Book Section
Maria Dębińska

The Slime Mould’s Many Bodies, or Modelling Networks with Physarum polycephalum

Fanon with Lévi-Strauss
Networks created by the slime mould Physarum polycephalum have been the object of interdisciplinary studies and artistic interventions for more than two decades. This paper examines different practices of abstracting humans’ and slime mould’s lines of movement into networks and investigates how Physarum networks are used to explore human patterns of movement and vice versa. It argues that, far from anthropomorphizing the slime mould, the effect of these experiments is instead a slimy rendering of the human.
Title
The Slime Mould’s Many Bodies, or Modelling Networks with Physarum polycephalum
Subtitle
Fanon with Lévi-Strauss
Author(s)
Maria Dębińska
Identifier
Description
Networks created by the slime mould Physarum polycephalum have been the object of interdisciplinary studies and artistic interventions for more than two decades. This paper examines different practices of abstracting humans’ and slime mould’s lines of movement into networks and investigates how Physarum networks are used to explore human patterns of movement and vice versa. It argues that, far from anthropomorphizing the slime mould, the effect of these experiments is instead a slimy rendering of the human.
Is Part Of
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
20 May 2025
Subject
Physarum polycephalum
network
lines
slime mould
transportation systems
models
Rights
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Language
en-GB
page start
109
page end
130
Source
Breaking and Making Models, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Marietta Kesting, and Claudia Peppel, Cultural Inquiry, 33 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 109–30

Publication scheduled for 20 May 2025