The Multiplicity of Worlds: In Conversation with Zheng Mahler

Kate Gu: Your practices come from two distinct fields—art and anthropology. How did the collective originate, and at what point did your individual disciplines begin to converge?

Daisy Bisenieks: When we got together back in 2007, we were both finishing our university studies in anthropology and art, respectively. We had plans to travel to various places for further research and attend residencies in South Korea, Thailand, and Kenya, so we moved, lived, and worked together for a period of time and participated in each other’s work. Naturally, our relationship and shared interests grew, ultimately evolving into an integrated practice. Over time, we found that we were interested in the same things, but we’d approach them from different angles and with contrasting insights. The institutions, communities, art and research spaces we worked with along the way allowed us to explore this more fully and holistically, and with other collaborators, too. We found we’d created a life where our work and disciplines complemented and challenged each other.

KG: How have your disciplinary perspectives influenced each other’s work? How would you describe your work that emerges from the intersection of art and ethnography?

DB: Working together has shown us that art and research are inherently world-making practices. The subjective, emotional, and aesthetic nuances of artistic inquiry can complement traditional analytic approaches, while using research as a foundation helps anchor and expand artistic practice. The poetic can be a powerful vehicle for communicating research insights and experiences. At the same time, it reaffirms the importance of being reflexive in both of our disciplines, prompting us to constantly sift through the biases, perspectives, and values that shape our work and how we connect with others. Art also invites research processes to be more collaborative and accessible. Through exhibitions, we can reach a wider audience and cultivate an emotional connection with the work while showing how researchers themselves influence their findings. Creating exhibitions to hold and translate research allows for a lingering ambiguity that can challenge existing systems of knowledge and offer new perspectives.

KG: You engage with a wide range of subjects from technology, architecture, and economy to trade and ecology. Could you describe your process of developing a work together? How does a project usually begin?

Royce Ng: For our work, this is similar to asking, ‘When does the present begin?’ It is incredibly difficult to pin down where or when a project has its starting point. Usually, it can begin with a conversation about a scientific paper, an artwork, a theory, a history, a film, meeting someone or something we previously made or talked about, which then snowballs into full-blown intellectual obsession. We’d read, collect, and archive everything about the topic until it reaches a point where the only way to rid ourselves of this ‘demon’ is to turn it into an artwork. For example, The Twenty-Three Thousand Sexes of Schizophyllum and Other Stories (2026) really began when we first moved to Lantau Island thirteen years ago and noticed the mushrooms growing around our village after the spring rains. Eventually, we were introduced to a neighbour who had spent some time foraging and taught us how to look for and identify mushrooms. This became a bit of an obsession for us each spring. When this commission came through, it seemed like a good opportunity to evolve our accumulated knowledge into an artwork.

KG: You started the Lantau Trilogy in 2021, having lived on the island since 2013. Could you speak about your journey with Lantau Island and explain why you chose to study the water buffaloes, the bats, and the mushrooms—perhaps as subjects through which to think about the island?

DB: We moved to Lantau when we began to do research for A Season in Shell (2013–2016) in Hong Kong. We wanted to live a quieter life again among mountains and trees, and being close to the sea was a bonus. We knew from previous trips to Hong Kong that the islands would be our preference if we were to live here. Royce was also familiar with Lantau Island through family visits as a child, and he still has family friends living here. Simultaneously, I was drawn to the unique coexistence of villagers and free-roaming water buffaloes and cows—a characteristic of Lantau Island—and thought it would be an ideal and interesting case study for my master’s research, which I began in 2013.

Living in such close proximity with creatures larger than ourselves and sharing an urbanising, residential space on a daily basis was incredibly interesting and obviously novel in a post-domestic place like Hong Kong. Conducting this research also became a way for us to learn about our new home, its everyday life and history, and how human and non-human relations have helped co-create the island’s communities, geography, and continuing narratives around issues of conflict and coexistence. These daily (or, in the case of fungi and bats, seasonal) interactions with our more-than-human neighbours are part of our life, whether it was gently navigating a buffalo or cow herd along a narrow village path on a bicycle, or anticipating clusters of fungi during the warm, humid months. Over the years, we became familiar with the seasonal feeding and courtship behaviours of microbats we’d observe outside our kitchen window at dusk as we prepared dinner. This became a little more obsessive during COVID-19 lockdowns; we were always looking forward to their daily acrobatic performances, and were naturally more curious given the reputation of bats in the time of COVID-19.

KG: What draws you to the non-human world as a site of inquiry, especially in recent years? In A Season in Shell, you investigated abalone and shells as part of the global trade system, where they appeared to be passive objects circulating within human economies. In the Lantau Trilogy, however, you engage more directly with the question of subjectivity, inviting viewers to imagine and embody the worlds of non-human species.

DB: The life of abalone is central to A Season in Shell, as the title suggests. The ten-part poem accompanying the installation interlaces multiple narratives with experiential symmetries, including the life cycle of the red sea abalone and how it is ‘revalued’ as it gets absorbed into the value-adding chains of human economies and society. It was important to integrate a seemingly passive mollusc into the poetry of these relations. In the long life of an abalone, which helps filter our oceans, it may only move thirty centimetres if left undisturbed, but it can be carried thousands of miles once captured for trade. The shucked shells in the exhibition space unexpectedly invited curious visitors to touch and connect with the afterlife of the abalone. Through the texture and the odour of decay, a shell is a visceral reminder of an abalone’s life and death as well as the lives of many—including fishermen and handlers—who facilitated its travel. The sensory reality of trade is often minimised or removed entirely so that we often just see the product. Here, the abalone reveals the spectrum of experiences that colour economic life and its multiple passages, including its value as a museum object within the exhibition. It acknowledges the life sources that often fuel the livelihoods and systems we inhabit.

We’ve always been drawn to more-than-human worlds for their radical alterities, but we’ve focused on them even more in recent years, largely due to the pandemic and staying at home more on the island. We were invited to participate in an exhibition where I had the chance to share my research on the water buffaloes of Lantau Island, and this research evolved into an artistic exploration of their sensory perceptions of the world. Our attention to more-than-human sensory experiences expanded to include bats when we observed them around our house over the years and during the pandemic lockdowns. Their presence invited further contemplation on human–wildlife proximities and how another species might negotiate space with their sensory perceptions. At the time, Royce was also investigating ideas around embodiment for his PhD research on meditation and technology, which brought us to common ground with Thomas Nagel’s essay, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ (1974).

My upbringing in a tiny town in Australia has also made me highly aware of sharing space with more-than-human beings and how they move through the world. Growing up, I was surrounded by a dense forest of towering, eighty-metre-tall mountain ash trees, which were immediately humbling, and my family would always observe the comings and goings of wildlife. My parents also instilled in me a sense of curiosity and a compassionate outlook towards the living world. In particular, my Latvian mother and her family’s animist traditions and cultural reverence for the natural world helped shape my sensibilities. This ecocentric perspective later made me wonder, as I neared the end of my anthropology studies, whether anthrozoological perspectives could provide more valuable insights into the complexities of human experience, interrogate the idea of human exceptionalism, and explore the dynamics of multispecies entanglements, including our shared vulnerabilities.

KG: Fieldwork and knowledge production have been central to your practice. Your ethnographically informed approach seems to have evolved from working with a Somali asylum seeker, in the case of A Season in Shell, to engaging multispecies ethnography in later works, such as your collaboration with Dr Alvin Tang for The Twenty-Three Thousand Sexes of Schizophyllum and Other Stories. Have new questions emerged through this shift, for example, regarding ethics or methodology?

RN: In some ways, turning to non-human informants for the Lantau Trilogy was a direct response to our experience working within a web of relations between human and non-human actants in A Season in Shell. Another part of that project was a questioning of the limits of ethical responsibility in ethnography by experimenting with this moral borderland within the context of the art world—specifically, the then-emergent field of ‘socially engaged art’.

The challenge of ethnographic research is the inherent paradox of gaining an informant’s trust. This process often requires us to set aside our objectivity and relate to subjects on a more personal level. If you speak informally with anthropologists, they may admit this is necessary, but it’s something that also needs to be hidden once the data is generated and the findings are recoded in the language of academic rigour. What art offers is an ethically ‘supple’ space, allowing us to set aside objectivity and let our subjectivities entwine with those of our informants. But this also opens one to influencing each other emotionally, for better or worse. The parallel subjectivity in that project—the abalone, its life cycle, and its incorporation into human trade networks—offered another expanded perspective. It felt natural for us to gravitate towards entwining non-human collaborators and informants with the Lantau Trilogy. It reflects our personal and larger worlds in equal measure.

KG: In The Twenty-Three Thousand Sexes of Schizophyllum and Other Stories, you highlighted the importance of prudent knowledge generation and dissemination in an AI era because there are intrinsic flaws from human bias in datasets. The work demonstrates how you would like AI to work in conjunction with culture and nature. In this instance, what role do you think AI has played? What was your initial reaction when you saw the AI-generated videos?

RN: To make the animations, we used the open-source, node-based generative AI software ComfyUI, which can generate videos locally on our own computer rather than on the cloud and run open-source AI models. Our overall goal was to generate moving images that looked different from what is usually produced with generative AI. The thousands of photographs we took of mushrooms played a part in this. At the same time, we used the technology counter-intuitively to produce unique and unexpected results. For example, we would often decrease the number of training steps in each generation so that the output was not ‘complete’ per se but looked more interesting.

Another technique was to keep the animations at twelve frames per second, as opposed to the conventional twenty-four or thirty frames. This gives them a look similar to stop-motion or time-lapse footage, which uses fewer frames. To create movement in the animations, we used some unusual sources. For example, to make the mushrooms ‘dance’, we took a clip of Gene Kelly performing the musical number ‘Singing in the rain’, turned it into black-and-white blobs with video-editing software, and used those to drive the mushrooms’ movement. Our first reaction to the videos was that the AI-generated animations were slightly uncanny yet mesmerising, in that they were ‘medium agnostic’—not quite video, not quite animation, not quite AI, but something hovering nebulously in between them all. Most of all, we wanted to avoid the ‘slop’ aesthetics which most people recognise from the proprietary, commercial models.

KG: You have incisive inquiries about technology and situate them culturally and socially in your work. In The Master Algorithm (2019), you speculate on how different societies might mobilise AI in ways shaped by their own histories and lived experiences. Do you still hold this view on the future of technology?

RN: On one level, The Master Algorithm was interested in a very top-down perspective of how technological development might diverge given geopolitical tensions and what cultural differences this might produce. The work used the trade war between the US and China during the first Trump administration as a starting point to speculate on how the two nations might develop separately if an AI ‘master algorithm’ were discovered. Since that time, a master algorithm of sorts has been discovered in the form of transformer networks and large language models, and this discovery happened in the US rather than China. However, the idea of two technological ‘Galapagos islands’ developing was superseded by the reality of capitalist dynamics when China’s DeepSeek released its open-source R1 model, which broke the monopolisation of proprietary models by Silicon Valley hegemons and has led to an explosion of innovation by individual programmers, researchers, and startups across the world. In many ways, the augury in our work was somewhat ‘technologically determinist’ in that it assumed technology would shape culture, while we seem to now live in a period of time that is seeing the ‘revenge of history’, where older historical considerations like resources, scarcity, and war are shaping our technologies and societies.

KG: Are there any texts or books that inspired this mushroom piece, as you often draw on theoretical and historical references?

Zheng Mahler: A few books we have read over the years, and which greatly informed our work with fungi include:

• John Cage, A Mycological Foray (2020)
• Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015)
• Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running (2005)
• Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez, Let’s Become Fungal! Mycelium Teaching and the Arts (2023)
• Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (2020)
• Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (2021)
• Leonardo Dellanoce et al., eds., Vertical Atlas (2022)
• Yuk Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics (2021)
• De Kai, Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future (2025)
• Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (2015)
• Ben Vickers and K Allado-McDowell, eds., Atlas of Anomalous AI (2025)
• Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All (2025)
• Benjamin H. Bratton et al., eds., Machine Decision Is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (2025)