The Cryptogamic Oracle is an app-based urban probe developed through walking workshops to guide participants in photographing and reflecting on overlooked sites where cryptogamic life and urban infrastructure intersect.

Cryptogams are forms of life that reproduce without flowers or seeds, including mosses, lichens, algae, fungi and ferns. They often grow in overlooked urban places: underfoot, in cracks, or in the back streets underneath leaking gutters. In this project, I use the word cryptogamic not only to describe these organisms, but also as a way of thinking about hidden systems in the city.

Technology can also be cryptogamic in this sense. It is often embedded, concealed; cables under pavements, sensors in buildings, servers in warehouses, data moving through systems we rarely see. By placing cryptogamic life and technology alongside one another, the project asks how both shape urban space through processes that are often hidden, distributed and material.

>>CRYPTOGAMS are organisms that reproduce without seeds or flowers – mosses, lichens, ferns, fungi, algae. They grow in the cracks, on surfaces, beneath notice. Ancient. Persistent. Hidden in plain sight.

>> TECHNOLOGY operates similarly – embedded in infrastructure, concealed in black boxes, naturalised into landscapes. Cables beneath pavement. Servers in warehouses. Computational substrate invisible until examined.

>> Both are MATERIAL SYSTEMS with hidden processes. Both accumulate memory. Both create networks. The cryptogam and the circuit share a logic – distributed intelligence, environmental sensing, collective survival.

Introduction – Cryptogamic Oracle v1

Project Outline

The Cryptogamic Oracle is a practice-based research project that explores how walking and photography can help people notice more-than-human life in the city.

Developed through moss walks and ecological workshops, the project focuses on cryptogamic life, such as mosses, lichens, algae and ferns. These organisms often appear in overlooked places, such as cracks, walls, drains, vents and damp surfaces. The project uses these organisms to draw connections between urban ecology, technology and the built systems that shape everyday city life.

The app works as an urban probe. It asks participants to photograph organisms, surfaces and infrastructures, then recomposes these images through an oracle-like interface. The readings do not give fixed answers. Instead, they offer prompts for noticing, making connections and staying with uncertainty.

The research suggests that speculative visual methods can support a slower, more relational form of ecological attention in urban space.

The Cryptogamic lens

Through a cryptogamic lens, the city appears as a living and technological body: breathing, leaking, heating, sweating, digesting, signalling and shedding. Its organs are gutters, drains, roads, cables, vents, hatches, cameras, walls and pipes. These systems appear to serve human life, but humans are also organisms moving through a larger urban metabolism of shelter, drainage, heat, light, data, sewage, roads, signals and supply chains. Cryptogams reveal where this body is never fully sealed. They gather in cracks, leaks, seams, damp walls, service voids and neglected surfaces. Moss, algae, lichen and fungal life do not sit outside technology. They emerge within it, showing where infrastructure becomes porous, weathered and available to other forms of life. To learn more about the notion of the techno-cryptogamic read the full glossay here>

Read more about the project background here…oracles and AI 

Using the App the cards are bound to composite images generated when the user submits photgraphs to the oracle. Here are examples of the outputs so far..

Output composites Crptogamic Oracle (desktop  app created using js. created using Visual Code studio + AI assistance)

 

Outputs from version v1 (Base44 mobile app)