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# Andrew Thomas Huang made an art game at Rhizome's 7x7
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/andrew-thomas-huang-made-an-art-game-at-rhizomes-7x7/
- Published: 2026-08-30T21:11:51.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-30T21:11:50.000Z
- Description: With scientist Stephanie Zhang and coder Sebastien Zany, the Björk collaborator built a playable myth around a mirage-breathing mollusk deity.
- Author: Kill Screen Staff
- Tags: Andrew Thomas Huang, Stephanie Zhang, Sebastien Zany, rhizome, new museum, Slime Mold, Chinese Mythology, simulation

In Chinese mythology the Shen is a gigantic bivalve, sometimes an aquatic dragon, that exhales vapor and builds mirage cities on the horizon; [per Rhizome's writeup](https://rhizome.org/editorial/2026/jun/12/Andrew-Thomas-Huang-Stephanie-Zhang/?ref=killscreen.com), the everyday modern Chinese word for optical illusion still descends from the creature. That is the deity at the center of the game [Andrew Thomas Huang](https://www.killscreen.com/andrew-thomas-huang/) announced in [a July reel](https://www.instagram.com/reels/DYkJ517gVwc/?ref=killscreen.com): “a mythopoetic sci-fi art game uncovering the memoirs of a Chinese mollusk deity by feeding a far future slime mold intelligence.”

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The announcement reel. Video: Andrew Thomas Huang on Instagram

The project came out of [7x7](https://rhizome.org/editorial/7x7-2026/?ref=killscreen.com), Rhizome's art-and-tech conference at the New Museum in May, which paired the Grammy-nominated director (collaborator to Björk, FKA twigs and Perfume Genius, and the creative director behind Björk Digital) with Stephanie Zhang, an artist-scientist who 3D-bioprints living sculptures and engineers cuttlefish-inspired photonic skins. The shared obsession was nonhuman intelligence: cuttlefish camouflage became the story map, and slime mold (the organism that famously re-derived Tokyo's rail network in a 2010 study) became the memory system, a network 500 million years in the future in which, as the collaborators put it, “the organism is its memories.”

Sebastien Zany wrote the code, simulating a quarter-million slime mold entities on simple rules and then treating the result as a found object rather than an asset: “I cannot really control it that well. It felt more like... sculpting this thing together.” The cuttlefish skin runs on real iridescence data measured in a materials lab by Siddharth Doshi. The reel promises a release soon, with support from Onassis ONX and Fuser.

Slime mold already has form as an infrastructure planner. Killscreen once covered a [historical sim about fixing New York's subway](https://www.killscreen.com/try-fix-nycs-subway-system-new-historical-simulation-game/), the human-committee version of the same problem. Huang's game hands the network the harder job: archiving a civilization's ghosts.

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