Slime mould: The fundamental mechanisms of biological cognition

© 2018 Elsevier B.V. The slime mould Physarum polycephalum has been used in developing unconventional computing devices for in which the slime mould played a role of a sensing, actuating, and computing device. These devices treated the slime mould as an active living substrate, yet it is a self-consistent living creature which evolved over millions of years and occupied most parts of the world, but in any case, that living entity did not own true cognition, just automated biochemical mechanisms. To “rehabilitate” slime mould from the rank of a purely living electronics element to a “creature of thoughts” we are analyzing the cognitive potential of P. polycephalum. We base our theory of minimal cognition of the slime mould on a bottom-up approach, from the biological and biophysical nature of the slime mould and its regulatory systems using frameworks such as Lyon's biogenic cognition, Muller, di Primio-Lengelerś modifiable pathways, Bateson's “patterns that connect” framework, Maturana's autopoietic network, or proto-consciousness and Morgan's Canon

Structural machines and slime mould computation

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. A Physarum machine is a programmable amorphous biological computer experimentally implemented in the vegetative state of true slime mould Physarum polycephalum. It comprises an amorphous yellowish mass with networks of protoplasmic veins, programmed by spatial configurations of attracting and repelling gradients. The goal of this paper to advance formalism of Physarum machines providing theoretical tools for exploration of possibilities of these machines and extension of their applications. To achieve this goal, we introduce structural machines and study their properties

Transdisciplinary Creative Ecologies in Contemporary Art within Emergent Processes

This research is composing in the moving with affective speeds and rhythms, instead of unfolding direct and in linear ways. It is important to come across different planes of composition in movement. There are so many planes of voices spinning around in relation. Research-creation seems as forms of relations and an invitation to appreciate the collectivity at the heart of thinking. The many entering-into relation within a differential thought in the making of its own. Emergent properties in non-human interactions, such as those presented in Steven Shaviro ́s Against Self-Organization (2009) and Brain Massumi, are symptomatic of how individualities relate to creative tendencies in relation to the human, non-human dynamism, and emergence as a state or condition. Emergence can be co-joined around the notion of self-organization, “the spontaneous production of a level of reality having its own rules of formation and order of connection” (Massumi, 2002). Self-organization emphasizes on matter-energy which Gilles Deleuze conceives of as the difference or line variation running through all things. Therefore, Deleuze focuses on immanence, how new forms are created, and on the ways in which material bodyings self-organize rather than being forced to do so. Moreover, the research in this dissertation seeks to generate a charged environment where human and non-human emergent processes activate creative encounters that co-create and co-shape each other (Delueze and Guattari, 2003; Stangers, 2017; Manning 2009). This study investigates how complexities and relations expand as an attractor of potentialities, that informs a matrix as movement, and recognizes nodes of the matrix as connections for such movements. My research is transdisciplinary, where experimental work interconnects art, science- zoology, architecture and process philosophy, and conjoins such with non-human emergent processes which are complex systems that activate intermodalities in their doing. These areas of research focus on, thread processes and transdisciplinary art doings.Textiles seen as intensities, transformations, movements, multiplicities of sensations experienced by familiar bodies in resonance with the world in acts of co-composing

Figurations of Fungi: An Exploration of Ethology, Emergence, and Expression in Creative Practice

This paper explores creative practice as a form of embodied, situated, and material research that generates the potential for change. It examines the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as well as contemporary feminist theorists Moira Gatens, Genevieve Lloyd and Rosi Braidotti. Their philosophical position on bodies, compositions and emergence counters the dystopian views of catastrophe and death that are so pervasive in posthumanist discourses. Holly Schmidt articulates an engagement with ethological practices that seek to deterritorialize the disciplinary boundaries of art and science. These practices take up the composition of bodies, their speed and slowness, and ability to affect and be affected. Ethology involves creative actions that recompose relations. In meeting that complexity, Schmidt suggests there is potential to recompose contemporary technoculture while developing new ways of making and being in the world that meet the complexity of global issues. Schmidt looks to the figuration of fungi as a form of expression for its rich potential to create other possible worlds. Being neither plant nor animal fungus has created much debate and confusion in the history of taxonomic classification. It is the many ways in which fungi evade the logic of Western classification and organization that suggests it is a figuration worth exploring. Fungi are explored through Schmidt’s creative engagement with a variety of communities. Schmidt’s work varies, as does her medium of expression, which includes the spatial practice of walking, with the relational practices of coordinating social events, and the architecturally influenced practices of building forms for interaction.InstallationsModern artScienceNatureBiolog

The idea of evolution in digital architecture: Toward united ontologies?

Humans have always sought to grasp nature’s working principles and apply acquired intelligence to artefacts since nature has always been the source of inspiration, solution and creativity. For this reason, there is a comprehensive interrelationship between the philosophy of nature and architecture. After Charles Darwin’s revolutionary work, living beings have started to be comprehended as changing, evolving and developing dynamic entities. Evolution theory has been accepted as the interpretive power of biology after several discussions and objections among scientists. In time, the working principles of evolutionary mechanisms have begun to be explained from genetic code to organism and environmental level. Afterwards, simulating nature’s evolutionary logic in the digital interface has become achievable with computational systems’ advancements. Ultimately, architects have begun to utilise evolutionary understanding in design theories and methodologies through computational procedures since the 1990s. Although several studies about technical and pragmatic elements of evolutionary tools in design, there is still little research on the historical, theoretical and philosophical foundations of evolutionary understanding in digital architecture. This paper fills this literature gap by critically reviewing the evolutionary understanding embedded in digital architecture theories and designs since the beginning of the 1990s. The original contribution is the proposed intellectual framework seeking to understand and conceptualise how evolutionary processes were defined in biology and philosophy, then represented through computational procedures, to be finally utilised by architectural designers. The network of references and concepts is deeply connected with the communication between natural processes and their computational simulations. For this reason, another original contribution is the utilisation of theoretical limits and operative principles of computation procedures to shed light on the limitations, shortcomings and potentials of design theories regarding their speculations on the relationship between natural and computational ontologies