Many-Headed: Co-creating with the Collective

In this essay, I critically reflect on my artistic encounters with the slime mould, Physarum polycephalum. Since 2008, this non-neuronally intelligent organism has provided stimulus for diverse creative enquiries and speculative actions, including time-lapse studies (testing and revealing behaviours), objects and installations (for public exhibition), and embodied encounters (inviting groups of people to enact slime mould rules). Focussing discussion on selected projects and processes developed over the past decade, connecting public audiences with slime mould behaviours, I address the organism as a working material to be manipulated, coerced, or encouraged to ‘perform’ and as a conceptual model, to explore notions of embodied intelligence between human and nonhuman entities.

Whilst looking directly at the collective behaviour of the organism, the narrative also addresses wider processes of human enquiry, the slime mould as a vehicle for curiosity and discovery. The concept of polycephalism – many-headedness – here relates not only to the internal cellular mechanisms of the slime mould, but to the methods developed to connect diverse ways of thinking and working in a process of co-enquiry. My artistic practice is a literal and symbolic investigation of information distribution mechanisms, diverse knowledge systems, and collective intelligence — an invitation for interdisciplinary and interspecies encounters. This essay is as much about the emergent properties of the creative process and the interactions between disciplinary approaches, as it is a study of the properties of slime mould itself.

Book description: Slime Mould in Arts and Architecture presents a set of unique chapters written by leading artists, architects and scientists, which resulted from creative translations of the slime mould behaviour into forms and sounds, unconventional investigations and sensorial experiences and the slime mould ability to remove boundaries between living and artificial, solid and fluid, science and arts. The book gives readers unique tools for designing architectural forms and creative works using the slime mould, understanding how pro-cognitive living substrates can be used in everyday life, it sparks new ideas and initiates further progress in many fields or arts, architecture, science and engineering.