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Accepted Paper:
Slime mould as speculative device: imagining human futures with Physarum polycephalum
Maria Debinska
(Polish Academy of Sciences)
The paper discusses my research with and on the slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, and artists, biologists and computer scientists who work with it. It focuses on speculative practices that Physarum invites and analyses them using Michel Serres’ concept of parasite.
Paper long abstract:
The paper discusses my research with and on the slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, and the people who work with it in a variety of fields, including biology, arts and computer science. It focuses on speculative practices that Physarum invites - from imagining world colonisation scenarios by computer scientists (Adamatzky) to writing their own science fiction stories by biologists (Dussutour). It examines how the peculiar properties of this organism, which is neither a fungus, nor a plant, nor an animal, but exhibits behaviours that can be interpreted as intelligence, memory, and learning capability, forces scientists to cross disciplinary boundaries and tell different stories than the ones they have been trained to tell.
It then analyses the role of an anthropologist in a field that is scattered, multidisciplinary and involving other than human agents, and the hybrid research methodology shaped by the slime mould’s ever evolving networks. It speculates that researching the human futures imagined with the help of the slime mould puts the anthropologist’s in an ambiguous position, that can be understood in terms of Michel Serres’ work on the parasite: relations established in the course of fieldwork are parasitic in nature in that each relation is towards another relation between two subjects or entities (e.g. researcher and slime mould), and distorts the latter by introducing informational noise into it.