SHOP
Everything Reminds Me of You
The internal impetus to mutate my personal archive led me to imagine a world that is yet to be and to collaborate with Physarum polycephalum, also known as slime mold, an acellular model organism that holds the interest of the scientific community due to its ability to think and perform complex computations without a brain or a nervous system.
It has now been sent into space to study the direction it will move in. Will it occupy the third dimension by going upwards, or go sideways? If the slime could access another dimension, perhaps I could work with it to explore another dimension of my archive.
By collaborating with the non-human, I aim to question what we ‘know’ about intelligence and assert the position of my mother, my maternal grandmother, and the slime mold as thinkers, innovators, everyday rebels, and aliens who constructed a new world and imagined new ways of being. My hope with the work is to establish a flat ontology to expand and contribute to the creation of this proposed world.
Here, all of us, the slime mold, the algae, the fungus that infiltrated our environment, my mother, her mother, and I, are as unruly as we can be. This process extended my role to that of a caregiver of a living photograph. Although its texture feels like it is embedded into the image, it is not. It moves and glides over the image, but does nothing to lend to its destruction.
I clean the slime. I feed it.
In doing so, I encounter my alien self through it.