We invite what we find beautiful in nature into our homes, nurturing houseplants for example, and mimicking Nature’s patterns when we upholster our furniture and cover our walls with floral designs. Less welcome are the life forms that we can’t see, the planets many forms of microbial life, yet without these, there would be no plants, whether these be the islands of floral, and incidental microbial life, we introduce into our homes or the blooms that we cherish in our gardens.

Why do we find microbial life so abhorrent when we are able to perceive apparent beauty in what is essentially a biological device that has evolved for the sole purpose of luring insects to a plant, in order to satisfy its sexual requirements? The flower also conceals another reality, and one that exists beneath the resolution of the human eye, in that viewed under a microscope it is merely an organized collection of microscopic cells. Individually, these cells are invisible but amassed they gain a relevance that extends far beyond their biological function.  They vector the extremes of our emotions, when they decorate a coffin for example, or adorn a bride. Unlike microbiological life, however, their impact is transitory as decapitated, or trapped behind glass, they die unfulfilled, and succumb to the microbe.

Biogenic Designs do not masquerade as Nature; they are its vitality manifest, its microbial intelligence rendered visible. Biogenic patterning also represents a uniquely contradictory form of art; it is ephemeral, yet also quasi-immortal, it is remorselessly dynamic yet also able to project a simultaneous essence of the past, the present and the future. Biogenic Designs also defy conventional artistic practice in that the artist only provides a ciphered template and thereafter the creative decisions are made by Nature alone. The outcomes are not however a consequence of random processes but like our own art; they can be a metaphor for the environment or can provide an imitation of the natural world itself.

The Physarum Dynamic is a collective (though in biological terms a mutualism is a more appropriate term) that exploits the creative intelligence of one of microbiology’s most remarkable life forms, the slime mold. It generates forms of art in which the artist is demoted to being a facilitator and the final creative decisions are made by the slime mold alone.

Examples of Biogenic Art can be seen on this page

The Physarum Dynamic is Represented by Simon F. Park contact him and become assimilated here.

Those assimilated by the Physarum Dynamic so far are: Anna Dumitriu, Heather Barnett, Tom Keene, Gary Cass, Peta Clancy, Antony Hall and Jo Holland.

See more photos of experiments here.

Recently there was a breach of containment, find out more here.