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.

shape shifter

Here's the Oscar-nominated performance of Physarum polycephalum doing a bit of flagellated swarming. At least I hope that's what it is...

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Amoeba.

Amoeba who?

Amoeba about to do something goood.


Putting together some drawings of some nice local amoebae.

See, I've been hassling the local waste-water treatment facilities for a good while now, trying to get access to their works with a view to making some lovely art, ideally in collaboration with them.

"I'm particularly interested in your Activated Sludge processes, and your Anaerobic Digestion Tanks," I'm saying. "I'm intending to make a series of beautiful paintings celebrating the wonderful co-operative interactions both of the communities of micro-organisms and of the humans involved in this social processing of our waste.."

The nice people at Veolia Water collapsed into helpless giggles when I eventually managed to find someone to speak to, said they couldn't let me in to the Seafield sewage works out of concern for my health & safety, but haven't ruled out the possibility of this happening elsewhere... perhaps.... one day...

I also got in touch with Edinburgh Council Scientific Services labs who do tests on the various sludges and waters. They pooh-poohed the idea out of hand.

However I intend to carry on undeterred.

This pretty picture, by the way, is available for sale at the knock-down price of £140 + p&p (unframed) , all proceeds to go towards funding a Park-Roberts-bacteria based collaborative pile-on we're cooking up , of which more later. If you would like it, do let me know.