Happy Summer!

There's a lot cooking in the studio this season, but the thing I most want to share is on Governors Island, so I'll start there.

Honey Fungus on Governors Island, NYC

After its world premiere at South by Southwest in March 2025 and a year of travelling to twenty plus international venues, I'm very happy to share that Honey Fungus has landed in New York. It will be on view on Governors Island until October as part of Transformation Stories, a summer programme curated by Noo Arts.

Governors Island has all the abandoned eco-decay vibes I could hope for. It's open to the public every weekend through October. If you'd like to come, let me know and I’ll walk you through the project.

Programme: https://www.nooarts.org/calendar/governors-island-open-house
Details on Honey Fungus: https://jonahking.com/honeyfungus

Honey Fungus on Tour

Honey Fungus has had a generous run since SXSW: the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; Wilshire Online Expo 26 in Los Angeles, as part of Frieze Week; The Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, Czech Republic (European premiere); Shape Shift Festival, Sofia; Maryland Film Festival, Baltimore; VR Fest, Mexico; the Miami Basel Art Tech Summit; Open World Animation Festival, Pittsburgh; InScience Film Festival, Holland; Poppy Jasper International Film Festival at Cura Contemporary, California; UAAD’s pop-up “Neuromantics” in Soho; The New Media Film Festival in Los Angeles; and it won an award at Digital Arts Zurich! 

Over the next few months, the project will feature at:
FIVARS, Toronto - June 15-19th
Sunrise Film Fest, Lowestoft - August 20-23rd
Aestetica Short Film Festival, York - 4-8th November

Synthetic Narratives x DVAA Upstate!

Last week, the symposium I co-direct, Synthetic Narratives, hosted a satellite event with the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance as part of their Future/Think series. Two panels and a screening of AI short films at the Tusten Theatre in Narrowsburg, a kind of weekend think tank in the foothills of the Catskills. Speakers included Torin Blankensmith, Daria Dorosh, John Craig Freeman, Amy Xiaofan Jiang, Mischa Kuma, and DJ Spooky. They were awesome! 

The point of this conference is to tease out how Immersive and AI tecnologies are challenging creators with both technical and big epistemological questions, and our speakers did not hold back.

Documentation will go online soon and join the archive from last year's festival, which is well worth a listen if you haven't already. We've also just been given the go-ahead to run the full festival again this autumn, so keep an ear out for details.

More: https://syntheticnarratives.com

Book chapter in Queer Flora, Fauna, and Funga

I've written a chapter for an upcoming book called Queer Flora, Fauna, and Funga, edited by Frances Cannon and published by Valiz. The title of my contribution is Unfathomable Intimacies, which pulls together some of my thinking around biological evolution and material interdependance. This is a real honour. Valiz also published Let's Become Fungal!, which was a touchstone while I was making Honey Fungus, and several of the new book's contributors are writers I was reading at the time. It's out in August.

Pre-order: https://valiz.nl/en/publications/queer-flora-fauna-and-funga

Rigged Realities Performance Lecture

I've spent the year developing an experimental performance lecture drawn from an article I wrote in Autumn for Millennium Film Journal, called "Digital Puppetry and the Animistic Liniage of Motion Capture". It looks at the relationship between digital avatars and animistic puppetry practices. I presented it in March at the New Media Caucus symposium “Restoration / Regeneration” at Arizona State University, and I'll be bringing it to Singapore later this year for the 11th International Conference on Communication and Media Studies at Nanyang Technological University. I'm thinking a lot about our devices and their relationship to larger technical/political infrastructure and how that expands and globalises our bodies in a way that maps onto animistic perspectives on materialism.

Speaking Engagements

In April, I chaired a discussion at the Villa Albertine between theorist Natasha Chuk and resident artist Hanako Murakami titled Reimagining Images: From Early Photography to AI. The conversation ranged widely, from historical photographic practices to generative and interactive technologies, and looked at how authenticity, aesthetics, and perception are being reimagined.

Other speaking engagements this year included a visit to Marymount Manhattan College in March as part of their Spring Social Justice Academy on Environmental Justice. I chatted on this podcast during Frieze Week LA. I presented to the Shadowbanned Magazine reading group, which was working through Let's Become Fungal!. Their magazine is brilliant, pick up a copy: https://www.shadowbannedmagazine.com.

Studio Work in Progress

I'm working on several projects this year. I'll share more as they develop, but the closest just started. Through the Lawrence T. Babbio '66 Pinnacle Scholars Program at Stevens Institute, I'll be assisted by two student scholars for ten weeks on a new body of work that extends the ecological themes in Honey Fungus through physical sculptures.

That's all for now. I always want to hear from you, so let me know what you're up to. Come for a studio visit, or join me on Governors Island some weekend this summer.

Warmest,
Jonah