ABSTRACT
The Physarum polycephalum is a single-celled organism with a theoretically infinite number of nuclei. In its ideal conditions – dark, wet and bacterial – it multiplies into a bright yellow mass that spreads ostentatiously, fanning out in veins or erupting in polyp-like protrusions. Working with a living organism as an artistic material requires adapting along with it: besides the act of keeping it alive, there’s the fact that not every museum or gallery wants bacteria-eating plasmodium spreading around the exhibition, and so the life-form must stay contained in its artwork. Contemporary management theory has generally come to treat social groups as organisms possessing their own form of intelligence. As a living model of nonlinear action and lateral collaboration, the slime mould prompts the question of whether organizations could ever truly develop “naturally” as an organism, devoid of top-down controls, or whether imposed horizontality only advances the interests of external forces governing the body.
