Imprinting Empathy: Intimate Encounters with Art, Fungi and AI

Step into a multisensory exploration of interspecies connection at The Edge, the State Library of Queensland’s community tech hub. This unique event brings together artist Bianca Tainsh and computing researcher Prof. Janet Wiles (University of Queensland) to present their collaborative project Imprinting Empathy, a transdisciplinary venture bridging art, ecological science, and emerging technology.

At its heart is Myc-a — a sentient living sculpture that houses a thriving biome of plants, microfauna and mycorrhizal fungi. Developed through experimental bio-art, Myc-a becomes both subject and collaborator, offering glimpses into the hidden electrical and acoustic signals exchanged within their fungal network — what has been dubbed the ‘Wood Wide Web’.

Together with researchers and students from UQ’s Biome Fungi Project, Tainsh and Wiles are asking bold questions:

What insights can collective intelligence offer humanity, science and technology? Can an AI learn to care? How might art and technology co-create new modes of ecological stewardship and sentience awareness?

This event invites audiences from the worlds of art, science, ecology and tech to experience these questions firsthand through talks, demonstrations and lively conversation.

Whether you’re fascinated by fungi, curious about the future of AI, passionate about ecological futures, or compelled by art’s ability to explore the unseen, Imprinting Empathy is a space to reflect, connect and imagine new ways of being.

EVENT PROGRAM

2:00pm – Opening Reflections: The Art of Imprinting Empathy
Artist Bianca Tainsh introduces the conceptual and ecological underpinnings of Imprinting Empathy, exploring how a living biome becomes both subject and collaborator in an intimate inquiry into interspecies care.

2:20pm – Pathways to Language: Machine Learning, Fungi and Interdisciplinary Discovery
Professor Janet Wiles shares how interdisciplinary collaboration presented an unexpected invitation to investigate the complex signalling of fungal networks. Drawing on developments in machine learning, electrical signal processing, and language modelling, this work explores how biological networks may inform next-generation technologies.

2:35pm – Listening to the Living Network
Experience Myc-a’s hidden activity through real-time demonstrations of new technologies developed by the Biome Fungi Project and the artist. Hear the biome’s acoustic signals, witness its electrical impulses, and speak with the student researchers building tools for fungal communication.

3:00pm – Interspecies Conversations: A Dialogue with the Audience
Bianca and Janet return for a dynamic Q&A session. Join the discussion on the ethics, implications and inspirations behind Imprinting Empathy, and share your own thoughts on what it means to connect across the boundaries of species and systems.

BIANCA TAINSH

Bianca Tainsh is an open-disciplinary artist, based in Meanjin Brisbane and on Lake Weyba, Kabi Kabi Country. Engaging audiences in Australia and beyond, Bianca crafts transformative experiences through her dynamic multi-artform installations and captivating performances. She is an award-winning artist renowned for her ground-breaking work that transcends traditional artistic borders. Her Art+Technoscience projects seek to not only reconnect people with nature but also to formulate novel solutions to ecological demise.

She is currently Artist in Residence with Metro Arts and an Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Queensland. Supported by QASP (Queensland Arts Showcase Program) funding from Arts Queensland, her research at UQ is an interdisciplinary collaboration to create an interspecies language AI, along with an ambitious new body of work.

Among Bianca’s extensive accolades and exhibition history, including shows along Australia’s east coast and reaching to Berlin and Leipzig; recent highlights include her solo at Outer Space (2023) and winning the 2021 Regional Art Awards New Media Award. As an advocate of Art for Change and following her panel appearance for Horizon Festival’s ART X ACTIVISM symposium, Bianca presented the TEDx talk “Art: Creating unique spaces for social transformation” (2020).

biancatainsh.com

PROF. JANET WILES

Janet Wiles is a Professor in Human Centred Computing at the University of Queensland. Her multidisciplinary team co-designs language technologies to support people living with dementia and their care partners; new tools to enable Indigenous communities to develop their own speech recognition systems; and social robots for applications in health, education, and neuroscience.

She received her PhD in computer science from the University of Sydney, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in psychology. She has 30 years' experience in research and teaching in machine learning, artificial intelligence, bio-inspired computation, complex systems, visualisation, language technologies and social robotics, leading teams that span engineering, humanities, social sciences and neuroscience. She currently teaches Research Methods in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and is developing a new course on Human-centred Artificial Intelligence. She presented The Florence Project at the United Nations AI4Good Global Summit in 2024 https://youtu.be/YpS6lekMAUU?t=505 and a TedX talk on “Robots talking with Robots” in 2012.

We would like to acknowledge that this event will be held on the lands of the Turrbal and Yuggera peoples, their sovereignty never ceded.  To all First Nations people, we express our deep respect for your culture, your connection to Country, and your fundamental knowledge of stewarding the land.  We look forward to the day when that knowledge is fully embedded within government agenda, and we all live together as respectable custodians on First Nations land.

This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and generous donors through the Australian Cultural Fund.

Photograph by Louis Lim