Multistage Physarum

2026

Abstract

Multistage Physarum gathers the visual work produced with the Mikro engines: cultures of artificial microorganisms grown in real time, each one captured at the moment its behaviour was changing.

The name refers to the method. A culture here is never a single simulation. A population is released on an empty field and left to colonise it; once a structure has formed, its governing parameters are shifted — sensor angle, deposition rate, decay — and the network already built becomes the substrate for a different organism. What survives from one stage conditions the next, so the final image carries its own history: filaments abandoned by one species and reoccupied by another, membranes thickened exactly where two growth regimes overlapped.

Nothing in these images is drawn. Every line is the trace of an agent that sensed a chemical field, turned towards it and reinforced it on the way through. The work of the designer sits upstream, in the rules and the timing of each intervention, and downstream, in choosing which of the thousands of states passing on the screen deserves to be fixed.