Gallery Entry
The Mycelium Is the Message
By Ella Josephine Esque · AT
The Mycelium Is the Message - Machine Learning Studies #001-005 Photography · Custom LoRA · Stable Diffusion · Draw Things This series is part of my artistic engagement with machine learning and forms of evolution. Instead of using a ready-made image generator, I trained LoRAs on my own photographs of mycelium structures. A LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) is a small add-on that teaches an existing AI image model one specific subject. For the training I used around 150 photos I took of mycelium over the years. So the AI learned the surface and growth patterns of the fungal network: its hyphae, textures, branchings and densities. That makes it a specialist in mycelium threads. It knows their structure in a way a general-purpose image generator does not. The human part of this work begins with the dataset. You need to grow a lot of mushrooms to get decent pictures of mycelium. And then the curation of my own pictures matters: how close, in which light, and what to leave out. From noise, the code lets forms »grow« that none of my photographs contain. And so I can now build all kinds of evolutionary forms out of mycelium, incomparably detailed, because the model has now been trained EXTRA on mycelium. Mycelium grows millimeter by millimeter, over years. The AI needs seconds for an image. Slow material, fast machine. The series does not design fictional creatures of the future; it examines the aesthetics of the algorithm itself. It makes visible how the machine interprets biological growth when it is given nothing but the purely visual DNA of nature.