The strange, abject allure of slime mold creeps across fields, sporulating into science fiction, artistic practice, computing, and beyond. Captured by Western logics and systems of speculation, slime mold’s talent for efficient spatial logic, parallel processing and pattern recognition have been mathematicized into the Slime Mold Algorithm (SMA), a type of Swarm Intelligence (SI) Algorithm utilized in optimization problems, machine learning, robotics, computer networking, and beyond. As the Expanded Data Artist in Residence, Bunton attempts to recover some of what is lost in this algorithmic translation of the other-than-human organism, attending to slime mold’s murkier, more troubling and often overlooked qualities. In exhuming and querying (or queerying) the systems of individualization, progress, and competition that shape Western scientific experiments with slime mold and the SMA, Bunton asks: 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? 

Michelle Bunton is a practicing artist, curator and roller derby player currently residing as an uninvited guest in Katarokwi-Kingston, Canada. They hold a BFA from Western University, are completing their MA in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University and will begin their PhD in Fall 2025. Bunton works with the Vulnerable Media Lab and Ayatana’s Biophilium: Science School for Artists, and they previously held a curatorial position at Agnes Etherington Art Centre. They are the Expanded Data Artist in Residence, 2025. Bunton considers collaboration to be a necessary condition of their curatorial, artistic and academic praxis, prioritizing kinship-building with both human and other-than-human interlocutors. For Expanded Data, they exercise speculative design, queer coding and science fiction in a critical rewriting of the Slime Mold Algorithm (SMA).