I realised that I've not actually updated the blog since the last somewhat gloomy post where it seemed the project could be doomed. Partly this is because I've been busy putting together the final elements of this project - but to be clear - it works! That is, my chosen collaborator, the physarum polycephalum slime mould, is not repelled by IR light as I had initally feared. If anything, it seems to be doing rather well. What I identified as the problem with the last batch is that I'd basically given the sample too much food - that is, there was a big chunk of porridge oats right on top of the sample so that when it 'awoke', i.e. it had enough moisture to re-activate again, it had enough food in it's near vicinity to not need to branch out and find some more - enough so in-fact that it didn't move at all for a couple of days while it was busy getting through the local oats. I ended up re-locating this culture to another container whereupon it started branching out vigorously onece the inital oat stack had been consumed. I did start a new one though in the container to be used in the exhibition and I also used cooked oat liquid to feed it rather than whole oats. According to the forum, this method may slow down the occurence of other moulds; though perhaps also it is slightly easier for the mould to 'digest', and this sample certainly seems to be moving around fairly rapidly. I spent the last week trying out some time-lapse methods with the raspberryPi night vision camera and I've managed to put together some really nice footage of the slime mould growing. I've also resigned myself to the fact that the pi may not be able to run my openFrameworks program quite how I'd like - but I'm happy enough to compromise on this and instead have a screencast taken from the slit-scan program running on my laptop with the time-lapse footage. Tonight I just need to see how the pi gets on with displaying the two video streams - the live stream from the camera and the screencast footage. Also I still need to get the printer to function correctly as it would be a shame if this wasn't running during the show. Hopefully, if I can get this all up and running tonight, I should be able to start installing in the space tomorrow!