“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett. Worstward Ho (1983)
I try to cultivate slime mold by regularly transferring small pieces of it in new plastic containers, hoping it will extend its plasmodial network all over the new dishes. However, not even 24 hours after the inoculation has been done, I’m puzzled to see only a small area of the dish visibly populated by the …
Continue reading “How fast time (and slime mold) can pass by”
Oat flakes are commonly fed to Physarum to act as chemoattractants and orient the critter’s growth. They’re also the main food sources employed in the making of living wires.
Update on the previous post: yes, putting a small piece of wet (white) paper towel in the petri dish does increase humidity and growth rate. In not even 24 hours, one of the four plates I had prepared made a nice connection between the electrodes. The other three slime mold blobs on other plates are …
The previous post introduced the idea of “desiccation shock” through Martin Grube’s contributed chapter in Advances in Physarum Machines (2016). I made slightly modified plates, with small bands of aluminum conductive tape protruding from the sides of the petri dishes to easily get a hold of them with alligator clips. Here’s a quick run through of what …
I’ve been incredibly lucky to be invited to work on my dissertation and current projects at Matt Ratto’s Critical Making Lab. Since last week, I started bringing the slime mold growing on plates nested in a camera bag, underneath a box of electronic components — musing for a few seconds, every now and then along the way, on the …
