The Guardians of Living Matter at Lowry

The Guardians of Living Matter lands at Lowry in January, pitching us forward to the year 2076 and into a future where the climate crisis has eased – not through techno-utopia or billionaire heroics, but through an unlikely alliance between artificial intelligence and the mycelium networks running beneath our feet. Artists John-Paul Brown and Sophy King use that premise as a springboard for something stranger and more hopeful, building an exhibition that treats imagination as a form of climate action.

The show rewinds to 2026, a moment defined by burnout, collapsing systems and a growing distrust of both governments and algorithms. Out of that fog, the artists conjure a turning point: fungal networks and low-carbon AI entangling, learning from one another, and opening a new channel of knowledge exchange. It’s speculative fiction with soil under its nails – a thought experiment that tries to sketch a future rooted in care rather than catastrophe.

At the centre of the exhibition is a vast, multi-sensory installation – a living sculpture formed from mycelium and low-carbon AI. It anchors the leap to 2076, linking the imagined future back to the turning point of 2026, when mycelium networks and emerging AI systems first began exchanging knowledge. Surrounding the installation are a research lab and new large-scale works by Brown and King, all exploring the entanglement of fungal and artificial intelligence and the possibilities that emerge when they collaborate.

The focus isn’t on sci-fi fantasy but on imagining how these systems might reshape our relationship with the planet – weaving climate research with low-carbon AI prototyping and treating hope as something active rather than abstract. As one of the major exhibitions to come out of Lowry’s Developed With programme, it channels that ambition into a show grounded in climate reality yet open to futures built on care, imagination and collective action.