Abstract
This chapter presents an overview of the television and film work featuring myxomycetes before introducing The Creeping Garden, directed by Tim Grabham and Jasper Sharp, a rare example of an independently-produced feature-length documentary intended for a general audience that focuses on scientific subject matter. The issues surrounding the communication of factual information in visual and audial form about an organism that occupies a different timescale and perceptual world to humans is explored, before the various representational techniques of time magnification, sonification, musification and simulation are introduced as potential ways of providing new insights into the natural world.
Filmmaker, independent researcher and author of The Creeping Garden: Irrational Encounters with Plasmodial Slime Moulds (Alchimia, 2015)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Other films by Higuchi include Shiitake (Kinoko, 1980), Symbiosis between Fungi and Plants (Kin to shokubutsu no kyousei, 1999) and The World of Mushrooms (Kinoko no sekai, 2001), as well as two films on the dictyostelids group, The Life Cycle of Cellular Slime Mold (Saibouseinenkin no seikatsushi, 1982) and Behaviour and Differentiation of Cellular Slime Mold (Saibouseinenkin no koudou to bunka, 1992).
- 2.
The birth of cinema is commonly held to be 28 December 1895, when Auguste and Louis Lumiére unveiled their Cinematograph camera/projection machine at the Grand Café in Paris (Fig. 6). It was the first commercially successful device capable of projecting larger-than-life-size images captured from reality onto a large screen so that, unlike Thomas Edison’s earlier peepshow device the Kinetoscope, they could be viewed by more than one person at a time. Various other contenders to who “invented” cinema abound, such as the German Skladanowsky Brothers, Max and Emil, who some two months prior, on 1 November, 1895, had projected pictures to the paying public at the Berlin Wintergarten, using their Bioscop camera/projector invention.
References
Boon, T.: Films of Fact: a History of Science in Documentary Films and Television. Wallflower Press (2008)
Field, M., Durden, V., Smith, P.: See How They Grow. Pelican Books (1952)
Field, M., Smith, P.: Secrets of Nature: With a Pref. by H. Bruce Woolfe. Scientific Book Club (1939)
Sharp, J.: The Creeping Garden: Irrational Encounters with Plasmodial Slime Moulds. Alchimia (2015)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sharp, J. (2016). The Creeping Garden: Articulating the Science of Slime Mould on Film. In: Adamatzky, A. (eds) Advances in Physarum Machines. Emergence, Complexity and Computation, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26662-6_36
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26662-6_36
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-26661-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-26662-6
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)