Chicago, IL, Feb. 01, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- (via Blockchain Wire) Accursed Share (https://accursedshare.art/), a production studio leveraging smart contract technology to push the boundaries of cryptoart, has announced a creative partnership with Wilmore Crossing Academy and New York Times best-selling author, Merlin Sheldrake. Together they will 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 personal 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 6PM 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 metres. These networks are decentralised, with no head or brain. And yet, fungi are able to 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.”
The NFTs in the Entangled Life collection showcase 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 are able to 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.
Since Accursed Share is an artist-led production studio and art accelerator focused on furthering the limits of NFT art, this collection truly breaks boundaries by bringing together art, education and science. Through its narrative-driven cryptoart pieces and installations, Accursed Share unlocks the creative realm of possibility through smart contracts and multifaceted and dynamic NFT creation. This collection fully embodies this mission, with a portion of proceeds going toward Merlin’s study of decentralization in fungal networks and another in support of the Fungi Foundation.
For more information, please visit https://accursedshare.art/ and sign up for the whitelist here.
About Accursed Share:
Accursed Share is an artist-led production studio and art accelerator focused on pushing the limits of NFT art. In addition to producing narrative-driven cryptoart pieces and installations, Accursed Share is developing a no-code platform to unlock dynamic NFT creation for everyone, including artists who are not blockchain or smart contract developers.
About Merlin Sheldrake:
Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures (2020). He received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
Entangled Life, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, has been translated into twenty-two languages and has met with widespread critical acclaim. It was described by The Wall Street Journal as ‘food for the soul’; by The Guardian as ‘brilliant’ and ‘entrancing’; by The Observer as ‘wondrous’; by The Mail on Sunday as ‘dazzling’; by The Spectator as ‘truly astounding’; by The Telegraph as ‘mind-boggling. Entangled Life won the Wainwright Prize 2021 and the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2021. It has been nominated for a host of other accolades, including the British Book Awards Book of the Year 2021 and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2021, and been selected as a Book of the Year by The Times, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times, New Statesman and Time, among others.
Merlin’s work has been endorsed by numerous scientific, literary, and public figures, including: Margaret Atwood, Russell Brand, David Byrne, Tyler Cowen, Elizabeth Kolbert, Jaron Lanier, Helen Macdonald, Robert Macfarlane, Michael Pollan, Paul Stamets and Ed Yong. His writing has inspired a couture collection by Iris van Herpen (‘Roots of Rebirth’, 2021).
Merlin is a research associate at the Vrije University, Amsterdam, and works with the Fungi Foundation and the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks.
About Wilmore Academy
Wilmore Academy is an NFT marketplace committed to freeing the spirit of enquiry by supporting academic and educational research through the sale of NFTs to individual sponsors. It enables academics, foundations and brands to launch NFTs to support research, typically through donations to universities and foundations. Sponsors of each project join research-focused communities through exclusive discussion channels, progress updates and participation in real-life experiences.
