Accursed Share partners with an author to launch NFT collection on Fungi

Artist-led production studio Accursed Share today announced its partnership with New York Times best-selling author Merlin Sheldrake, to launch an NFT collection based on his award-winning book, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures.

The NFTs are digitally curated from Sheldrake's studies of three-dimensional scans of thousands of sliced and rendered samples of plants and fungi exploring their codependent intimacy. The NFT collection, featuring his book and studies, will consist of 9,950 NFTs created with the help of screening technology and powered by Algorand’s carbon-negative blockchain.

The NFT drop starts February 10, 2022, at 6 PM UTC. The first 1,000 unique ALGO addresses will receive a free animated NFT from the Entangled Life collection, while the top 100 referrers will receive a more exclusive NFT with dynamic features and surprises.

“Fungi form living networks that can sprawl over tens or even hundreds of meters. These networks are decentralized, with no head or brain. And yet, fungi can integrate an unceasing flood of sensory information and engage in sophisticated trading relationships with plants, striking compromises and resolving dizzyingly complex trade-offs. Fungal coordination is dispersed across their networks, taking place both everywhere at once and nowhere in particular,” said Merlin Sheldrake.

“I like to imagine the bewilderment of an extraterrestrial anthropologist who discovered only yesterday, after several decades of studying modern humanity, that we had something called the Internet. It’s a bit like that for contemporary ecologists, grappling with the many ways that networks of symbiotic fungi change our understanding of how organisms interact,” Sheldrake added.

The NFTs in the Entangled Life collection showcases the symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants, highlighting how essential fungi are to life. More than 90 percent of plants depend on this relationship, making it a more fundamental part of planthood than flowers, fruit, leaves, wood, or roots.

Sheldrake explores how fungi form decentralized underground networks with plants, sometimes known as the ‘Wood Wide Web.’ The NFT collection reveals an intimate view at these subterranean roots that make up the base of the food chain and sustain the future of all life on earth.

“Bridging biology with decentralized technology and NFTs is an ideal representation of how fungal networks work together to sustain life,” said John Connor, CEO of Accursed Share. “Merlin’s work explores decentralized decision making and resource coordination in fungi, concepts which can help shape the way we understand and design optimal functioning DAOs and other web3 entities.”

Sheldrake explains that all organisms have a method to map and preserve their history.

That is among one of the similarities that may be inferred between fungi and the blockchain as both act as decentralized entities with the ability to permanently store information.

Blockchain has a similarly fashioned, immutable ledger, which helps record a timescape of inalienable history. Much like humans in the real world and in the Metaverse, fungi can navigate their environment, make decisions between alternative causes of action, form complicated and elaborate relationships within their intricate environments—all while achieving and sustaining their form as a decentralized entity.

Published on: Friday, February 04, 2022, 03:34 PM IST