Sunday night at the Vetinary Varieties.

Here's S i n k improvising to the life cycle of slime mould Physarum polycephalum at the Anatomy Theatre at Summerhall.  (It's Edinburgh's old Vet school, now given over to artists, hackers & the like.)  I did a short talk & me and Slimey did the visuals for the rest of the night. Very nice it was too, a gentle, eclectic night.

me & Slimey's watery lines of becoming

What's left on the new green brain. I'm not getting bored of this.

ways of being and all that

More here of the slime mould plasmodium with all its beautiful ways of journeying, pathfinding, exploring, wayfaring, foraging and generally taking its lines for walks. Marvellous organism.

Slime Mould Pan-Galactic Green

Oh well there you go. Avoiding the copper, climbing all over the ultramarine but not having much of an interaction, a little uptake of the phthalo blue and tucking in heartily to the chromium oxide green.

Actually the plasmodium did send a few fingers out to stroke the copper, sat there for a little while thinking about it, and then scarpered; an approach to life I admire.

a new green brain

A nice new brain for the slime mould. And something empiricalish....

Physarum polycephalum International Blue

Physarum polycephalum International Blue, that should say.

It's the same pigment Yves Klein used, the Dolly Blue, Reckitt's or ultramarine. I think what we have going on here is "I'm not so keen on the seasoning but I'll eat it anyway, to be polite."

Whereas the copper powder is sadly being rejected out of hand.

Dark Matters

Please come to my show! Pictures made to be seen in the dark. Things you can't see, don't often see, things you might not want to look at all of the time: monsters, memories, movement, myths, moths, maths, molecules, microbes, mites, Maggie. With stunning collaborations by the slime mould Physarum polycephalum.

It's at Gallery 3, Art’s Complex, St.Margaret’s House, 151 London Road, Edinburgh, EH7 6AE. Map here , if you're coming by car there's a confusing car park: 

 Booze 'n' schmooze night is 3rd February, 6.00 - 9.30 pm, and the exhibition is open every day after that until the12th February from 10.00 am - 6.00 pm.

Slime mould on drugs

See this is what happens if you don't get your plasmodium to come off your painting in time. Sadly I think it is too late for this little big cell, I have been doing some intensive care but it seems to be thoroughly contaminated.

Luckily I got some of it to form a sclerotium in earlier, happier days. And now I have a persuasive agent to help it decide to come to the safety of the clean things: this slime mould, it seems, will do tricks for tranx. Valerian root - lovely, boiled with the porridge, or just on its own as a snack. (Valium for micro-organisms, or humans, but the cat uses it as an upper and goes off in a drug-crazed frenzy to wage war on cardboard boxes. Slime mould doesn't seem to care for catnip though.) Thanks to Andy Adamatzky, font of Physarum Wisdom for that hot tip, in this paper.

doing thinking with slime mould

Here's what Prof. Andy Adamatzky has to say about Physarum plasmodium doing thinking:
"Plasmodium’s foraging behaviour can be interpreted as computation, when data are represented by spatial configurations of attractants and repellents, and results by structures of protoplasmic network . Plasmodium satisfactory solves many computational problems with natural parallelism, including shortest path, implementation of storage modification machines, Voronoi diagram, logical computing, process algebra... "
 Read all about it in his nice paper "Slime mould computes planar shapes" here.

Well that's very nice for me that somebody has gone to the trouble of doing sums to prove that the thinking of bodies can indeed be thought of as thinking, that Ms. No-brain, No-symbolic language here is doing the math all over my pictures. Maths even.

More to the point for me is the slime mould's responsiveness to things in general. This is a much more complex adventure for the Physarum than the smooth laboratory agar. All the different patterns it is creating here are responses to changes in humidity, available nutrition, light, the textitily of the substrate and other things I don't know about, all at the same time. I'm not at all sure how much it notices or cares about the grease and dirt left by my hands and the ubiquitous cats paws, sneezes, coffee spills and so on. I don't know if it is happy enough on the paintings because when I soak them after they are painted they get a thin coating of the size that the paper is impregnated with. 

I don't know if it has any kind of memory. Or even what I think I might mean by memory here. 

I have no idea why it seems to be happy to forage endlessly across paintings carrying a burden of fluorescent powder with only the occaisional break with a clean oat flake on a bit of damp kitchen roll. But then I can't say I understand why I do, either.