INTERNATIONAL
with Heather Barnett
Heather Barnett is a UK-based artist who integrates the study of biological systems with her creative
practice. Barnett studied photography at Nottingham Trent University (1992) and then Westminster
University (1997). She has exhibited projects at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Kunst Museum
Ahlen, Museum of the History of Science, Oxford University. She currently teaches art and science at
Central Saint Martins and the University of Westminster.
By Julia Rooney
Contributor
This past September, Heather
Barnett and the collective she founded
Slimoco (The Slime Mould Collective),
launched an unprecedented experiment
involving Physarum polycephalum (a
form of semi-intelligent slime mould)
and a group of human participants,
first acting as “food” for the mould
to consume and then emulating the
behavior of the slime mould itself. The
project was aptly titled Being Slime
Mould, and was produced at the New
Museum in Rotterdam. Interested
in the unique way this organism
grows, the team first documented the
mould’s growth in response to food
sources, a cooperative process in which
hundreds of individual cells merge to
create a single mass cell that works
more efficiently. Though slime mould
reproduces by way of spores, and was
once classified in the fungi kingdom,
it has recently been re-classified as a
form of amoebozoa, in the kingdom
protozoa, and is now considered to be
a form of plasmodial slime mould—a
large, single amoeba of protoplasm
with thousands of nuclei. Barnett
and her collaborators, Jeff Jones and
Alex May, created a participatory
installation in which audience
members became food nodes for the
virtual slime mould to consume, the
simulated organism forming a network
between disparate visitors in the
gallery. The third element to the work
invited people to enact slime mould
behaviors in a performative event, as
Bartnett explains:
44
Slimoco workshop. Image courtesy of Heather Barnett.
“The ‘Human Slime Mould Experiment’ Experiment'
(devised in collaboration with Daniel Grushkin, cofounder of GenSpace) was a playful way of testing
human navigation and cooperation abilities, as
compared to the slime mould. Tied together (as a single
celled organism) and following slime mould rules (i.e.
communicating through oscillations, operating as a single
entity, seeking food, and forming efficient networks) a
group of strangers had to navigate their environment
in search of food. A chaotic shuffle ensued as people
followed giant oats around the building, reshaping
and reconnecting when obstacles were met, forming
networks between food sources. One of the most
interesting things to emerge from the ‘experiment’ was
the discus