A Real-life Science Fiction Story about Slime Moulds and the People who Work with Them
"The Creeping Garden (the book) is meant as a companion to the film The Creeping Garden. First off: both are excellent! Excellently produced, excellent visually, and very informative."
~ Fungi, vol 9, no.2 (Summer 2016)
"The Creeping Garden is beautifully illustrated: the photographs of fungi and moulds are stunning.. Highly recommended." 9/10
~ The Fortean Times
The Creeping Garden is an introductory guide to the strange world of myxomycetes, or plasmodial slime moulds.
Neither animal, plant nor fungi, these alien-looking single-celled organisms are all around us in the natural world, shifting in form throughout distinct phases in their life cycle, for the most part invisible to the naked eye, but strangely beautiful in their foraging or reproductive stages. They creep around forests and grasslands across the globe almost imperceptibly, with an agency all of their own that some have described as intelligent.
Overlooked for years by natural historians and the general public at large, only recently have small groups of scientists, artists and visionaries begun to find within their intriguing behavioural patterns extraordinary metaphors that seem to belong to the world of science fiction, inspiring practical applications such as powerful computing devices, transport network designs, robot controllers and even music...
This lavishly-illustrated companion to the feature documentary The Creeping Garden takes a closer look at this mysterious life form and the diverse and curious array of research it has inspired, while providing an insight into the modus operandi of the film’s makers.
What they said about the film…
"A vibrant cinematic cabinet of curiosities that will leave you giddy and delirious with wonder."
-- Eli Horwatt, Hot Docs International Documentary Festival
"Stupendously fascinating and individualistic documentary masterpiece... see it and be forever altered."
-- Mitch Davis, Fantasia International Film Festival
"The movie hums as if it was shot by aliens visiting Earth for the first time, and that’s a high compliment."
-- Jordan Hoffman, The Guardian
"An out-of-left-field nerdy delight."
-- John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter
"Imagine if Stanley Kubrick and Douglas Trumbull were tasked with making a 1970s educational science film about the pods from Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers and you're some way to understanding The Creeping Garden."
-- James Marsh, Twitchfilm
"An enthralling delve into the world of plasmodial slime moulds... A unique documentary to be sure."
-- Mark Adams, Screen International
The Creators...
Jasper Sharp is an author, filmmaker, critic and curator based in London. Internationally regarded for his work on Japanese cinema, he is the co-founder of the Midnight Eye website. His book publications include The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film (2003), joint-authored with Tom Mes, Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema (2008) and The Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema (2011). As well as possessing a keen amateur interest in mycology, his research interests include the history of production and exhibition technologies, and has a PhD in ‘Japanese Widescreen Cinema: Commerce, Technology and Aesthetics’.
Tim Grabham is a filmmaker, visual artist and animator based in London. His background of music performance recording and composition is instrumental in the approach, subject matter and audio aesthetics of his work. After 10 years of live visual and analogue projection installations and experiments across the UK and Europe, he established the independent studio ‘cinema iloobia’ www.iloobia.com in 2003. As well as directing music videos and editing feature documentaries including Bassweight (2010), the award-winning Soka Afrika (2011) and The Fade (2013), he has made KanZeOn (2011), a sensory exploration of sound in Japan co-directed Neil Cantwell.
Technical Details
Size: 225mm x 192mm
Binding: Paperback
Extent: 192 pages, heavily illustrated throughout in colour
ISBN: 978-1-903254-78-3
Publication Date: 27 August 2015
Market: Science, Mycology, Cinema
Weight: 0.65kg
Edition: First Edition
Cover Price: £16.99 (UK) / $24.95 (US)
