sonja bäumel in collaboration with maurizio montalti (Officina Corpuscoli) mirko daneluzzo & tommaso casucci (Co-de-iT) Waag Society's Open Wetlab WASP
self-initiated
WORKSHOP AT THE WAAG SOCIETY AMSTERDAM
Interactions between Biological and Digital computing, in the forms of Slime Mold and 3D printed architectures.
How do biological entities and digital algorithms relate to each other? How could the study of such interaction be visualised? And what would be the applications and the implications which could derive from such a study? Which disciplines could be affected?
On January 24th and 25th 2014 the first edition of the Bio-Logic workshop took place, with the objective of exploring and experimenting on possible ways to design artificial systems, by combining digital strategies and living material. The chosen living protagonist of the whole 2-days experience has been, without any doubt, a microorganism: Physarum polycephalum, commonly known as slime-mold.
Slime-molds are neither plants nor animals nor fungi, but they could be considered a hybrid living organism with a unique development-cycle and behaviour. Also known as myxomycetes, they are a group of heterotroph organisms, which use organic substrates to get chemical energy for their life cycle.
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Five different processing-based softwares and a related interface were developed (Tommaso Casucci
& Mirko Daneluzzo), to allow the participants to easily define the desired patterns, and export the related G-Code to the hacked 3D-printer. In order to better analyse the interaction of the used slime mold, P. polycephalum, with the printed patterns, we created an image resulting from the overlap of the timelapse frames and describing the way in which the slime mold explored different paths. You’re welcome to join the discussion, by using the comment section on Vimeo.