"Honey Fungus," King’s Latest Virtual Reality Project, Debuts at South by Southwest

At this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW), Jonah King, an assistant professor of visual arts and technology in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, debuted Honey Fungus, a virtual reality (VR) project that encourages audiences to deepen their sensory connection to the natural world. The project marks a major milestone for King, following years of exploring ecological storytelling, sci-fi-inspired immersive media and new forms of intimacy.

“Premiering Honey Fungus at South by Southwest felt like the culmination of a long and evolving journey,” King said. “Everything leading up to SXSW had been a kind of work-in-progress—an extended period of prototyping, experimenting, and learning in public.”

The annual Austin-based festival—known for blending technology, film, music, education and culture—proved to be the ideal venue for the work. Over several days, King’s team ran four stations, screening the nine-minute experience continuously for eight hours a day, welcoming nearly a thousand participants.

The nine-minute VR experience centers on a sentient mycelial network—a vast, root-like web of fungal threads—that guides participants through an interactive landscape. Viewers encounter spores that whisper poetic, AI-generated texts blending Smithsonian field notes with fragments of amateur erotica.

“It was deeply satisfying to present something so technically stable, emotionally resonant, and formally complete,” King reflected. “It finally stood on its own.”

Want to see a video play-through of Honey Fungus? Check out King's website.

Art Meets Technology, Earth Meets Eroticism

Honey Fungus doesn’t shy away from the provocative. Described by King as a “queer omnipresent mycelial entity,” the work invites participants to explore the entanglement of human and non-human bodies, raising questions about intimacy, ecology and the fluidity of identity.

“I wanted to offer viewers a way to feel that connection differently—to challenge binary thinking about humans and nature, self and other,” King said. “Where does a body end and begin? What does care mean beyond the human? Can we form new kinds of kinship with the non-human world? And how do delineations of gender and sexuality crumble under that lens?”

Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and originally launched in early form at VISUAL Carlow, Honey Fungus has evolved through iterations at EXPO Chicago, art fairs and exhibitions. At each stop, King collected feedback, gradually shifting the work from a narrative VR format toward a more tactile, immersive installation.

At SXSW, the project reached its final form. King, along with producer Alex Darby of Hybrid.Studio transformed a 20-by-20-foot space into an atmospheric environment complete with custom rugs, stools, banners and dual-monitor displays.

SXSW attracted a broad and diverse audience, offering a range of interpretations and responses to Honey Fungus.

“On a technical level, I had the chance to speak with directors from Industrial Light & Magic about some of the interactive techniques I developed,” said King.

“On a philosophical level, one viewer made a fascinating connection to Navajo cosmology—specifically the metaphor of ‘the web of spit,’ which describes the body as both internal and external, individual and collective at once,” King continued. “I valued the opportunity to discuss how the themes in the work connect to broader, long-standing conversations about land stewardship.”

Expanding the Ecosystem of VR Art

Honey Fungus was presented within the XR track at SXSW, a showcase more often associated with narrative film than with visual art. For King—whose background includes experimental theater, 3D modeling and live avatar performances—this was an opportunity to bridge disciplines.

“I hoped Honey Fungus could hold its own in that context, without the need of my presence as an artist to explain it,” King said. “It was a welcome surprise that my first completed VR film would be presented in such a prestigious context.”

The installation is part of King’s larger body of work that explores ecological intimacy and nonhuman kinship through emerging media. Previous projects include Hybrid Drift, an AR project mapping Itaparica Island as a hybrid technological body, and Tongue The Sun, a COVID-era digital sculpture that draws attention to the materiality of our body’s ecosystem.

With Honey Fungus, King hopes viewers left with a new sense of relationality.

“We’ve inherited cultural logics that position the human as separate from or superior to ecological systems,” King said. “Yet science is presenting ever more clearly that distinction doesn’t hold. We are inseparable from the world’s living networks.”