This experiment places Ganoderma lucidum and Epipremnum aureum in a shared substrate under controlled enclosure conditions, instrumenting their cohabitation through environmental and bioelectrical sensing. Neither organism is managed toward a designed outcome. The system operates without an occupant — what remains is a negotiation between two non-human actors across soil, atmosphere, and electrical potential.
The organizing principle of this system is competition — two organisms occupying the same substrate, drawing from the same resources, neither able to relocate. Survival is not a dramatic event but a continuous metabolic calculation running simultaneously in both organisms, without awareness of the other's existence. And yet the system they jointly produce has emergent properties neither would generate alone: competitive at the resource level, incidentally complementary at the microclimate level.
Mycelium networks perform natural computation by growing, reorganizing, and responding dynamically to their environment, supplying nutrients where needed, and offering systems that can maintain their functional integrity even when partially damaged. Rather than extracting contamination from the city, this system recruits it as infrastructure. Abandoned buildings and toxic sites become inoculation sites; contaminated soil corridors and waterways become the network's routing pathways, forming an urban mycoremediation network. The output is a closed loop — toxicity feeds growth, growth performs remediation, remediation transforms the substrate that sustains the next cycle.
Habitat destruction and climate instability are producing conditions in which species are forced into novel proximities. Ecosystems are reorganizing not by evolutionary design but by the elimination of alternatives. This experiment takes that pressure as a generative condition rather than a catastrophe. It asks: how do remaining species adapt to cohabitation without human intervention? And what does that adaptation look like as architecture?
Ganoderma lucidum and Epipremnum aureum are placed together in a shared substrate not because they are compatible, but because they are both survivors. The experiment instruments their negotiation and asks whether the logic of that negotiation — competitive, distributed, chemically mediated — can become the generative rule set for architectural form in a post-human world.
Two parallel conditions are established. In the first, reishi mycelium and pothos are co-planted in a shared substrate inside a ventilated enclosure. In the second, the same pairing is placed under intentionally degraded conditions to provoke and document stress responses in both organisms. Control enclosures — reishi alone and pothos alone — run simultaneously under identical parameters.
The bioelectrical differential between the two organisms — one electrode in the mycelium, one in the root zone — captures the electrical boundary condition between two competing biological systems. Spikes or shifts in that differential indicate stress events propagating as electrical signal through the shared conductive medium of the soil. The sensor does not intervene. It witnesses.
| Condition | Setup | Variable |
|---|---|---|
| Ideal Cohabitation | Reishi + pothos, shared substrate, controlled enclosure, optimal humidity and temperature for both organisms | Baseline negotiation — humidity, soil moisture, CO₂, EC differential |
| Forced Stress | Same pairing under intentionally degraded conditions — reduced moisture, elevated temperature, restricted light | Stress response — bioelectrical spikes, EC shifts, CO₂ flux under resource scarcity |
| Reishi Control | Reishi alone, identical enclosure and substrate conditions | Isolates fungal metabolic signature without plant influence |
| Pothos Control | Pothos alone, identical enclosure and substrate conditions | Isolates plant metabolic signature without fungal influence |
Electrode placement is spatial: one Ag/AgCl electrode inserted into the reishi mycelial mass, one into the pothos root zone. Mushroom bioelectrical signals operate in the 0.05–12 mV range and require amplification through the INA128 instrumentation amplifier before reaching the Metro RP2040's analog input. All four enclosures log to synchronized wall-clock-timestamped CSV files for direct comparison across conditions.
Continuous multi-channel differential measurement captures the environmental and bioelectrical gradient across the reishi–pothos boundary in real time. The conductivity gap between the mycelial mass and the root zone is the primary metric — shifts in that differential correlate with stress events, resource competition, and metabolic activity in both organisms simultaneously.
Ruins are not decay — they are productive substrate. The accelerating collapse of human-built environments under climate pressure produces not absence but material opportunity for organisms that do not require human comfort to persist. The residue of human construction becomes the condition for non-human reorganization. This experiment models that process at the scale of a single enclosure: two species, no occupant, negotiating the terms of cohabitation without instruction.
The question it opens toward is architectural. What does a building look like when it is designed for non-human survival rather than human comfort — can the plant and the fungus themselves become the system? The growth is not designed. It is computed by the organisms themselves, in real time, in response to conditions they are both creating and enduring.