Garginz has been the ongoing archive and reference repository for Borrowed Scenery. Its aim is to consolidate, group and summarise most of the relevant links scattered across the Libarynth and function as a convenient resource for visitors and developers. Within the logic of the project's narrative, it also embodied and reflected the efforts of Armoracio “Bud” Mineuz, the archivist patabotanist character, and was thus also in part subsumed within the augmented reality narrative, while being one facet and eventuality of its progression.
Conversations with Gent Plant People by Imogen Semmler
Fieldwork instructions for observing, collecting and interacting with plant life by Alchemilla L. Umiliata and Drukpa I. Konvulvul.
“We propose that parallel to the field of HCI - Human Computer Interaction, we should explore the field of HPI - Human Plant Interaction. HPI explores the nature of surfaces and processes required to facilitate reciprocal interaction between humans and plants. Historically, interaction between humans and plants has ranged from parasitic to collaborative. However, for HPI to become mutually beneficial, a symbiotic relationship may be most appropriate. Before a Human-Plant symbiosis becomes possible, we need to ask ourselves why, where and how can this two-way interface be realised? What cognitive and social biases need to be overcome? Can we develop a generalisable approach to interfacing with the entire plant kingdom, or do we require localised interactions between different species, ecotopes or alkaloids?”
In Plan/Plant/Planet, Terence Mckenna popularised the idea that we can reconnect to the Gaian, planetary Other by embracing a plant-based model of human culture, facilitated in particular by psychoactive mushrooms and the ubiquitous spread of mycelium. Peculiar efforts at fungal communication have also been attempted in certain mycelial radio workshops conducted amidst the chaos of the FoAM studio. The thought processes accompanying the convergence with the mycelial mind through photonic exchange instruments is documented in Approaching the Inexplicable.
“Reestablishing channels of direct communication with the planetary Other, the mind behind nature, through the use of hallucinogenic plants is the best hope for dissolving the steep walls of cultural inflexibility that appear to be channeling us toward true ruin. We need a new set of lenses to see our way into the world. When the medieval world shifted its worldview, secularized European society sought salvation in the revivifying of classical Greek and Roman approaches to law, philosophy, aesthetics, city planning, and agriculture. Our dilemma will cast us further back into time in search for models and answers.” – Terence McKenna
Hildegard von Bingen has been canonised as the patron saint of Viriditas, and devised the unknown language of Lingua Ignota. A whole range of principles have come to accrue around the notion of viriditas, including viridian design and green, also summarised in these notes. As one of Hildegard's “most potent metaphors,” writes Sarah Higley, she describes with viriditas “not only God’s natural world, but all that is spiritually creative and filled with the sap, the sudor of divine life” (–Hildegard of Bingen's Unknown Language, Palgrave, 2007, p.3).
Various strains of magick include toad rites and magickal resistance. Terence McKenna surfaces yet again in his Lectures on Alchemy, and one must not forget the venerable Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension nor its hyperspatial Other, The Dheoxyrissonucleic Hytherdimension. Fragmentary alchemical notes may be misleading.
The definitive resource on the interweaving of the Tarot stories with ethnobotany is the tarot_tutorial, with supplementary notes and addenda on card design. “What do plants and Tarot have in common? The answers are manifold – from looking at plants that can influence our mood to make us act as The Fool or The Empress, to plants having physical characteristics of The Star or The Hermit. The links can be made on the symbolic, iconographic, botanical, physiological, hermetic and many other levels. Plants are so embedded in our culture, that linking them to deep cultural archetypes in Tarot unveils the intricate relationships we have with the vegetal realm, extending far beyond mere food and fuel.”
Gardens are the meeting place of vision and practice, beauty and edibility, earth, water and air, human and plant… and so as reflected here the field of gardening and gardeners is correspondingly wide and diverse. From rooftops to greenhouses, seedballs to cities - almost all activities related to humans and plants can be seen to fall within the ambit of gardening at some stage.
“Gardens encourage and accommodate a broad range of activities; in substance these have changed little through the centuries and are recorded in garden paintings from late medieval French manuscripts to Fragonard and Pater. Gardens are territories of play - both play as alternative to work or business and play as theater, make-believe, the whole gamut of role playing that is human life. Though this last is not obviously confined to gardens, it flourished there because gardens are special sites of artifice pretending to be nature; though if you were convinced a garden was wholly natural, you were tempted to think you could dispense with role playing.” –John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque, p. 263
Ideas and initiatives that span activist gardening such as seedballing and guerrilla gardening to reclaiming disused spaces in the city such as the Church Garden project in Amsterdam, on rooftops or indoors for productive cultivation. Whatever the scale of these forms of growing and gardening, they also incorporate various cultivation techniques and principles, which are represented in this material as well.
Plants examined intimately and close-up… Their biology, phytonomy, and phytophysiology, and neurobiology; all about the principles and practice of making best use of plant guilds in growing and gardening; experiments and examples relating to plant_movement; explorations of plant_perception and sensing; models for the algorithmic simulation of various aspects of plants; rendering plants in 3D and online; some peculiar plant tricks; and contemporary and historical compendiums of plant data. Recent concentrated attempts in human-plant communication have begun to take shape in the Snoepwinkel as part of the intrepid Silent Dialogues experiment.
Augmented ecology encompasses everything to do with the mapping and geotagging of ecological features such as edible plants. It can be on a small scale with the objective of gleaning and foraging for urban food with the help of mobile apps such as Boskoi, or it can involve the long-term measurement of environmental and ecological systems on a global scale.
The wacky world of games about, by, for or with plants. Combines alternate reality games, speculative fiction, (pseudo)scientific research and instrumentology, magiK realism, mycology, invented languages, and all things in between. In plant games you can become a plant, talk to one, immerse yourself in plant time and space, or explore various technologies for plant communication.
Germination X is “a permaculture game for social networking platforms” and was a fertile spinoff of research into robot social intelligence initially conducted for the LIREC project, incorporating a state-of-the-art AI system based on Fatima. The basic concept of GerminationX is that you can sew seeds and see other players' plants, which grow along the lines of a model that simulates companion planting. The plant species represented in the game should be local, interesting or endangered, as well as more “popular” kinds. You have a guide or companion who assists you to companion plant, but players themselves never meet directly through the game – though they become indirectly aware of one another through their planting activities. Though it is big, you can only encounter a small part of the game world at a time.
P~lot or Play Lab on Open Grown Territories brought together a motley crew of artists, designers, students, theorists and enthusiasts in the tiny Istrian village of Groznjan. P~lot was a workshop designed to examine the “play” and “games” as tools for mixing physical and digital realities. The workshop had two strands, called Gamespace and Playspace. Gamespace was designed to enhance creative skills in the field of online game development, specifically looking at context-based gaming environments, rooted in existing places such as the village of Groznjan.
The groWorld initiative is FoAM's interstice between ecology, culture and technology. It brings together three “forces” capable of transforming the world on human and ecological scale: design, permaculture and technology. In its current installment, groWorld explores interactions between plants and humans from multiple perspectives. It works towards minimising borders and maximising edges between the human-made and vegetal by entangling culture and cultivation {sym}, building and growing {bio} and nature and technology {sys}.
Luminous Green is a workshop about the world. About the world that supports life today and about the possible worlds that can support more luminous life in the future. It is a gathering of people who can imagine, cultivate and inhabit such a world. People who consider themselves creative thinkers, doers and makers. Who deploy their creativity and imagination to shape a brighter future, disentangling themselves and their practices from the unsustainable and unnatural. 'Luminous Green' will seek out lush worlds and find fertile ways of growing them.