EVENT
More than Meets the Eye
Ongoing
Part of Open Worlds
MoMI opens its doors for a series of free events that bring into conversation mycologists, biologists, and ecologists alongside artists and filmmakers, exploring how the tools of science and cinema can reveal more of our urban landscape than is visible to the naked eye.
Day 1, June 28
Free, RSVP encouraged
Join us on Friday for an evening with NYC Microseasons, which will highlight the natural and unnatural shifts in New York City through a series of short presentations. Inspired by the Japanese calendar of 72 seasons, this project will share the latest forecast for local phenomena—including fireflies, horseshoe crabs, mulberries, and fireworks—and discuss how to join in commemorating these fleeting moments of change. Including a reception with mead from Enlightenment Wines.
Schedule:
6:30 p.m.: Doors open
7:30 p.m.: NYC Microseasons program
8:30 p.m.: Reception
Speaker:
Erin Chapman, when not scanning the skies and sidewalks for the auspices of urban seasons, is Assistant Director of New Media at the American Museum of Natural History. She and co-author Allison Meier created NYC Microseasons in 2021.
Terrence Hopkins is a chemistry PhD student at NYU who studies how light interacts with matter. Outside the lab, he enjoys being active and 3D rendering art.
Tom McNamara is a science filmmaker and journalist. He found the lost, first-ever underwater motion picture. He embedded with a research team for a month in the Amazon. He formed an orchestra of hibernating animals and animated their performance. He’s also a former National Park Ranger, where he met many animals with stories, including horseshoe crabs.
Georgia Silvera Seamans is the founder of Local Nature Lab, a nature education and biodiversity monitoring nonprofit. She is an adjunct professor in the field of environmental studies and teaches at New York University and The New School. She likes to drink tea while thinking about nature in cities.
This program is supported by the Simons Foundation.
Day 2, June 29
All events are free, though RSVPs for the walk* and for the film screening are encouraged.
*The first 50 RSVPs get a free NYMS mycological hand lens!
On Saturday, everyone is welcome for an afternoon exploring the world of fungi and mushrooms. The New York Mycological Society, a volunteer-run organization founded by experimental composer John Cage in 1962, will lead a walk starting from Museum of the Moving Image that explores the mycelium in our everyday landscape that we might be unaware of. Everyone with a love of fungi, regardless of their level of knowledge or area of interest, is invited. Meanwhile, BioBus, a school bus transformed into a mobile laboratory equipped with research-grade microscopes, will be parked in front of MoMI starting at 2:00 p.m. All are welcome aboard the BioBus—bring a sample from the walk or use one that we’ll have on hand! Then, at 4:30 p.m., a series of short films employing a range of cinematic techniques will reveal the surprisingly animate world beneath our feet.
Schedule:
12:30 p.m.: Meet for the mycological walk in the MoMI Lobby
1:00–2:00 p.m.: NYMS walk from MoMI
2:00–4:00 p.m.: BioBus at MoMI
2:30 p.m.: NYMS ID session
4:30–6:00 p.m.: Screening and Q&A
Guests:
Maya Han is the Cultural Coordinator for NYMS; founder of the Myco Film Festival; and an artist, writer, and experimental filmmaker. Her work is a form of soft activism, critically engaging with issues of race, gender, class, diasporic identities, and marginalized histories. She can usually be found in Paris or in Brooklyn, where she is cultivating our garden.
Sigrid Jakob is the current president of the New York Mycological Society. She is passionate about community science and spreading the joy of fungi to more NYC communities. She can be found on the club’s year-round weekly mushroom walks or her DNA lab in pursuit of discovering fungi new to science. She also co-leads the Green-Wood Cemetery Fungi Phenology Project, a long-term survey of the fungi of that beautiful green space. She is also a board member and sequence validator for FUNDIS, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting fungi. She has an MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts. @greenwoodzombie and @dung_fungi on Instagram.
Andrew Cannon is an artist and amateur mycologist. He has had work exhibited at the Santa Monica Museum, White Columns, and Page Gallery, among others. He became interested in fungi while taking a botany course in 2008 and has participated in mycological societies in Los Angeles and New York ever since. He also enjoys identifying and foraging plants, and cooking meals with wild ingredients.
Misha Zitser is a naturalist who has spent the last four years observing and documenting the flora, fauna, and fungi of NYC. He is a prolific contributor to several iNaturalist projects, including “New York City EcoFlora” and “Fungi of NYC,” a project that was created by NYMS to document the fungal diversity of New York City. While he enjoys traveling beyond the city, as a Queens resident most of Misha’s nature adventures take place in his backyard—the beautiful, forested parks of Alley Pond Park and Cunningham Park.
Janelle VanderKelen is an artist whose films and intermedia installations imagine alternative acts of relation between imperfect bodies (human, vegetal, geological, or otherwise). She thinks about the camera as a sensory prosthetic and uses animation to make the agency of plants visible for human audiences. Janelle is an Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and Time-Based Arts at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
This program is supported by the Simons Foundation.