From Slime to Survival: Who’s Really in Control?

Slime is everywhere. It coats moist dishrags, surrounds algae, shapes marine ecosystems, lives inside our bodies, steers immune responses in animals like us and even solves problems without a brain. But what happens when we stop seeing slime as something disgusting and begin to see it as one of life's oldest forms of intelligence, responding actively with its environment?

In this lecture performance, artist Michelle-Marie Letelier and marine biologist Karin Pittman invite visitors into a sensory encounter with living slime mould, ocean-based hydrogels and real bioslime. A light table brings together fossils, algae, growing slime moulds, marine slime and translucent hydrogels infused with different colours and scents. Visitors are encouraged to touch, smell and compare these materials while following projections of microscopic worlds, time-lapse footage of slime mould, and slimy marine life.

Rather than asking what artificial intelligence can do next, this performance turns to a much older question: what can cell-based biological intelligence teach us? Slime has connected organisms, environments and evolutionary processes for hundreds of millions of years, long before humans appeared. Through art, marine science and material experimentation, the performance asks what these ancient forms of communication, adaptation and cooperation might reveal about our own bodies, our relationship with the ocean, and the invisible living systems that make life possible.

This event is for anyone curious about the hidden life of slime. No scientific background is needed, only a willingness to look closely, touch unfamiliar materials and rethink what intelligence might be.

What if the oldest intelligence on Earth has never belonged to brains at all?