Single Cell, Single Sky is an interactive immersive installation I created for Cinema Mystica in Budapest, shown as part of their 2024 exhibition MikroMakro: As Above So Below. It repurposes the generative system from my audiovisual piece Dust for an interactive setting, with an adapted, looping version of Dust’s music. The forms come from a microscopic organism but read as something closer to the cosmic.
At the center of the piece is my own simulation of Physarum polycephalum, a single-celled slime mold. It solves pathfinding problems by leaving a trail on its environment, which it then uses to communicate with itself. Physarum has been shown to find the shortest path between two food sources in a maze, much like ants mapping routes to food with pheromone trails. In generative art, it was popularized by Sage Jenson. Here the simulation reacts to the viewer’s presence in the space and moves subtly with the music.
Process
The videos below show two TouchDesigner tools from development. The first is the interactive demo I used to test the interaction with a mouse. The second is a tool for visualizing the projection mapping, which I used to make sure the artwork was seamless across the walls and floor.