It is still a surprise, to meet pattern and system at such a miniature scale,

Attending to lichens can bring you into contradictory relation with the assumptions of capitalist space and time, in which looking closely at no apparent thing, and moving slowly, is suspicious.

attending to lichens is attending to relationship, to qualities of connection. It is about revaluing forms of life and being that are generally ignored if not literally stepped on, and learning from those beings how we might practice living differently.

Attending to lichens also puts you in close relation with the actual surfaces of the world, which are messy and complex, often not what we expect, and sometimes exquisitely beautiful.

Lichens are small, slow growing, seemingly inconsequential beings that do not even try to compete for attention in a human-centered world of spectacle and speed, but their multitudinous, often multicolored, intricate, and wildly varying forms are almost everywhere.

The Lichen Museum aims to help change how we see, and to interrupt and question certain habits and structures of knowing, being, relating, and describing by engaging with life forms that appear to organize their lives—and “selves”—differently.

Some of lichens’ radical lifeways include collective identity, mutual aid, decentralization, interdependence, humility, and resistance to being used, as well as slowness, porosity, adaptability, wild diversity of form, and intimate relations with their environment.

How can I argue for any kind of meaningful relation with, or the ability to learn from, beings that occupy worlds that are so different in every way from my human world, and that are only knowable through the very forms of knowing that I am trying to question, disrupt, and find ways to exit from—knowledge practices that turn beings into things, and reenforce the unbalanced, power-saturated relations of subject and object that both seeing and language seem to require?

The Lichen Museum, as a project, aims to learn from lichens how we might become better humans.

lichens are not obviously involved in human worlds. In fact, they seem to exist in a parallel world that barely intersects with ours,

The Lichen Museum grounds itself in the possibility of art to imagine other dimensions, worlds, and futures, even as it looks excruciatingly closely at what is already here, and even as it borrows scientific and other disciplinary “knowledges,” with their various historical baggage, as contributions to an ongoing process of coming to know differently.

“The mechanism by which this symbiotic association occurs is completely unknown and remains a real mystery”;

composite beings whose collective constitutions mess with our grammar and complicate my attempts to write their multiplicity.

Lichen( s) have no centralized system we can recognize—nervous or vascular. They create themselves as collaborative entities through active, ongoing relationships between multiple organisms from different taxonomic kingdoms.

art for me is as much about inviting and discovering unexpected and promiscuous associations between ideas as it is working with physical materials.

lichens are everywhere—but most of us don’t “see” them because we don’t know what we are looking at.

You cannot own, control, or know—in the inherited traditions of Western knowledge practices—the “collection,” though there is plenty of room for coming to know as a processual, ongoing mode of relating affectionately in time.

Art, as I understand and practice it, involves an intimate interaction and mingling of first-person sensory experience with whatever draws us out of ourselves.

Lichens combine the two—algae (which are “plants”), plus fungus—plus miscellaneous additional contributors to the lichen holobiont, 2 contributors whose functions remain mysterious as of this writing and which appear to vary widely in kind across lichen species. “Lichens are not individuals but tiny ecosystems, composed of one main fungus, a group of algae and an assortment of smaller fungi and bacteria.”

Research in evolutionary biology since Lynn Margulis’s revolutionary findings regarding the symbiogenesis4 of eukaryotic cells—including the bacterial origins of human mitochondria and photosynthetic chloroplasts—has provided genetic evidence to undermine any residual assumptions that individual organisms are closed, self-sufficient systems.

Linnaeus and other systematist scientists of his time created a generic, universal, and timeless characterization of nature as if it were an objective library of types. These representative types then stood enshrined as highly influential, convincing, and constraining windows through which to observe and come to know the world.

Schwendener interpreted what he saw through the language and prejudices of his time. You could say a colonial mindset infected and constrained his ability to describe the symbiotic relation as anything other than a familiar social hierarchy of capture, possession, domination, enclosure, exploitation, and control:

Both Linnaean taxonomy and neo-Darwinist theories of evolution follow the structure of a tree; lichen symbiosis and the profusion of symbiotic relations in general are better envisioned as rhizomatic networks—horizontally distributed, with many lateral connections trespassing between branches, and making queer alliances through cross-kingdom affiliations that do not follow expectations for “normal” interrelating, sexual or otherwise.

heterotrophic fungi quite simply regenerate the world.

what if none of the specific qualities of the parts are presumed to preexist but only emerge through relationship, through multiple relationships? This is hard to write about, even harder than negotiating the uncountable noun. 29 Language itself troubles the task by embodying the paradox: “sense” (if any) in language is made not by single words standing alone but in the invisible relations between them.

A crucial complementary piece in Barad’s theoretical development of the concept of intra-action concerns “the cut”: how and where we divide up the world. Finding order and making sense in a world of entangled relationships necessarily involves cutting—dividing one “thing” or idea from another, making distinctions. Cutting is analytical; it is part of human thought, language, and perception; and it is critical to science, but the cuts themselves are not preexisting. They are what humans do with the world, how we create it, in active, engaged response to and with it, in order to try to understand and navigate in it. How we make these cuts feeds back into and shapes our perceptual and cognitive experiences, what we can see, quite literally, as well as how and what we are able to know.

it is possible to think of the “cuts” we inevitably make, the boundaries or edges we draw around things, people, and ideas, as folds instead of cuts. If they are folds that dip under, out of sight or sense, their edges are only temporary, receding not discontinuous, not actually a “cut” but a connection, a continuity in “the flesh of the world,” 35 retaining the potential to unfold, reveal, and reassemble, differently, at another time.

We know that we are open systems—sensorily, perceptually, physically, emotionally, and socially. How can I have an interior if the fundamental unit that matters is relation, relationships through and across which I am multiply distributed? A huge dimension of what and who “I” am lives dispersed throughout those worlds. “I” can be understood better as a topological surface, part of which is turned inside out toward the worlds of shared languages, common air, and other bodies; the worlds where moisture, light, and noise move and make contact. Another part of that continuous surface folds over, bends in, and obscures areas of itself, areas not always exposed to the sun and not known even to myself. 42 However you think of the tissue of relation, your “I” is already a “we,” already a collectivity, including the long ago agreement you made to collaborate with bacteria that entered your eukaryotic cells.

The latest research on lichens indicates that at least a third entity, perhaps bacterial, is necessary to catalyze the lichen symbiosis,

Tracing the evolutionary history of lichens is further complicated by their scant and evanescent bodies—they leave little trace in the fossil record, our main access to organismal histories in deep time.

It has been assumed that lichens pre-dated the appearance of vascular plants on land, 7 and that they contributed to creating soil and atmospheric conditions amenable for those plants and other organisms to survive on land by eroding rock surfaces. A recent study8 contradicts this assumption, based on modeling the separate evolutionary trees of the primary phylum of fungus involved in creating lichens (Ascomycota) and the phylum of algae (Chlorophyta) most often engaged with it in symbiosis. Researchers claim that the “family trees” of neither that fungus nor that algae pre-date vascular plants (both ancestral lines being only about 250 million years old), concluding that lichens as we know them now could not have existed before that time. This research is new and controversial as of this writing.

Among the several kinds of reproductive bodies that lichens generate, “vegetative propagules” are not sexually produced, but are packets of both fungal and algal components. They form asexually, break off, get carried around by the wind, and land somewhere, possibly to start a new lichen community.

As subtypes of these generative packets, soredia are algal cells wrapped in thread-like fungal filaments, and isidia are algal cells enclosed in fungal cortical tissue,

Lichens also may produce fungal spores, sexually and/ or asexually. Released from special “fruiting bodies” on lichens, spores must find a compatible alga to generate a new lichen body. “It’s unclear how mycobionts manage to find compatible photobionts” 14 is a repeating refrain in the literature. 15 But whether the form of reproduction is by spore or propagule, the fungus and the algae still have to “choose” to get, or stay, together.

old ideas about the sedimentation of geologic strata (“ stadialism”), as if the earth’s history was written in sequential chapters that tell a continuous and fully decipherable story, rather than one characterized by eruptions, unconformities, and lacunae.

Lichens grow almost everywhere on earth, but the lichen species that grow in any particular place evolve in response to, and with, that place—they generally can’t survive being moved. In this sense, lichens are both adaptive and defiant: they figure out how to live where nothing else does, but they won’t grow anywhere you tell them to.

If we think of rock as inert matter’s dumb representative and the antithesis to life, then the distinction between life and not-life is yet another boundary blurred by lichens’ affectionate natures as they create close and meaningful relationships with rock. But mineral matter is not inert and dumb: it too is tied in through networks of relations with other beings and things in lively time. Visionary Russian geochemist V. I. Vernadsky, writing over a hundred years ago, proposed that mineral and biological forces—life and nonlife—together created the planet from its start. 10 He argued that life and rock are so intimately linked that all the changes that the earth has gone through since its inception have been connected to the work of living organisms, and that you cannot separate the history of the mineral earth from the bacteria and archaea that have cocreated it through minute but collective metabolic processes.

Spores can be created sexually or asexually in the parent organism. They are unicellular, while seeds already contain the multicellular “embryo” of a new plant as well as some food to get it going. Spores are particularly adaptive in the sense that they can wait around for a very long time before germinating.

seed banking in general raises questions about what happens when you separate seeds from the farming practices and local environments with which they coevolve. What is stored in the DNA of seeds is not a guarantee but a set of possibilities, a potential, that interacts with local conditions to create a plant.

I have come to think of lichens more like a skin itself than as a scab or a disease. Considered collectively, they create a dramatically varying, living membrane surfacing the world, one that senses, filters, processes, monitors, and regulates exchanges of gases, liquids, and nutrients—porous and discerning, protective and responsive, discontinuous and massively distributed. Weird and beautiful. But skin is only my chosen analogy, or my anthropomorphic projection, grasped at in an attempt to make sense-able, across species worlds, a habit of being that is still mysterious to its human researchers and aficionados.

lichens from my perspective are more like events: queer and polyamorous affairs, or ongoing performances of complex intra-activity.

Lab conditions are axenic, which means “free from living organisms other than the species required.” 3 But if you don’t completely know which species are required for a symbiotic process to succeed, if you limit inclusion in your lab experiment only to what you assume to be necessary, you are likely to leave out critical ingredients when setting up your “culture.”

Lichens have no recognizable “circulatory” system to transport cellular information between their different parts, like a tree or a plant. How the various partners communicate to create, maintain, and perpetuate their surprising collaborative forms is a big part of the lichen mystery.

what the three main growth forms of lichens look like:—Crustose lichens stay relatively flat, and closely associate with their chosen substrate (rock, tree, etc.). They do not have a lower cortex, or bottom—their “bottom” is essentially the material they are attached to. They grow from their margins. Sometimes their center falls out, and other lichens take up residence in the emptied space.—Foliose lichens “grow radially, as . . . rosettes” and develop leafy, ruffly, forms, though still in contact with and attaching to their substrate along the way. They also grow (primarily) from their margins.—Fruticose lichens “may be fine, round, hair-like . . . as well as bushy,” or “flattened and strap-like.” They attach at their base, and grow from their tips. Some “have a tough central core.” 6

Lichens’ expansive distribution is matched by their enormous variation in shape and appearance—lichenologists have identified approximately 17,000 species of lichens but estimate that about that many more are probably unidentified. “The types of growth forms described . . . show our desire to classify every living organism many ways. Unfortunately nature often produces intermediates that will not conform to these man-made groupings.” 10

The invention of names to distinguish increasingly technical parts of lichen anatomy becomes obsessively polysyllabic: soralia, conidia, pycnidia, schizidia, thlasidia, polysidia, phyllidia, consoredia, parasoredia, hysterothecia; cephalodia, cyphellae, pseudocyphellae, pycnoascocarpia, thallinocarpia, hormogonia. . . . The unintelligibility (though interesting mouth-feel) of these terms to a lay person (me) contrasts with sensory descriptions of what other parts of lichens look like: cilia are “eyelash like growths”; the tomentum is “velvety . . . consisting of densely arranged short, hair-like hyphae”; pruina is a “powdery film . . . resembling the bloom on grapes.” 12

The Lichen Museum aims to lichenize humans, not to anthropomorphize lichens. It is a delicate balance to strike for sure, and an impossible task for humans to do on our own—the lichens have to help. An example of a lichenized human could be a lichenologist, a being who has allowed themselves to be taken up by lichen worlds.

Uexküll imagined each species’s perceptual world, its Umwelt, organized around a particular “carrier of significance”—what matters to that species most. The Umwelt of ticks, for instance, is entirely organized around the smell of sweat and the specific temperature of warm blood. The human Umwelt is more complex, with many and various carriers of significance, depending on point of view. The “carriers” within our human world are not predetermined but contingent on interest or investment: “There exists a forest-for-the-park-ranger, a forest-for-the-hunter, a forest-for-the botanist, a forest-for-the-wayfarer, a forest-for-the-nature lover, a forest-for-the-carpenter,” 20 etc.

Lichens “become” through intra-actions with their symbionts and with their environments. Information from these relationships feeds back into their cells, which in the end decide which genes to turn or or off. 25 Lichens also “become” through intra-active processes by which they are observed and described by humans. Identifying taxa based on genetic ID instead of on what the lichen looked like to a human observer dramatically changes the relation between humans and lichens.

axenic conditions per se—sterile, controlled, determinate—seem to be precisely what prohibit lichens’ collaborative creation and reproduction in a lab.

If/ when scientists do think they have figured out what is involved in the mystery of lichens’ morphogenesis, perhaps it will signify that we have changed how we do and think science, having come to accept that interdependent relations among many and diverse worlds is what makes any of us what we are.

Lichens in their very marginality seem to occupy and thrive in a parallel world different from the one we inhabit as humans now; a world that functions on a different kind of time and space and with collective relational skills that will allow them, in that world, to outlast the one humans are so badly inhabiting. Conceived as a massively distributed, collectively assembled, discontinuous, and wildly diverse “skin” of the earth, the Lichen Museum offers the potential for experiencing a different kind of encounter between worlds, and imagines the possibility of creating and co-inhabiting “a world of many worlds”—with no one standing outside, looking in, or aiming at.

Lichens refuse to be moved, or at least they reserve the right to choose whether a place feels right. They refuse to grow and reproduce in a lab, and they refuse to be used as living wallpaper to decorate a contemporary art museum as if they were abstract paintings. Asking how lichens can please, or be useful to, humans by laboring for us, to satisfy our needs, is the wrong question. Instead, how do they resist being exploited as resource and supply, and what can we learn from their resistance?

Litmus paper, used to determine pH values, was invented by the Dutch in the sixteenth century CE using lichen dyes and is still made from them.

lichen harvesting for commercial use has historically followed the colonial logic of mining, with its boom and bust cycles: you have to look somewhere else when the minerals (or lichens) are used up, or else your business goes belly up—but eventually you will run out of new places on earth to extract from.

because they are almost everywhere present in some form, they become, perversely, everywhere hidden.

The color of any thing can be understood as not an essence of that thing but an action it performs in relation with light.

At least two billion years old, cyanobacteria are assumed to be responsible for oxygenating the early earth’s atmosphere through their multitudinous exhalations, requiring that life forms adapt to the new toxic oxygen by learning to metabolize it or go underground. Some lichens compose themselves solely with cyanobacteria as their photosynthesizers rather than green algae, others include cyanobacteria along with green algae, and some might not have any cyanobacteria but are still indebted to them via the chloroplasts in their photosynthesizing algal cells. Cyanobacteria are the ancient ancestors of chloroplasts, the chlorophyll-containing organelles inside plant and algal cells that perform photosynthesis.

Having worked out a system to transform sunlight into energy using carbon dioxide and water, cyanobacteria gave this inventive “gift” to other cells by climbing into them, enabling not only life to evolve, but the whole biogeophysical shebang called “earth.”

It seems possible that once fungi evolved around 1.5 billion years ago, they might have teamed up with cyanobacteria, creating forms we can’t imagine because those forms have since disappeared, evading detection in the fossil record because of their fugitive bodies, folded under and into the earth’s, and time’s, opacities. 7

They can’t regulate their water content: they are poikilohydric, meaning that their water status is passively dependent on the surrounding environment. 9 This porosity allows them to survive in hot and dry conditions because they can absorb very small amounts of moisture easily from the atmosphere, and it means they dry out quickly in extremely hot conditions when having too much water might boil their tissues or block gas absorption.

we don’t just see color, color sees. Pigments detect, as well as reflect, light. The whole world is full of eyes, responding differentially to the sun and processing it into food, or images, or thoughts, or as obscure mineral semiotics we don’t know how to decode.

If you understand cognition as “action based on sensory information,” 15 then all the world is “sapient” because it senses and responds actively to light, and even “dull matter” responds to the sun by looking back.

it sounds like the rationale for the green revolution in the 1960s: by creating pesticides and fertilizers made from remnants of nerve gas and chemical warfare, scientists in concert with industry and First World politicians claimed they could feed more people. Instead, people lost the ability to feed themselves, and became dependent on multinational corporations like Monsanto (aka Bayer), while getting sick and dying from the chemicals, along with the birds.

Sleep allows humans to turn down and off, to cleanse our cells, and to commune with the many selves that we have forgotten we have and that we don’t need to remember consciously but that we visit with while sleeping.