Finally got some Agar powder the physarum polycephalum arrived in a neat little envelope last week, so yesterday I was ready to start growing some slime mould.

I was surprised by how little agas powder I had to use to make the jelly, only a few grams to make 100ml of jelly - enough to cover the bottom of an old takeaway container. Once set, I placed a piece of card with some dried slime mould in one corner and some dried oats in another, a little something to hopefully entice the slime mould to grow out across the base. Within a few hours it had already started branching out! Checking back this morning, not much progress, in-fact it didnt't seem to have moved at all. My theory is though that once the paper it was on got damp from the agar jelly, it probably started eating that, so we'll see in the next couple of days I guess if it goes to seek out the oats once it's done munching the paper.

Next steps...

I'd like to build the acrylic box container to house the growing slime mould soon so that I can start playing around with mounting a camera and be able to observe the slime mould remotely/ start generating stuff from that footage in openFrameworks. Still not sure exactly what approach to take and how far I want to move away from the original form of the slime mould. The slit scanning looks cool but I'm not sure how well it would work over such a long time period. I was thinking to perhaps try out openCV with voronoitype patterns, I'll have a go at working with the ofx add-on today and I'll upload some pictures of the slime mould in the next post.