Dust is an audiovisual piece I made for the Expo Pavilion arts program in Sunderland, UK, along with its companion piece, Tangled. It was shown from February 2025 through March 2026 on the pavilion’s 20×5 meter semi-transparent LED screen, as part of a program curated by Debra Stewardson.
Physarum is a single-celled organism that solves path-finding problems. It leaves a trail on its environment that it then uses to communicate with itself, much like ants following pheromone trails to food. A small set of rules can model it, and those rules produce surprisingly complex behavior. Sage Jenson popularized physarum in generative art, and it has since become a staple of the complex-systems toolkit. For Dust I wrote my own implementation. I added inputs so that real-time audio analysis steers the motion, and folded in external geometric patterns such as hexagonal tiling and circle packing.
The piece was programmed in TouchDesigner and rendered in real time at 60 fps in a single take. Dust was later shown in SEQUENCER :: 002 Micro Mythologies, a group exhibition of new media artists working with generative systems, mythical biology and micro-organisms. It was also part of the TouchDesigner Event Tokyo 2025 gallery.
Dust showing at SEQUENCER :: 002 Micro Mythologies. Photo courtesy of Projekt Blank.