[-empyre-] oozing

[Renate Terese Ferro]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Crazy day, exhausted from the hurdles that the end of the semester teaching 
brings but thoughts about our effuvian age, hosts and viruses, and mushrooms 
are making me happy to read such incredibly thoughtful and creative. poetic 
responses.  I promise to respond after reading all of my admissions folders but 
wanted you to know that you are all keeping me afloat. 
Thank you. More soon. 
Renate

Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art
Tjaden Hall 306
rfe...@cornell.edu

On 11/28/17, 4:46 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Mez Breeze"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

___
empyre forum
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Re: [-empyre-] seep for a thousand years

[Ben Kinsley]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Cage's "Orgelstück Organ2/ASLSP" is a great model of slow time... along
these lines of thinking I'd like to also bring up the work The Long Now
Foundation is doing with long-term thinking.

"The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and
Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term
cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a
counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term
thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of
the next 10,000 years."

They are developing a clock that will keep time without human intervention
for 10,000 years: http://longnow.org/clock/

I mentioned Brian Eno at the end of my long rant about mushrooms. He's on
the board of directors for the Long Now Foundation and gave an excellent
speech on "The Long Now" as part of their Seminars About Long-Term
Thinking. The audio quality is poor but here's the full speech:
http://longnow.org/seminars/02003/nov/14/the-long-now/

Here's some of the same ideas, condensed into a shorter essay:
http://longnow.org/essays/big-here-long-now/











On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 10:10 PM, Simon  wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Dear <>,
>
> A very brief response to Melinda's post and in consideration of the
> timescales or scaling times of contamination, I would like to point to the
> documentary *Onkalo* or *Into Eternity*
> ; it also recalls the
> strange attraction of contaminated zones, like Chernobyl--perhaps a
> contemporary romanticism of the ruin? Nature's alter-return, post anything,
> anyone *human*kind. And the beauty of time at scale, of Cage at
> Halberstadt, which I'm sure I've brought to the list's attention before:
> http://www.aslsp.org/de/das-projekt.html
>
> Best,
> Simon
>
> http://squarewhiteworld.com/
>
> On 28/11/17 02:25, melinda rackham wrote:
>
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hello everyone-
>
> thank you for inviting me to join this discussion Renate - its very close to 
> me on a number of fronts and depths. Ive resonated with the discussion so far 
> and am delighted to have new links to explore so thank you other guests for 
> your insight into residual, viral and network contamination, symbiotic 
> relations, boundary crossings, contaminate affect etc.  However I have just 
> driven in the APY Lands - Indigenous Homelands in central Australia where I 
> live for 6 months of the year today and am exhausted so will respond more 
> fully tomorrow after a good sleep.
>
> I just wanted to comment on one aspect of contamination briefly, harking back 
> to Renate's initial post on contamination as boundary seepage.. almost a 
> persona  "contamination creeps and has a slowness about it.” Yesterday I 
> noticed in my news feeds a story of radioactive waste seepage accelerated by 
> climate change on the remote Marshall Islands, halfway between Australia and 
> Hawaii. on googling i discovered its not a new story- heres a link to the 
> Guardian’s 2015 coverage  
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/runit-dome-pacific-radioactive-waste
>
> A concrete dome, known locally as “the Tomb”, containing tonnes of 
> radioactive waste including about 400 lumps of plutonium left over from 60 
> United States Pacific Nuclear tests on atolls in the 1940s and 1950s is 
> seeping - or has been for quiet a while.  What really struck me was that the 
> dump site is sitting directly on the earth- ie it is not actually sealed and 
> just has 18 inch slabs of concrete on top to conceal it - hardly a forward 
> thinking containment strategy. Did the US not learn anything from the marvels 
> of German engineering in WW 11 on how to build indestructible concrete 
> megastructures like the Flakturms in Germany and Austria with 3.5 m (11 ft) 
> concrete walls reinforced with steel cables. But the obscene absurdity of 18 
> inches of concrete icing on top of the radioactive cake?  But what I want to 
> comment on is that for 50 years its contents have already been seeping into 
> the Pacific Ocean through the permeable earth, creeping into the planets 
> living systems, and we have been unconcerned.
>
> Meanwhile on a larger island at the bottom of Australia a 6000 square metre 
> three level sandstone lined bunker houses the Museum of Old and New Art 
> (MONA). In early interviews on the Museums owner David Walsh (the internet 
> gambling trillionaire who built this whimsy to house his massive collection 
> of antiquities and contemporary art) would speak about how the gallery is cut 
> from rock deep beneath a tidal river, his engineers have told him in about 50 
> years water will seep in and slowly immerse the gallery spaces, making it a 
> subterranean mausoleum. 
> https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/february/1366597433/richard-flanagan/gambler
>
> Wa

Re: [-empyre-] And one more: Welcome to Ben Kinsley

[Mez Breeze]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi All,

Lurking away on the fringes, on the lip-edge of human disturbances, to find
this post. Thank you Ben for an amazing, and affirming post.

Yours in the Mycelium,
Mez
--
mezbreezedesign.com


On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 11:47 AM, Ben Kinsley 
wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hello all,
>
> I've been following along with the past month's discussions, waiting for
> my chance to talk about mushrooms. If anyone knows me personally, this
> won't come as much of a surprise... I'm always finding ways to lead
> conversations towards fungi ;) I've become quite obsessed with the mushroom
> world over the past few years. This all began in upstate NY, in the
> Adirondacks, where my wife and I go each summer. In the Adirondacks,
> there's a tradition to collect an "Artist Conk" fungus (Ganoderma
> applanatum) on hikes, and make a commemorative etching onto its surface,
> writing the date, place, names of participants, sometimes drawings of
> memorable sights, and put these on a shelf in your cabin. Our neighbor has
> a whole wall full of these, and we discovered 2 in our cabin dating from
> 1935 and 1937. So we began taking up this folk tradition, and quite quickly
> began to encounter so many different kinds of mushrooms in the forests. In
> our need to know more about how to accurately identify "Artist conks"
> (look-alike species don't hold a etching permanently like Ganoderma
> applanatum), we joined the New York Mycological Society in NYC where we
> lived from 2013-2017. As it turns out, the New York Mycological Society was
> co-founded by John Cage, who was an avid mushroom hunter and renowned
> mycologist in his own right. In fact, he was perhaps as experimental in his
> approach to mycology as he was with his music, and we know of a few more
> choice edible species due to his (sometimes nearly deadly) experiments with
> mycophagy (the practice of eating fungi -especially mushrooms collected in
> the wild). Cage once explained his dual-obsessions by pointing out that
> "music" is next to "mushroom" in most dictionaries, however after spending
> most of my free time since 2013 foraging for mushrooms, I understand the
> kinship between his interest in silence and mushrooms -- both require deep
> and slow observation, and you begin to notice so many things that were once
> hidden in plain sight. In fact, the first time we went foraging with the
> NYMS, I couldn't find a thing. Then, after adjusting to the process of
> looking, mushrooms were all around me! We came home from Central Park with
> a basket full of wild edibles, and cooked a delicious brunch. From this
> point onward I was hooked.
>
> I bring up mushrooms for a few reasons:
>
> Perhaps foremost, is the relatively new knowledge we have about the
> mycoremediation possibilities with a variety of fungi. Oyster mushrooms,
> for instance, have been proven to be able to clean up oil spills (as well
> as retain their nutritional edibility!).
>  http://www.fungi.com/blog/items/the-petroleum-problem.html
>
> Certain mushrooms are considered to be hyper-accumulators of heavy metals.
> These mushrooms should not be eaten, but can be collected, thus picking the
> heavy metals from the soil of radioactive sites.
> https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/using-fungi-remediat
> e-radiation-fukushima
>
> Certain species of mushrooms are highly medicinal. Turkey Tail, Enoki,
> Maitake, Reishi, and Chaga have proven anti-caner and immune-enhancing
> effects. Shitake has antiviral and cholesterol-reducing effects. Lion's
> Mane is believed to stimulate nerve growth. Cordyceps are known to improve
> respiratory health and increase oxygen uptake, among other properties (It
> has been recommended to me to take cordyceps to help with elevation
> sickness, as I adjust to the Colorado elevation). There is also active
> research being done with Bird's Nest fungi and its possible effects to
> fight pancreatic cancer.
> https://www.drweil.com/diet-nutrition/nutrition/mushrooms-for-good-health/
>
> There is research being done (again) with psilocybin being administered to
> terminal-cancer patients in an effort to relieve anxiety and "existential
> distress."
> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment
>
> Newly published research on cordycepts have shown that when they infect an
> ant, the fungus actually infiltrates and surrounds muscle fibers throughout
> the ant’s body, and takes over all functions *except for* the brain -
> essentially puppeteering the ant! (It was previously thought that the
> fungus took over the brain).
> https://gizmodo.com/the-fungus-that-turns-ants-into-
> zombies-is-more-diaboli-1820301538
>
> Paul Stamets is a leading mycologist, and you can learn a bit more about
> all of this here:
> https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_
> can_save_the_world
> https://soundcloud.com/publicprograms/paul-stamets
> (and if you can d

[-empyre-] becoming symborg - two decades later

[melinda rackham]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hello again –empyre-  and all our other guests

I want to say something about flour and dough and weeds and mushrooms and the 
folly of Onkalo but first Bishnu, Andrea and Rahul I am very interested in the 
work you have been doing in terms of living as multispecies. In thinking about 
how a state of purity never existed I’d like to revisit “carrier” a web work I 
created two decades ago in 1997 -  http://www.subtle.net/creative_carrier.html

The work originated from my own bodily experience of living with the chronic 
viral illness Hepatitis C. In the spirit of the experimental first wave of net 
art my research encompassed gender, queer theory, alife, the fabulous work of 
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, immunosemiotics and Niels Jerne's Nobel Prize 
winning Network Theory of Immunity. I consumed popular media on Ebola and 
computer virus outbreaks (Melissa was the celebrity virus at the time) and read 
scholarly texts on tantric sex.

It’s a love story really - a romance between and virus and the receptive human 
host. carrier eroticises the contagion via intertwining of genetic codes and 
repositions viral infection/species contamination as positive biological 
merging - between intelligent beings, rather than the defensive medical 
response which sites the virus an invader and the body as a detached 
battleground.

It also integrated the dynamic of interrelating pure codes, whether they be 
within the immune system or the computer operating system eg software viruses 
utilise breaches in systems, so they help software to evolve in almost an 
organic way in response to them, just as biological viruses shape the evolution 
of biological creatures.

I saw carrier as a model of becoming symborg at the turn of the new millennium, 
a way to think about ourselves in symbiosis as distinct from cyborgian 
assemblages, as the concepts of natural/artificial/species boundaries were 
dissolving, or so I thought in the heady 1990’s. Here’s an excerpt from an 
interview I did with Eugene Thacker for CTheory in 2001: 
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=28

“My infectious agents.. invite an erotic embrace, a warm wet viral merging. And 
they are your best friends, your closest confidant, your perfect lover, spliced 
together forever at the cellular level.

But Viruses.. mimic others protoplasmic signatures to slip into places where 
the immune system would rather they not go — with the resulting viral 
cross-species merging being sex in its rawest form — the virus inserts its 
genetic material inside our cells, using our proteins to make an offspring, an 
almost perfect copy of itself. “

The language needs a little updating but the idea is the same.  My intent with 
carrier was to explore the textures of melding rather than contrasts of 
oppositions, and included intimate real life experiences of living with chronic 
viral illness, which were contributed anonymously from the internet.

One of the very interesting things I about this work is it is diminished now - 
almost none of it works.  Evolution of software and Operating Systems have 
breed it out of existence over 20 years . Java script and Java don’t always 
work, Shockwaves don’t function; the VRML pluggins are not available; the pop 
up windows that looked to be contaminating your screen with viral strains are 
mostly blocked.  

Here is some very dodgy documentation of a later version of carrier. 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qdbyk4dtrndygjk/VTS_01_1.VOB?dl=0

till tomorrow (if I have electricity and a network -its rainy season here)
___
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empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

Re: [-empyre-] two more guests for Week 4: Ian Alan Paul and Isak Berbic

[Ricardo Rene Dominguez]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hola Tod@xs,


Our Effluvian age,


This E-age calls on us to create magikal transformations with our artivism and 
avant-gardening that can capture all the demons that jump from toxic things to 
the Internet of things, from oil to Hush Puppies, from radiant dust to art 
bunkers-to route around the bubbling sludge around us and within us. Yet, no 
matter what we do the demons, that old Pazuzu, keep riding downwind. So we mark 
and draw out our exorcism of our lands, bodies and skies. We make circles and 
filters that attempt to contain our contagious condition-but something always 
keeps breaking out. So now we attempt to become more contagious,more viral, 
more weedy, more infecting-using our magik to become wilder beings-to be one in 
states of effuvian extimacy.


On a side note: How Hush Puppies Haunt Us Down:


Still, fear abounds.


“You just sort of lose your peace,” said one Plainfield Township resident, 
Meaghan Schweinzger, a day before crews arrived to remove rusty barrels and 
leather scraps from the hillside near her children’s trampoline.


Ms. Schweinzger’s well water is among at least 30 to have been found to exceed 
the federal government’s recommended lifetime exposure 
levels
 for PFAS, also known as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances. She 
lives on the same street where Wolverine once dumped sludge that included 
Scotchgard, the waterproofing chemical used in Hush Puppies shoes that 
contained PFAS.



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/24/us/michigan-water-wolverine-contamination.html

[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/11/25/us/25michigan1/00shoes3-facebookJumbo.jpg]

Miles From Flint, Residents Turn Off Taps in New Water 
Crisis
www.nytimes.com
Waste from a shoe factory has tainted groundwater in a Grand Rapids suburb. 
Some residents are skeptical of Michigan officials, who botched the response in 
Flint.










From: empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
 on behalf of Renate Terese Ferro 

Sent: Monday, November 27, 2017 3:01:58 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: [-empyre-] two more guests for Week 4: Ian Alan Paul and Isak Berbic

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
So happy to warmly welcome Isak Berbic and Ian Alan Paul who will join Amy Sara 
Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez and Melinda Rackham.  So sorry I inadvertently left 
them off from yesterday’s introduction.

Isak Berbic (SFRY, US) In the 1990’s when Yugoslavia disintegrated and Sarajevo 
was under siege, Isak Berbic and his family escaped from the war to Croatia, 
lived in a refugee camp in Denmark, and received political asylum in the United 
States. Isak Berbic studied art at the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, and at 
University of Illinois at Chicago, where he completed his MFA. In Chicago Isak 
produced initial pieces such as My Uncle’s Tooth, 2006, and also worked on 
publishing Zambak, an independent culture and politics publication for the 
North American communities of the Bosnian War diaspora. From 2007–2012 he was 
based in the United Arab Emirates, where he taught at University of Sharjah, 
producing site specific works, photographs, short films, including projects 
such as, Abu Dhabi, and, Sarajevo. Isak is currently based in Brooklyn, New 
York. He teaches at The State University of New York at Stony Brook. At the 
moment he is working with saguaro cactus, hippopotamus fossils, juju beans, 
lapis, shrapnel and meteorites.

Ian Alan Paul (EG, US) s a transdisciplinary artist, theorist, and curator. His 
practice aims to produce novel conditions for the exploration of contemporary 
politics and aesthetics in global contexts. His projects often incorporate 
digital/new media, performance, and installation, and are informed by prolonged 
engagements with continental philosophy and critical/queer/feminist theory. His 
recent work has approached topics such as the Guantanamo Bay Prison, Fortress 
Europe, the Zapatista communities, Drone Warfare, and the military regime in 
post-revolution/post-coup Cairo.


Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art
Tjaden Hall 306
rfe...@cornell.edu

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-empyre-
empyre.library.cornell.edu
-empyre- is a global community of new media artists, curators, theorists, 
producers, and others who participate in monthly thematic discussions via an 
e-mail listserv.

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[-empyre-] seep for a thousand years

[Simon]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Dear <>,

A very brief response to Melinda's post and in consideration of the 
timescales or scaling times of contamination, I would like to point to 
the documentary /Onkalo/ or /Into Eternity/ 
; it also recalls the 
strange attraction of contaminated zones, like Chernobyl--perhaps a 
contemporary romanticism of the ruin? Nature's alter-return, post 
anything, anyone /human/kind. And the beauty of time at scale, of Cage 
at Halberstadt, which I'm sure I've brought to the list's attention 
before: http://www.aslsp.org/de/das-projekt.html


Best,
Simon

http://squarewhiteworld.com/

On 28/11/17 02:25, melinda rackham wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hello everyone-

thank you for inviting me to join this discussion Renate - its very close to me 
on a number of fronts and depths. Ive resonated with the discussion so far and 
am delighted to have new links to explore so thank you other guests for your 
insight into residual, viral and network contamination, symbiotic relations, 
boundary crossings, contaminate affect etc.  However I have just driven in the 
APY Lands - Indigenous Homelands in central Australia where I live for 6 months 
of the year today and am exhausted so will respond more fully tomorrow after a 
good sleep.

I just wanted to comment on one aspect of contamination briefly, harking back to 
Renate's initial post on contamination as boundary seepage.. almost a persona  
"contamination creeps and has a slowness about it.” Yesterday I noticed in my 
news feeds a story of radioactive waste seepage accelerated by climate change on the 
remote Marshall Islands, halfway between Australia and Hawaii. on googling i 
discovered its not a new story- heres a link to the Guardian’s 2015 
coveragehttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/runit-dome-pacific-radioactive-waste

A concrete dome, known locally as “the Tomb”, containing tonnes of radioactive 
waste including about 400 lumps of plutonium left over from 60 United States 
Pacific Nuclear tests on atolls in the 1940s and 1950s is seeping - or has been 
for quiet a while.  What really struck me was that the dump site is sitting 
directly on the earth- ie it is not actually sealed and just has 18 inch slabs 
of concrete on top to conceal it - hardly a forward thinking containment 
strategy. Did the US not learn anything from the marvels of German engineering 
in WW 11 on how to build indestructible concrete megastructures like the 
Flakturms in Germany and Austria with 3.5 m (11 ft) concrete walls reinforced 
with steel cables. But the obscene absurdity of 18 inches of concrete icing on 
top of the radioactive cake?  But what I want to comment on is that for 50 
years its contents have already been seeping into the Pacific Ocean through the 
permeable earth, creeping into the planets living systems, and we have been 
unconcerned.

Meanwhile on a larger island at the bottom of Australia a 6000 square metre 
three level sandstone lined bunker houses the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). 
In early interviews on the Museums owner David Walsh (the internet gambling 
trillionaire who built this whimsy to house his massive collection of 
antiquities and contemporary art) would speak about how the gallery is cut from 
rock deep beneath a tidal river, his engineers have told him in about 50 years 
water will seep in and slowly immerse the gallery spaces, making it a 
subterranean 
mausoleum.https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/february/1366597433/richard-flanagan/gambler

Walsh saw this as a completely fitting outcome for MONA - colloquially known as 
the museum of sex and death - both inevitable in life cycles. Walsh would be 
dead - entombed in one of his large collections of urns in the internment wall, 
with MoNA offering lifetime membership for $75,00 where your cremated ashes can 
be urned up in the sandstone wall as well. That sort of talk about submersion 
has unfortunately now disappeared from any discussions of the Museum as I guess 
Walsh doesn't want to scare away paying visitors and gamblers now he is 
building a casino there. However for me this planned obsolesce through tidal 
seepage into the pinnacles of art and culture was the most interesting concept 
of the whole project, pitting nature as the contaminant.

more tomorrow

Melinda

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Re: [-empyre-] And one more: Welcome to Ben Kinsley

[Ben Kinsley]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hello all,

I've been following along with the past month's discussions, waiting for my
chance to talk about mushrooms. If anyone knows me personally, this won't
come as much of a surprise... I'm always finding ways to lead conversations
towards fungi ;) I've become quite obsessed with the mushroom world over
the past few years. This all began in upstate NY, in the Adirondacks, where
my wife and I go each summer. In the Adirondacks, there's a tradition to
collect an "Artist Conk" fungus (Ganoderma applanatum) on hikes, and make a
commemorative etching onto its surface, writing the date, place, names of
participants, sometimes drawings of memorable sights, and put these on a
shelf in your cabin. Our neighbor has a whole wall full of these, and we
discovered 2 in our cabin dating from 1935 and 1937. So we began taking up
this folk tradition, and quite quickly began to encounter so many different
kinds of mushrooms in the forests. In our need to know more about how to
accurately identify "Artist conks" (look-alike species don't hold a etching
permanently like Ganoderma applanatum), we joined the New York Mycological
Society in NYC where we lived from 2013-2017. As it turns out, the New York
Mycological Society was co-founded by John Cage, who was an avid mushroom
hunter and renowned mycologist in his own right. In fact, he was perhaps as
experimental in his approach to mycology as he was with his music, and we
know of a few more choice edible species due to his (sometimes nearly
deadly) experiments with mycophagy (the practice of eating fungi
-especially mushrooms collected in the wild). Cage once explained his
dual-obsessions by pointing out that "music" is next to "mushroom" in most
dictionaries, however after spending most of my free time since 2013
foraging for mushrooms, I understand the kinship between his interest in
silence and mushrooms -- both require deep and slow observation, and you
begin to notice so many things that were once hidden in plain sight. In
fact, the first time we went foraging with the NYMS, I couldn't find a
thing. Then, after adjusting to the process of looking, mushrooms were all
around me! We came home from Central Park with a basket full of wild
edibles, and cooked a delicious brunch. From this point onward I was hooked.

I bring up mushrooms for a few reasons:

Perhaps foremost, is the relatively new knowledge we have about the
mycoremediation possibilities with a variety of fungi. Oyster mushrooms,
for instance, have been proven to be able to clean up oil spills (as well
as retain their nutritional edibility!).
 http://www.fungi.com/blog/items/the-petroleum-problem.html

Certain mushrooms are considered to be hyper-accumulators of heavy metals.
These mushrooms should not be eaten, but can be collected, thus picking the
heavy metals from the soil of radioactive sites.
https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/using-fungi-
remediate-radiation-fukushima

Certain species of mushrooms are highly medicinal. Turkey Tail, Enoki,
Maitake, Reishi, and Chaga have proven anti-caner and immune-enhancing
effects. Shitake has antiviral and cholesterol-reducing effects. Lion's
Mane is believed to stimulate nerve growth. Cordyceps are known to improve
respiratory health and increase oxygen uptake, among other properties (It
has been recommended to me to take cordyceps to help with elevation
sickness, as I adjust to the Colorado elevation). There is also active
research being done with Bird's Nest fungi and its possible effects to
fight pancreatic cancer.
https://www.drweil.com/diet-nutrition/nutrition/mushrooms-for-good-health/

There is research being done (again) with psilocybin being administered to
terminal-cancer patients in an effort to relieve anxiety and "existential
distress."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment

Newly published research on cordycepts have shown that when they infect an
ant, the fungus actually infiltrates and surrounds muscle fibers throughout
the ant’s body, and takes over all functions *except for* the brain -
essentially puppeteering the ant! (It was previously thought that the
fungus took over the brain).
https://gizmodo.com/the-fungus-that-turns-ants-into-zombies-is-more-diaboli-1820301538

Paul Stamets is a leading mycologist, and you can learn a bit more about
all of this here:
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_
mushrooms_can_save_the_world
https://soundcloud.com/publicprograms/paul-stamets
(and if you can deal with Joe Rogan):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPqWstVnRjQ

I've been thinking a lot about how much of this knowledge is ancient -
embedded in folklore, traditional medicine, and in the culinary customs of
so many cultures. Ötzi, the 5000 year old Ice Man, was found carrying two
mushrooms - the Birch Polypore (which has antibiotic and styptic
properties) and a Tinder Conk (which was used as tinder and as a way to
transport fire, through smoldering embers).