The Creeping Garden: Irrational Encounters with Plasmodial Slime Moulds - Softcover

Sharp, Jasper

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1903254787 ISBN 13: 9781903254783

Publisher: Alchimia, 2015

Synopsis

This lavishly-illustrated companion to the feature documentary The Creeping Garden is a layperson’s entry point into the strangely fascinating world of myxomycetes, or plasmodial slime moulds.
Neither animal, plant nor fungi, these alien-looking single-celled organisms are all around us in the natural world, shifting in form throughout distinct phases in their life cycle, for the most part invisible to the naked eye, but strangely beautiful in their foraging or reproductive stages. They creep around forests and grasslands across the globe almost imperceptibly, with an agency all of their own that some have described as intelligent.
Overlooked for years by natural historians and the general public at large, only recently have small groups of scientists, artists and visionaries begun to find within their intriguing behavioural patterns extraordinary metaphors that seem to belong to the world of science fiction, inspiring practical applications such as powerful computing devices, transport network designs, robot controllers and even music...
The Creeping Garden takes a closer look at this mysterious life form and the diverse and curious array of research it has inspired. Providing an insight into the modus operandi of the film’s makers and the perceptual world of the organism, it brings the reader into a unique and irrational encounter in which time and space are magnified and intelligence redefined.

About this title

About the Author:

Co-director of The Creeping Garden documentary (with Tim Grabham), Jasper Sharp is an author, filmmaker, critic and curator. Internationally regarded for his work on Japanese cinema, he co-founded the Midnight Eye website. His books include The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film, Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema, and Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema. As well as a keen interest in mycology, his interests include the history of production & exhibition technologies, and has a PhD in ‘Japanese Widescreen Cinema: Commerce, Technology and Aesthetics'.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

...The slime mould does exist, of course, but it was its sheer obscurity, the dearth of readily-available information about it and its invisibility to those not actively looking for it that originally got me hooked. What equally interested me, as much as the mystery of the organism itself, was what had prompted other people to tumble down this same rabbit hole. What was the source of their interest, and how had this shaped their understanding of the world?

In articulating these questions, both Tim and I became thoroughly aware that our own budding fascination with what we might term “myxomycology” and our attempts to explore and explain this curious creature through the medium of film were complementary to our contributors’ attempts at expanding the overall knowledge base. We realized that in recording slime mould behavior in as much detail as possible with the means we had available, we were embedded within a similar process of practical research as them.

Our approach to portraying what a slime mould “is” was therefore framed through the distinct prisms of each of these contributors by, as Tim phrased it, “observing and immersing the audience into the worlds of the observers and the observed.” Be they mycologist, artist, computer scientist or musician, all of our human subjects had their own different relationships with the organism, which combined together, we hoped would elucidate its various aspects to give a better overall understanding of an essence that could never be truly understood in its totality.
In all of this, we also wanted to invoke the possibility of the slime mould itself as an active collaborator, entertaining the question of what we are to it and how it looks upon us. In order to negotiate its way through its environment, the organism senses the world in a very different way from humans, in terms of its perception of light, smells and, most notably, time. After all, they creep very slowly...

The obvious fact that dawned on us was that our human-centric view of the world has been intrinsically conditioned by our own perceptions, primarily of vision and hearing, and that this has been reinforced by technologies of recording and reproducing the external environment (i.e. the movie camera, audio recorder). However, the resulting consensual reality is a reality in only a limited sense, and a reality quite divorced from the perceptual world of the slime mould. This seemed something that might be very interesting to explore.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alchimia
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1903254787
• ISBN 13: 9781903254783
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192