HEATHER BARNETT
Artist, researcher, and educator working with living systems, imaging technologies, and playful pedagogies to explore how we observe and influence interspecies ecologies. Heather is Pathway Leader on the MA Art and Science and Co-Director of the Living Systems Lab at Central Saint Martins, UAL
Heather will discuss the practice of co-creating with living systems and the issues of care and control that it raises, with a particular focus on a new work made with the slime mould. Ripple Rift is an immersive video installation portraying a continuous conversation between an organism and the volatile landscape it inhabits.
Inspired by the shape-shifting Icelandic landscape, the piece follows the encounters of the slime mould as it navigates its world through a process of chemical sensing, constantly assessing environmental conditions and responding to changing events. The work reveals the highly attuned and endlessly adaptive behaviour of a curious nomadic explorer and invites us to consider our own interspecies relations and environmental sensitivities.
Neometa / Julia Shu
NeoMeta (Julia Shu) is a transdisciplinary multimedia artist and experimental researcher. By blending physical and digital, real and imagined realms, NeoMeta creates multisensory, interactive installations, live performances and mixed realities, treating living, found, and discarded as equal collaborators.
Learning from living systems, Julia Shu explores the boundless potential of regeneration in Nature to ignite a spark of hope for a future where all living, non-living and virtual beings can flourish in harmony within diverse ecosystems. Julia's practice reflects on the coexistence of scientific and indigenous knowledge, fostering empathy and kindness for Others. NeoMeta's practice-based research focuses on nonhuman agency, bioacoustics, digital sensing technologies, and interspecies communication. NeoMeta's 'Roots to Revival' installation explores the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, reviving a remnant of the natural world into a post-human, technological ecosystem.
British artist, Heather Barnett, has been working with the true slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, for many years, observing and influencing its growth patterns, navigational abilities and seemingly human behaviours. Used as a model organism in diverse scientific studies, the single cell organism is attributed with a primitive form of intelligence, problem solving skills and the ability to anticipate events. It is also intricately beautiful, the dendritic patterns reminiscent of forms seen at varying scales within nature, from blood vessels to tree branches, from river deltas to lightening flashes.
The organism is a nomadic information distribution system. As it creeps across its terrain it makes continuous micro-decisions about surrounding atmospheric conditions and resource distribution. With no brain or sensory organs, this amorphous cellular mass computes the complexities of its environment through chemical signalling. It is a highly adaptive biological barometer. The Physarum Experiments is an exploration of the simple yet complex behaviours of this biological and cultural phenomenon and our relationship with it.
About The Physarum Experiments by Heather Barnett


