Hyphul

I have explored creating art with lights in other projects before but never really had the chance to create something truly artistic and meaningful. I was fortunate enough to complete my humanities capstone project in the area of light art with the guidance of Professor Joshua Rosenstock, who I have worked with on other projects before. Inspired by the works of Jen Lewin, Hyphul is an interactive light art display consisting of a series of glowing mushrooms forming a mycelial community.

Design

Hyphul is made up of a series of plastic mushrooms made of recycled plastic food containers, each with several individually addressable LEDs inside. Viewers can scan a QR code to claim and control a mushroom from their phones, setting its color and animation patterns. Each mushroom can be set to one of four personalities, which dictates how it reacts to changes in other nearby mushrooms. The whole thing is controlled by a Raspberry Pi Pico W, which communicates via WebSockets to the viewers' devices.

Artistically, Hyphul is meant to represent a community, showing the ripple effects of change in one place spreading throughout the group. I have been thinking a lot lately about how the people in my own community work to support and uplift each other and wanted to create an artistic representation of this. Real mushrooms have an underground network of mycelium allowing them to connect and communicate which I decided to try and emulate with this project. The name "Hyphul" is a combination of hypha, the structure that mushrooms are made of, and the -ful suffix seen in words for emotions (ie. joyful, sorrowful, etc.).

Process

I initially had big ambitions for how this project would turn out. I wanted to showcase it outside, leaving it set up for multiple days and have significantly more mushrooms than I ended up with. This led to a number of logistical challenges that made it necessary to scale back quite a bit, especially during one of the busiest and most stressful college terms I have had so far. Going back to the idea of community, I am extremely grateful for my friends, family, and peers who supported me throughout the process.

While I worked with several artistic and technological mediums with this project, my biggest area of growth was in flexibility and persistence. I learned firsthand about the balance between sticking to my goals and adapting to change. If I had leaned too far in either direction, I would not have ended up with a satisfying final project. I seem to have reached a good middle ground in this project and hope to be able to apply that to other projects I may work on in the future.

Conclusion

Hyphul was showcased on Friday, May 1st as part of an end-of-year art show. Though it was not quite as dark in the space as I had hoped so the lights did not show up quite as well, it still got a good turnout and people seemed to enjoy interacting with the display. It was really cool watching how different people played with Hyphul, from one person who came back multiple times to ensure his mushroom had not been overwritten to the little girl who dragged her entire family over to check it out. While the scope of this project shifted a lot, I still feel as though I accomplished my original goal of creating interactive light art that builds community.