Thomas Peter James
Welcome to the Royal College of Fungi
The ‘RCF’ is an active, multi-faceted research project that compares social systems to fungi systems to understand what we can learn from nature to think and create sustainable modes of living, working, and learning. Working as ‘mockstitution’, as used in Gregory Sholette’s Dark Matter, the RCF mimics institutional structures, while letting them be infiltrated and shaped by natural processes, to critique and reinvent them. The core subjects offered by the RCF are growth, interaction, and regeneration.
We envision radicalising the hierarchical structure of mainstream education further by committing our education model to the mycorrhizal network of a fungus. We believe that by observing fungi and understanding the natural processes, systems, and networks of a mediating species, we can reflect upon our own social mindsets, particularly the ethos of education, and seek ways to reform education systems by using fungi as a theoretical and even a practical tool. The fungus that we have based our research on is the oyster mushroom. The oyster mushroom or the ‘Pleurotus ostreatus’ in Latin, is a common edible fungus that is known and loved by many. This is just the fruit of a far greater body, the fruit of an organism that stretches off underground into the dark kingdom of the soil. Reaching deep into the soil fungi can access deposits of minerals that were out of reach for other life, by breaking them down to their simplest forms fungi are able to move the minerals through their roots ‘hyphae’
across the network to repurpose them. Here is the dilemma... Fungi can dig deep in the darkness, however, require sugars from sunlight, trees can climb very high toward the sun but can’t dig as deep in the soil. What fungi do to solve this problem known as mycorrhizal networking is to wrap around the roots of the tree and attach itself, and in doing so create an exchange of its minerals and nutrients for the tree's sugars... Therefore, one fungi can connect to more than one tree at a time, more than one species of tree, and more than one species of plant, it creates a network with the whole ecosystem and mediates communication and share of nutrients between itself and an organism, or even between two different organisms through its network, this is known as the WoodWideWeb.
So this is the introduction to why we base our university on Fungi. We see the body of information being education itself, a network rich and deep in information and knowledge, and we see its students like trees who feed into the network, exchanging and growing symbiotically. This growth and freeform of information exchange creates a structure that replaces the hierarchical structure with a more organic and intuitive system, one where all entities are met ethically and play a fundamental role in the dynamic and growth of the ecosystem, which is in the vision of the RCF, education.