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[ESC]Slime Solutions, Pty Ltd
You may or may not have heard of the experiment where in 2010, researchers in Japan used a Mould to map the Tokyo rail network. Placing oat flakes at each major Japanese city, as nutrients for the mould. At first this mould was sprawling out randomly, but as it found each oat it made its veins converge to the path of least resistance between all oats. Which by the time it was finished mirrored the existing and highly planned Tokyo rail network within a matter of minutes.
This slime mould has no brain yet was able to achieve something that took engineers and planners decades.
The coauthor of this study (Nakagaki) had done a similar experiment a decade earlier with the slime in a maze with food at two exits. Showing that without a brain this intelligence still found the shortest path. His experiment won an Ig Nobel Prize. (A satirical scientific reward that is designed to make people laugh then think about something)
This is essentially the exact same point made by Tsing, just more extreme.
Tsing wants us to see fungi as relational, intelligent, world-making actors rather than passive scenery, which they are. But this slime mould pushes the idea further by being an organism with literally no brain that can still produce something indistinguishable from city planning.
(Tsing, Anna. "Arts of Inclusion, or How to Love a Mushroom." Mānoa, vol. 22, no. 2, 2010, pp. 191–203.)
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