The Creeping Garden: Irrational Encounters with Plasmodial Slime Moulds

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. Read more