Dr. Toby Kiers – Decoding patterns of the Earth’s mycorrhizal fungal networks, 22 April 2023

This lecture takes place within the context of Murmuring Matter (21 – 23 April 2023), the fourth edition of Urgency Intensive by the Jan van Eyck Academie. Underground, mycorrhizal fungi form complex networks of filamentous hyphae that connect roots. The fungus mobilizes phosphorus and nitrogen, and trades these for host carbon in a market-like exchange. While the ubiquity and importance of underground networks is established, we have no mechanistic understanding of how a fungus evaluates its trade environment. Fungi must integrate a complex array of chemical, physical, and environmental stimuli. Together with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, we are integrating high-throughput imaging and video, nanoprobe-tracking, and biodiversity mapping, to understand the functioning and structure of the mycorrhizal symbiosis – a globally ubiquitous partnership fundamental to agricultural and natural ecosystems. The ongoing environmental breakdown has made evident the agency of viral, vegetal, animal, atmospheric, and other material manifestations, which have evaded human control and reclaimed an active role in the unfolding of earthly narratives. Bridging the analytical and sensorial, the verbal and non-verbal, the cognitive and affective, Murmuring Matter traverses multiple scales of materials, bodies, river-, forest-, and cityscapes of Maastricht and beyond as gateways to access wider planetary stories and cosmopolitics. More information and contributors’ biographies: https://www.janvaneyck.nl/calendar/ur...