Lies travel faster than the truth. If the subject of that untruth has an associated financial aspect, that amount will grow to ridiculous proportions over time. I can imagine a graph with one axis for distance a falsehood travels, and another for time, with the result being an arrow shooting upwards at a 45 degree angle.
Here’s such an example. The College of Charleston recently came under file for supposedly spending $3 million to put shrimp on treadmills to see how fast they could move. As professor Louis Burnett was forced to clarify to the media, it was $1.3 million, and it was to study the crustaceans’ ability to handle infection, such as that from pollution, under different stressors. Basically, it was an environmental impact study. At a cost of $15,000 to construct, the treadmills were a small part of it.
The furor over the study was all part of the DOGE purge of government employees, programs and entire agencies this past Spring, the likes of which is something I hope we’ll never see again. I thought of this while watching 2014 documentary The Creeping Garden. Everything in it concerns fungi and slime molds, which I didn’t even know were two different things. The various researchers here engage in various studies, such as getting molds to play music. I can sooo imagine Elon Musk and company losing their shit over that.
Not only are slime molds not really fungi, nobody seems to know exactly what they are. As they grow, they don’t just expand, but may even pull up stakes from the area where they started, making them appear to “move” around. There is a great deal of footage, and it is often as hypnotic as it is unnerving. Some of them slowly wave in the air as if they were seaweed underwater.
Are these things plant or animal? Are they possibly both? Their scientific grouping is the combination of “myceto”, for fungus, and “zoa” for animal. Whatever they are, they are deeply strange, with one talking head here saying they could be removed from an environment and there likely not be any impact to the environment by their removal. It is also speculated these could be alien life forms, as the spores could survive in space, ala the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
It is isn’t a surprise the people shown here who study the things are all a bit odd. They also come from a variety of backgrounds, whether it is an amateur enthusiast, or a university’s curator of mycology, or somebody who was once an artist in residence at a pathology lab. I am still musing over the last of those, wondering why pathologists would need an artist. Not to be judgey, but I’m not sure I’m OK with that.
The museum employee is Bryn Dentinger, and he is probably the least weird person here. He shows some of the finds in the Natural History Museum of Utah’s extensive collection, such as one dubbed the “dog penis fungus”. He isn’t sure of the accuracy of that title, as he claims not to have observed many dog penises, but you never can tell.
Conversely, the weirdest person here is Heather Barnett, the aforementioned artist. She makes art with the molds, encouraging them to grow in the manner she requires. Apparently, molds really like carbohydrates, so I suspect I might actually be a slime mold. She also organizes a social experiment for groups of people to make a “human slime mold”. I suspected it was only to annoy strangers, as I failed to grasp the point of people moving around while tied to each other. And the film spends way, way, waaay too much time on this segment.
Some of the interview subjects engage in even more bizarre experiments. There’s a guy with the aptly named Unconventional Computing Group, which examines the networks formed by mold growth and tries to find applications for that. One experiment has food placed where the biggest cities would be on a U.S. map. In the end, the growth is exactly like our interstate system. I was stunned that anybody would be amazed by this, as those pathways are just the most direct lines between points, whether the destinations are cities or carbohydrates.
The segments about audio were even more ridiculous. I was not impressed by the guy who has a mold “play” the piano, and that he even duets with it. I was waiting for either Brian Eno to do an album using this technique or for the mold to actually evolve to become Eno. Another researcher translates electronic signals produced during mold growth into audible signals, which then determine the expression on a deeply unsettling robot head, complete with the face of a young boy. It is even wearing a tiny cowboy hat. It is creepier than many intentional horror films I have seen.
I was onboard with the picture for roughly the first half-hour, when it is at its most grounded. I found a distance between myself and the film as the experiments kept getting weirder. By the end, I was quite bored. It didn’t help that the directors inexplicably favor extreme close-ups of the interviewees, such as only focusing on their eyes or their mouth.
It is a disappointment The Creeping Garden becomes a chore to watch, because there is a great deal of interesting info to be gleaned from it. My conclusion from it is a newfound belief that the division between science and art should be as severe as I believe the one should be between government and religion. My other thought is I have a better title for their film: The Fungus Among Us.
Dir: Tim Grabham and Jasper Sharp
Documentary
Watched on Arrow Video blu-ray