Ontophonics explores the sonic potential of Physarum polycephalum, a single-celled, multinucleated slime mold known for its distributed intelligence and adaptive behavior despite lacking a central nervous system. Using custom-designed printed circuit boards, the organism’s movements and bioelectrical signals are transformed into sound in real-time. Ontophonics proposes a new model of sound installation – one based on co-agency, proximity, and emergence. It mediates between the unpredictable growth of a living organism and the structured world of circuitry and sound.
The circuits used are carefully composed platforms of geometric conductive zones that guide the organism’s growth while enabling multi-point sensing. As Physarum physically connects or bypasses specific nodes, it completes circuits and alters electrical conductance, producing voltage fluctuations. These are amplified, filtered, and rendered audible. The sound of each piece is not a simulation, but a mediation between biological agency and technological listening. The circuit board functions not merely as a control instrument, but as an environment—Umwelt—in which the organism lives, senses, and expresses itself.
Each of the four pieces consist of acrylic plates, stainless rods, and circuitry from an industrial material substrate—rigid, precise, and deterministic. In contrast, Physarum moves with softness and unpredictability, slowly spreading and reshaping the terrain. As it grows, it alters connections, generates sound as movement, and transforms the space into an emergent environment. In this dynamic interplay, sound becomes not merely a signal but a gesture—an audible trace of cohabitation and spatial negotiation. This creates a zone of cohabitation, where functionality is entangled with responsiveness.
The title Ontophonics—a neologism combining “ontology” and “phonics”— Here, sound is not just an effect but a way of revealing material and temporal dimensions. Each configuration arises as a singular, irreducible expression shaped by the shifting interplay between organism, circuit, and space. It does not repeat but transforms through relational tension and temporal difference. Rather than presenting a sound in a predetermined format, Ontophonics is an ecology of practice—one where sounds become a mediated space between forces: the organism and objects, growth and resistance, proximity and delay. Sound is not programmed or predetermined but unfolds through situated interactions between the organism and its environment.
Ontophonics, in this sense, is not about representing life through sound, but about allowing sound to participate in life’s unfolding—responding to the organism’s subtle gestures, echoing its strategies of navigation, and extending its presence beyond the visible. Sound here is not composed by the organism but composed with—arising from its movement, decaying with its withdrawal, and resonating in the liminal space between signal and silence, presence and absence. In this co-emergent field, the exhibition space becomes a site of potential: a living system shaped by contingency, in which composition is not imposed but continually negotiated—a living trace that embodies biological life and its capacity to shape body, time, sound, and perception in return.
