Fungiversum

Fungiversum (Sieniversumi in Finnish) is a mushroom inspired machine made for Art & Craft School Robotti. Robotti was a Finnish non-profit association that provided for many years activities for children to encourage creative exploration of technology through art. Fungiversum was made as a part of Robotti's project, which focused on creating inspirational electronic arts examples and materials for art teachers. The project was called Elektronisen rakentamisen oppimisen polku and it was funded by the Finnish National Agency for Education.

When I was asked to create a small electronic art project with simple materials, I thought it would be great to include open archival materials in the work. There are lots of wonderful archival materials available online, which are in the public domain or otherwise available for reuse. I've worked previously with such materials to make electromechanical machines such as Forbidden Fruit Machine and As Light Goes By. For Fungiversum, the staring point were images of fungi, as I really enjoy walking in forests and learning about mushrooms. The fungal illustrations that I used are from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The great diversity and peculiar forms of mushrooms inspired me to create a fungi universe, combining the illustrations with the spectacular astronomical images from NASA. Please see this PDF document for the image source details.

To animate the fungi, I used two DC motors with gear boxes from Robotti's material collection. The motors were combined with simple mechanical parts in order to create different kinds of movements. LEDs and switches made of aluminium foil and nuts were also used to create interruptions in the movement and light. For the structural and mechanical parts I chose materials, which are relatively easy to obtain and work with. Also, the internet holds loads of DIY tutorials related to simple automatons and moving machines. I tried to include similar materials, so that variations of the mechanisms, with or without electronics, could be made easily based on these resources.

See also:

• Photo album of Fungiversum
• Interview video of making the machine (in Finnish)