Fantastic Encyclopedia

2022 — Present

Fantastic Encyclopedia is a visual encyclopedia of all that exists: plants, animals, architecture, people, myths, battles, music, history, and still lifes. We are presented with an imaginary parallel universe whose central element is the fly agaric—a metaphor, a magical mushroom that permeates all spheres of life. The project is created by the creative duo of Glish Group—Timofey Glinin and Anastasia Shubina. This St. Petersburg pair of biologists and philosophers, who have become visual artists and film directors, now live in San Francisco and employ a synthesis of scientific worldview and artistic practices in their work.

The project was born out of the artists’ long-standing anthropological interest in the shamanic traditions of northern peoples. While studying their rituals, they discovered that the fly agaric (Amanita Muscaria) has long been perceived as a magical mushroom serving as a portal to the spirit world. One of its psychedelic effects is the sensation that everything in the world originates from the fly agaric and is invisibly connected to it. This becomes the conceptual framework of the project. In the world of the Fantastic Encyclopedia, human figures, animals, and cities acquire fungal characteristics—domes reminiscent of caps, skin textures echoing its white spots, and shapes merging with the silhouette of the fly agaric, as seen in shamanic visions.

For the creation of their mystified compendium, the artists worked with the Midjourney artificial intelligence using an “evolutionary” method. They generated images repeatedly with the neural network, then introduced random variations and selected the best outcomes through hundreds of iterations—thus simulating natural selection in nature. This gave rise to a symbiotic process of “artist — AI”, during which a series of hundreds of illustrations was created. Each image resembles a page of an encyclopedia and recalls the classics of scientific illustration—such as Ernst Haeckel—yet is filled with fantastic content.

The project also explores the concept of the encyclopedia as a form of human knowledge. Encyclopedias reached their peak during the Enlightenment—as a symbol of a new, rational worldview. They replaced the sacred book of creation by offering, instead of a divine act, a structure, a system, an orderly collection. The encyclopedia became a utopia of reason: an attempt to present all knowledge as a completed, hierarchical, and universal model. However, today, in the digital era, this ideal no longer holds. Modern forms of encyclopedias—such as Wikipedia—are decentralized, fragmented, fluid, and do not claim universal truth. The encyclopedia has lost its role as the ultimate description of the world and has transformed into a space of constant transformation.

Fantastic Encyclopedia embodies precisely this: on the surface, it is designed as a classical encyclopedia, yet it is filled with content where reality and fiction, myth and algorithm, are deeply interwoven. Here, the encyclopedia is not a finished text but an endless mutation. It portrays a world in constant becoming; its images and creatures emerge through a series of errors, associations, glitches, and hidden archetypes that saturate the digital world. This is a book that cannot be finished, for it grows like a mycelium in all directions.

Artificial intelligence here acts not merely as a tool, but as a co-author—a kind of demiurge of the digital age, helping to create a new reality. Thus, Fantastic Encyclopedia transforms into a book of creation for a new universe. As Umberto Eco noted, humanity possesses an encyclopedic impulse—an innate drive to link everything that exists, to systematize and order chaos. Here, that instinct turns into a magical act of creation: the artist and the machine jointly create the imaginative framework of a new world.

Thus, Fantastic Encyclopedia creates a unique, multilayered world where the boundary between the real and the imaginary is blurred, and the fly agaric transforms into the universal code of this universe—both biological and cultural. Glish Group offers the viewer a kind of “museum of the impossible"—a pseudo-encyclopedia that unites science and myth. The project invites us to reflect on how we construct reality from facts and fantasies—and what role technology and collective imagination play in this process.

“AI HAS A SOUL” exhibition in ANU Museum, in Tel Aviv. Exhibition was a part of “SlovoNovo” forum of Free Culture. June 2023. 

“Fantastic Encyclopedia, ” Brunch SF, San Francisco, USA, 2024, Solo Show

 “AIAIAI exhibition”, Radian Gallery (Wessling Contemporary), San Francisco, 2024, group exhibition.

“Fantastic Encyclopedia” at “50|50 Show”, Sanchez Art Center, 2024, solo show in a group exhibition.