[a speculative and incomplete] Jamming Playbook: Re/Decomposing the Slime Mold Algorithm
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Authors
Bunton, Michelle
Date
2025-08-21
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
slime mold , algorithm , queer use , apparatus , assemblage , transcoding , non/human
Alternative Title
Abstract
The strange, abject allure of slime mold creeps across fields, sporulating into science fiction, artistic practice, computing, and beyond. Captured by Western logics, slime mold’s pathway-finding ability has been mathematized into the Slime Mold Algorithm (SMA), a tool used in solving optimization problems. In exhuming and querying (or queerying) the systems of individualization and optimization that shape Western scientific experiments with slime mold, I ask: What alternative futures become thinkable when attention shifts from the profitable and problem-solving characteristics of slime mold, to its more queer and problem-making characteristics? If thinking-algorithmically is a form of problem decomposition, then what changes when the algorithm itself is subject to decomposition? When the algorithm becomes a counter-algorithm, when its design is centered around problem-making and not problem-solving? Taking the form of a playbook, this thesis engages a critical and diffractive reading of “apparatus” (Karen Barad, Michel Foucault) and “assemblage” (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and N. Katherine Hayles), that I further complicate by turning to Indigenous paraconsistent logics (Rebekah Sinclair). The playbook attempts to recover some of what is lost in the SMA’s algorithmic translation of the nonhuman organism, attending to slime mold’s murkier, more troubling and often overlooked qualities, proposing a speculative and queer reconfiguration of the SMA.
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Queen's University's Thesis/Dissertation Non-Exclusive License for Deposit to QSpace and Library and Archives Canada
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This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
ProQuest PhD and Master's Theses International Dissemination Agreement
Intellectual Property Guidelines at Queen's University
Copying and Preserving Your Thesis
This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International