Sensory Kinship Book — Allie E.S. Wist

Sensory Kinship of the Third Kind
A collaboration with Lisa Schonberg
(Full project here)

Sensory Kinship of the Third Kind 94-page field guide was published by Pioneer Works (available in Pioneer Works bookshop in Brooklyn, Collar City Mushrooms in Troy, NY, and by email order for $30). The book includes essays, exercises, MIDI poems, and text scores. A sample is below, and the full PDF is available here.

Sensory Kinship of the Thrid Kind is a gesture of relation towards mushrooms—an attempt to explore fungal modes of sensory co-authorship within creative works. It posits forms of relationality and intimacy withmushrooms through recorded and live audio, scents, and texts.

Mushrooms maintain a persona that hovers between our world and the underworld, provoking disgust and fear as potentially lethal entities which veer outside categorization as either an animal or a plant. They are biosocial entities that deal directly with death and decay, but also enrich soil that harbor seeds and the nutrients to sustain new growth. They can be found thriving in wastelands, and in the detritus of other organic life. They are essential to the function of ecosystems across bioregions, yet most of their labor and energy are hidden from human sensing.

Might we engage in sensory forms of companionship as a tool to forge better human and nonhuman relationships? As a way to ‘know’ fungal worlds? As Donna Haraway outlines: “the task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present.”

Poems (below) were co-authored with wild mushrooms by using MIDI data from their electrical energy. Wist “wrote” the poems by using the MIDI data to select words from academic papers on fungal viablity in outer space.