Jonah King


Jonah King is an interdisciplinary artist exploring human/nonhuman relations and speculative futures. Their multifaceted world-building create immersive experiences to examine how ecological intimacies influence individual and social identity.

About

Film
Immersive
Lecture/Workshop
Performance
Sculpture
Web
Writing

Exhibitions

Image View




Jonah King
Projects:

Virtual Reality Experience & Installation

2024 

Honey Fungus is a sci-fi Virtual Reality work and installation that invites the audience to expand their bodily experience of the greater ecosystem.

A queer sentient ecological being— manifested in the form of an omnipresent mycelial entity—leads the audience on a journey into an entangled ecology.

The project opens new perspectives for understanding where one body ends and another begins. In this VR world, we embrace the possibility that we all have not only our one body but also, as scholar Daisy Hildyard suggests, a 'second body' through which we are all interconnected.

Completed October 2024


Exhibited as Work In Progress:
Bolivar Gallery, Lexington, Kentucky
Hesse Flatow, Expo Chicago
Myclological Film Festival, SVA Theatre, New York
GBA, Brooklyn
Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
Urban Soils Institute, LMCC Arts Center, Governor’s Island, New York
RealMix 2022, Hyphen Hub, Colombia
Moss Arts Center, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA
NEW INC, NewLab, Brooklyn
VISUAL Carlow, Ireland

Producer
Alex Darby, Hybrid.Studio

VR Production
Pariah Interactive

Audio
Reading: Helga Hansen Logan
Sound Design: Frank Sweeney
Vocals: Anna Roberts-Gevalt
Mixing Engineer: Daniel Neumann
Contributing Writer: Sue Huang

Supported by
The Arts Council of Ireland / An Chomhairle Ealaíon
UCONN
Science Sandbox - Simons Foundation
NEW INC - New Museum

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council




2D Extract of VR Experience


Honey Fungus: Specimens

Digital C-Print Series; 12x12”

2022

HONEY FUNGUS SPECIMENS comprises nine digital C-prints (each a single edition).
Each specimen is an inflated body processed via 3D software and placed in a virtual glass specimen box. These fungal avatars are captured mid-dance, contorting to their unique rhythms.
The mycelium network's ecosystem is at the core of Honey Fungus, which nourishes, feeds, mates protects and spreads like a living internet. As viewers explore the underworld of spores and their soundscape, they encounter fungal specimens moving through a viscous liquid. These sensual specimens are an AI-generated amalgamation of erotica and exotic fungi, resulting in a colourful and complex hybrid body that is part human, part mushroom.

Made in collaboration with Sue Huang.
Available through GBA.family


Watch Video

Exhibition
Guilty By Association, Brooklyn


Honey Fungus: WebVR

WebVR

2022

A Social VR interpretation of Honey Fungus created by RealMix 0.2 - Art in Escadão.

This is a virtual event of the District Institute of the Arts - Idartes organized by its Line of Art, Science and Technology and by the Planetarium of Bogotá, which aims to recognize and encourage technological creation and experimentation through projects of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Realities (MX).

Supported by Hyphen-Hub, Newrona, Planetarium of Bogotá, Idartes.

Watch Walkthrough


Screen capture of WebVR.

Honey Fungus: Presentation at Embodied Ecologies

Public Presentation at New Museum, New York

2022

Presented in partnership with Serpentine’s Synthetic Ecologies Lab, this program features members of NEW INC’s Creative Science Track who will present the ways their practices interact with notions of ecology, nature, and embodiment.

While Western culture distinguishes the natural world as external to humans, the speakers included in this program will tell stories that expand our perception of ecology, suggesting that the natural world consists of an entangled series of interactions and relationships that are inclusive of humans. The presenters will reveal the hidden ways we participate in our ecologies while also making visible how our environments change us, our bodies, and our perceptions of our surroundings.

Event Details

Unfathomable Intimacies

Essay

2020

Every egg a person carries forms inside their ovaries while they are still in the womb of their mother. In that way, my mother was once inside my great-grandmother’s womb, and I spent time in the womb of my grandmother. My grandmother is fast asleep right now, in the creaking bed that she was born in. Her giant black collie dog is snoring on the floor beside her....

This text forms the basis of Honey Fungus and Tongue the Sun

Full Text