The Project

As it's what I'm mainly going to be writing about for the next month or so, I should probably talk a little bit about what I'm working on at the moment. Inspired by the panpsychic notion that 'Morphogenesis is consciousness'. As such I want to create a program (most likely in openFrameworks) which will track the growth of plasmodial slime mould (specifically, physarium polycephalum) over time and then do something with those frames. I envision a series of of time-lapse stills which will be sent to a mini thermal printer. If 'emergence is expressive becoming', it is my goal to facilitate the slime mould's expression of itself through the form it takes over time. Aided by the computer, the slime mould will be creating printed artefacts, as well as being a component of the overall installation. An artwork within an artwork...or something like that. The slime mould grows pretty fast as far as organic organisms go - I've read that a healthy specimin can grow up to 1cm per hour, but that's still pretty slow as far as a human oberver is concerned - so it's going to be a pretty slow burner. As the slime mould grows and the print out roll accumulates, so there will be a physical record of it's life and growth. I'm not quite sure yet how I'll display the print-outs, but I made this highly sophisticated drawing to demonstrate how the installation might look. Next step - actually experimenting with growing some slime mould...

So what was I doing today? Well, I recently joined the 'slime mould collective' which was started by artist/scientist/ slime mould aficionado Heather Barnett, and contacted a guy on the forum who may be able to (very kindly) provide me with some slime mould samples so I can have a go at growing some of my own. But mainly I was working on some coding stuff today and getting to grips with working with video streams a bit. So far,I've modified an old class lab project to do some slit-scanning which might yield some interesting results...