Substrate

LACMA / Los Angeles Central Library / Long Beach City College A monumental interactive AR experience, Substrate invites the viewer to consider connections between knowledge-making organizations by contributing their own descriptions of culturally significant artifacts. Borrowing imagery and examples from networks in nature, Baker Cahill depicts LACMA, the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library, and California’s system of community colleges as abstracted, interlocking trees with root systems and mycelial networks that produce essential nutrients for human health and well-being. The work is based on the artist’s earlier project of the same name, supported by LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab, which used futuristic civics and systems thinking to demonstrate the potential of collaborations between local civic hubs. I am so fortunate to have received a grant in 2022 to launch Substrate, a multi-valent experimental, collaborative systems project the first part of which is completed. The second part, an AR visualization, will follow in future months. In the face of compounding, interconnected global crises, Substrate, an experimental art project in futuristic civics, looks for solutions in nature, focusing on biomimicry. Mycelial networks provide a robust model as networks that supply decentralized, self-sustaining, reciprocal, efficient systems of community care and resource-sharing to the interdependent carbon-based life they support. Our shared social, economic and environmental futures may depend on learning from this blueprint for “moral economies,” privileging the health and sustenance of the entire system over the needs of discrete individuals. Emerging technologies that contain the structural capacity for similar systems, including distributed ledgers of blockchains, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and the novel virtuality and interoperability of a “Web3” internet may provide new models for redistributing and protecting cultural knowledge and culturally-specific epistemologies, an early (but by no means solitary) step toward generating more equitable civic futures. This initial community-determined exhibition, created by Shereen Moustafa, Mark Sosa, Casper Torres, Miguel Zavala, was minted, encrypted and time-stamped on the blockchain. It is shareable, traceable and adaptable through the vast network of libraries in California and throughout the United States. This model is designed to be adapted and further developed for additional contexts and community needs/interests. The project is thus forming a substrate – an ever-expanding, accessible foundation of experimental exhibitions and new (and hopefully unexpected) forms of cultural engagement from which interested communities might be equitably and creatively sustained.