ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors report on recent explorations of Physarum’s capacities for community art exchange. They describe engagement with building on Physarum’s ongoing transit between art, biology and technology in the context of bioart workshops conducted at Studio XX and inter/access, two Canadian artist-run centers. The authors contend that Physarum not only lent itself as a flexible and sociable bioart workshop medium, but also as a cultural mediator. From an artistic perspective, Physarum provided for individual experiments with filamentous, networked movement in space-time, just as it facilitated the collective emergence of new networks, that of bioart and biomedia workshops. The diversity of methodologies and results further appealed to a sense of scientific practice as an experimental, tentative, contingent and pragmatic effort. As fresh cultures are established, Physarum can be segmented onto new agar plates to be re-sclerotized, providing for future supplies and enabling sharing with artists, students, workshop participants and so on.
