February 1st, 2022 - The Algorand Foundation today announces a grant for Wilmore Academy, a marketplace committed to supporting research by enabling artists, academics, and brands to produce and launch NFTs. Wilmore Academy is a marketplace committed to freeing the spirit of enquiry by supporting academic and educational research through the sale of NFTs to sponsors. It enables artists, academics, and brands to launch NFTs to support research, typically through donations to universities and foundations.
Accursed Share and Wilmore Academy are proud to announce their collaboration on Algorand’s carbon-negative blockchain with Merlin Sheldrake, bestselling author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape our Futures (2020), and winner of the Royal Society Science Book Prize. Crowning a recent spate of popular forays into mycology, including smash-hits like Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) and Louie Schwartzberg’s documentary Fantastic Fungi (2019), Entangled Life explores the ways that fungi – and their remarkable symbiotic relationships – have profoundly shaped the history of life, and provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live.
Merlin studies the relationships that form between plants and symbiotic fungi that live in their roots, known as mycorrhizal fungi (from the Greek mykes, meaning fungus, and rhiza, meaning root). More than ninety percent of plants depend on these partnerships. They are a more fundamental part of planthood than flowers, fruit, leaves, wood, or roots, and lie at the base of the food chains that sustain nearly all terrestrial life. Fine threads of tubular fungal cells — known as mycelium — emanate from plant roots into the surrounding soil. Plants and fungi engage in sophisticated trading strategies, striking compromises and resolving dizzyingly complex trade-offs. These sprawling, decentralised networks can link different plants underground and are sometimes referred to as the ‘Wood Wide Web’—which, as we shall see in coming weeks, also resembles some of the structures and culture emerging in Web3.
Whether in agriculture, forestry, or in our attempts to restore degraded ecosystems, we depend entirely on the healthy functioning of mycorrhizal relationships. But they are hard for us to see, hidden within plant roots and buried in the soil. To create this extraordinary limited NFT collection of symbiotic rootscapes, Merlin has used a novel technique that provides unprecedented access to the spaces within roots, revealing the subterranean intimacies that underpin much of life on land.
Some of the proceeds of Entangled Life: Worldbuilders will be used to support Merlin’s research into the decentralised problem-solving ability of fungal networks, and some will be used to support the work of the Fungi Foundation.
ABOUT WILMORE ACADEMY
Wilmore Academy is a marketplace committed to freeing the spirit of enquiry by supporting academic and educational research through the sale of NFTs to sponsors. Our expertise in technology, design, marketing and business development enables artists, academics, and brands to launch NFTs supporting research 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.
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, Tyler Cowen, Elizabeth Kolbert, Jaron Lanier, Russel Brand, Helen Macdonald, Michael Pollan, David Byrne, Robert Macfarlane, 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.
