PAULINE RUFFIOT

Slime molds are neither animal, plant, fungi, nor bacteria: they make for great partners to explore such questions as they are so hard to classify, and so different. No brain, only chemical-sensing, no hands, only tentacles. Closely watching their growth patterns, I wondered about their perceptions and motivations, alternating between contemplative drift and quasi-scientific curiosity. My readings of the tentacle patterns are as telling as cloud watching or palm reading. They reveal as much about me as a Rorschach test.

To take a step back from my too human interpretations, I enrolled artificial intelligences as intermediaries. The first one is based on generic image recognition models : they look, analyze and classify any submitted image according to the few hundreds of categories they know. Their inability to identify slime molds opens new ways of perceiving by escaping the frame of scientific and taxonomy practices, forgetting about kingdom, genus, phylum.

The second AI is specialized in text generation, trained on millions of pages, and fine-tuned with biology essays, shape-shifting tales and a few witch’s spells. When asked “What is life?”, it answers to the best of its absorbed knowledge, starting each answer from a different point without questioning the adequacy of its statements. Meanwhile, both us humans and slime molds can keep sensing around without certainty. To challenge our too-certain knowledge and try to work with our too-human representations of the world we live in, thinking through tentacles to advocate for equivocal answers and complexity.