Photo-drawings

Some great photos here from  Gary C Martin's photostream on Flickr.


He has illuminated the pictures using only white & UV Magic harrypotter enjoy-your-dinner looking sticks so the means of looking at the pictures has created light drawings in the photographs. Brilliant!

how to look at art

Well my little show in the dark is a roaring success. I'm very encouraged that all sorts of people are getting the clever thinky stuff with no trouble at all and picking up on the subtle stuff I threw out there just in case anyone found it a bit amusing and generally enjoying themselves.  But it turns out there are some aspects that need a little explanation—here is my fun instructions manual for attaching a batttery to a battery clip.

a piece of my mind

This comes from a drawing of an actual slice of an actual brain of an actual person. The Brighton & Sussex Medical School Art Society kindly let me sit in on one of their Dissection Room Drawing sessions. Thank you BMSMSAS, thank you Actual Person, thank you Physarum polycephalum.

I like to think that there is a reciprocation for the Actual Person, that somehow all the jolly colours get transmitted through the past to him as nice thoughts, which of course is bollocks but I encourage that sort of thing in myself as I believe it to be a useful cultural way of remembering to respect the things I interact with.

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.

Imaging the brain using old technologies

The mouldy painting from the last post. Anyway it still works fine and it's going in the show. Maybe put this one behind glass though, health & safety and all that...

When good paintings go bad

Another decompositionist work. Unintentional this time. Well it was only a matter of time before this happened.
The pretty greenish white fungus seems to have come on to the painting with the black paint, which I must have left sitting around for a bit too long. Then had a nice incubation as the painting lolled about damply waiting for the slime mould to finish with it. Dunno about the brown sugary-looking one but the white starry fungus belongs to the slime mould alone.

If anyone could identify any of these I would be very happy.