D-ARK
D-ARK is an ongoing inter-medium art project. Its core mission is to engage the public and institutional bodies, in existential contemplation to picture a world that exists beyond the scope of historical sensibilities. To think about the marks that will be left behind by human beings as individuals and as a species while we come to face one another in the brink of our extinction.
Tower, Black Boxes
– Physarum Polycephalum, Agar, Recycled Materials, Death and Decay.
© 2020 Chris Manfield
“Tower, Black Boxes” embodies the present reoccurrence of a Babylonian account of the disintegration of language that happened during the fall of Babel through a contemporary lens. These artifacts and tabulae will continue to exist as black boxes that will endure past the collapse of our civilization to reflect how we’ve come to grow more and more polarized and divided among ourselves in a post industrial-capitalist society that’s becoming more hierarchic.
Tower
– Physarum Polycephalum, Agar, Recycled Materials, Death and Decay.
© 2019 Chris Manfield
Tower, Black Boxes
– Physarum Polycephalum, Silver Gelatin, Death and Decay.
© 2020 Chris Manfield
Tower, Black Boxes
– Physarum Polycephalum, Silver Gelatin, Death and Decay.
© 2020 Chris Manfield
The Eusocial Slime
Physarum Polycephalum, the plasmodial slime mold, lives along the edge of an ecosystem between death and reincarnation. It spends most of its early life as a single cell amoeboid when food is most abundant under the turning leaves of autumn— feeding off detritus, fungus, and other microbes that had proliferated on the surfaces of decaying matter. As winter creeps closer and food becomes more and more scarce, the amoeboid cells congregates and fuse together to form a plasmodium body that migrates as a unit to seek whatever food is left to consume.
The slime mold is arguably one of the most successful eusocial organisms. Its ingenuity lies in the simplicity of it’s biological matrix. They rely on one another to share resources and are highly interdependent of each other. They socialize like we do; except, they’re not worried about resource hoarding strategies or national security. They handle immigration conflict much differently; instead of rising borders, when one plasmodium body meets another, they will (even when continuously separated) fuse together as a single entity.
The consciousness, intelligence and decision making ability of the plasmodium relies entirely in the organic interaction between fused amoeboid. Within this amoeboid goo, order is maintained without governance nor hierarchy, without leaders nor followers. These creatures unveil some sort of ancient intelligence in their ability to structure themselves in most efficient ways to distribute resources without the presence of a central nervous system. A case study in Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, led by Toshiyuki Nakagaki exhibits a plasmodium culture that replicated Japan’s railway system over oat flakes that had been strategically placed in correspondence to the location of Tokyo and the cities surrounding it. Their ability to memorize patterns and anticipate changes from their environment made them a perfect candidate for bio-computing research.
After consuming all available resources, the plasmodium— which avoided light for most of its lifetime— in scarcity, will start to creep closer towards it. It will enter a different stage of its life cycle. Coordinating a synchronized effort of mass reproduction, some cells will turn into spores while others to stems. The way these amoeboid choreograph themselves throughout this process remains unclear. By spreading their spores, they are able to reach as far as possible to better their chances of encountering suitable living conditions which will allow their spores to germinate and begin their life cycle.
As we approach the end of our civilization, maybe we can look at these primordial slime, which have long lived alongside death and decay for some insight of what life might be like in the aftermath of capitalism or maybe even the end of human civilization itself. If we can humble ourselves before these molds, maybe we can learn to alchemize life out of death, as they do.
