Pond Scum Encrypts Your Data, and Shames the Music Industry

The petri dish sits under a hood of soft yellow light, humidity monitored, oatmeal flakes portioned out like communion wafers. Inside, a yellow blob called Physarum polycephalum is doing what it's done for hundreds of millions of years before Spotify existed to ruin our attention spans: it's thinking without a brain. It's solving mazes. It's building networks. And in Stephanie Rentschler's installation SlimeMoldCrypt, it's generating encryption keys its designer says not even a quantum computer can crack. Chaos, real chaos, the kind that grows and breathes and dies if you forget to feed it, doesn't submit to math.I read about this thing and sat up straight. Because I've been trying to explain something about rock to anyone who'll listen for the last decade, and here was some designer explaining it for me using pond scum.Let me back up.The Blob That Learned to SingRentschler's project works like this: you take a slime mold (technically not an animal, not a fungus, not a plant, some…