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| groworld_vegetal_culture [2013-01-25 03:35] – alkan | groworld_vegetal_culture [2013-01-25 07:00] – [GroWorld: Experiments in vegetal culture] maja |
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| Culture, in the sense of cultivation of minds and behaviours, is one of the most enduring phenomena through which humans shape the world (Brand 1999). Culture leaves persistent human hand-prints on the biological environment, both enhancing and depleting ecosystems. Some preindustrial cultures saw themselves as a part of ever-widening cycles of nature. We can still experience their silent memorials in the form of animist and Buddhist temples in Asian landscapes, or pagan sites scattered throughout Europe. With the advent of the industrial age and modernism, human culture became increasingly divorced from the non-human "planetary other" (McKenna 1992), so that the two evolved in parallel for a while, only to begin converging again in the unlikely places such as sites of failed industrial experiments. The Chernobyl “involuntary park” is a marvel of biodiversity and adaptation to a technological disaster (Sterling, retrieved 2010). Abandoned factories in the German Rühr are now colonised by cultural initiatives, such as the Zollverein. Both culture and nature are slow but tenacious forces often marginalised in a world dominated by economic rationalism. They are messy tangles of emotional, spiritual and physical values, irreducible to simple graphs and statistical analysis, and as such are often ignored. | Culture, in the sense of cultivation of minds and behaviours, is one of the most enduring phenomena through which we shape our world (Brand 1999). We leave cultural expressions, including religious sites, shipwrecks and public art, as hand-prints on the environment we share with other species. Enhancing and depleting ecosystems. Some preindustrial societies saw themselves as a part of ever-widening cycles of nature. We can still experience their silent memorials in the form of animist and Buddhist temples in Asian landscapes, or pagan sites scattered throughout Europe. With the advent of the industrial age and modernism, European cultures became increasingly divorced from the non-human "planetary other" (McKenna 1992), so that the two evolved in parallel for a while, only to begin converging again in the unlikely places such as sites of failed industrial experiments. The Chernobyl “involuntary park” is a marvel of biodiversity and adaptation to a technological disaster (Sterling, retrieved 2010). Abandoned factories in the German Rühr are now colonised by cultural initiatives, such as the Zollverein. Both cultural and natural changes are slow but tenacious forces often marginalised in a world dominated by economic rationalism. They are messy tangles of emotional, spiritual and physical values, irreducible to simple graphs and statistical analysis, and as such are often ignored. |
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| On the other hand, technology – another human contribution to the planetary ecosystem – is embraced by the same economic and political powers as a panacea to most contemporary challenges, from environmental turbulence to financial crises. From prehistoric seed-collecting and early agricultural ploughs through to nanotech, technology has become a persistent mark of humanity, in the shape of tools and techniques through which we analyse and interact with the world. Although technology has had a substantial influence on culture and nature (digital technology being the most recent example), it can never fill the cultural void left in the wake of the erosion of the grand narratives of the 20th century. Technology in isolation cannot provide truly encompassing visions of culture, even though humanity has attempted to understand culture (and the whole universe) in terms of technological models – as clockwork, steam machine, or computer. The limitations of these models have become gradually apparent as science (and common sense) has dug deeper into the fundaments of life. Now, after ages of superimposing technological worldviews on nature, perhaps it is time to superimpose a natural and cultural worldview on technology. | On the other hand, technology – another human contribution to the planetary ecosystem – is embraced by the same economic and political powers as a panacea to most contemporary challenges, from environmental turbulence to financial crises. From prehistoric seed-collecting and early agricultural ploughs through to nanotech, technology has become a persistent mark of humanity, in the shape of tools and techniques through which we analyse and interact with the world. Although how we use and think about technology has had a substantial influence on cultural changes and the eco-systems we live in (digital technology being the most recent example), it can never fill the cultural void left in the wake of the erosion of the grand narratives of the 20th century. Technology in isolation cannot provide truly encompassing visions of what a society could become, even though we have attempted to understand culture (and the whole universe) in terms of technological models – as clockwork, steam machine, or computer. The limitations of these models have become gradually apparent as science (and common sense) has dug deeper into the fundaments of reality. Now, after ages of superimposing technological worldviews on living systems, perhaps it is time to evolve technology from life. |
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| “The word ‘technology’ derives from technē, a Greek word that originally referred to the labours of the smith and other craftsmen. The analogous Greek word for the labours of the farmer is erga or ‘work’ … For the Greeks, the smith was a solitary figure, whose technē was a jealously guarded secret connecting him to the powers of the underworld through the god Hephaestus. In contrast, the erga, or work, of the farmer was public, involving the whole society and most of the gods. Both activities (smithing and farming) involved ritual, but in the case of technē the rituals were secret and individual, whereas erga are public and collective.” | “The word ‘technology’ derives from technē, a Greek word that originally referred to the labours of the smith and other craftsmen. The analogous Greek word for the labours of the farmer is erga or ‘work’ … For the Greeks, the smith was a solitary figure, whose technē was a jealously guarded secret connecting him to the powers of the underworld through the god Hephaestus. In contrast, the erga, or work, of the farmer was public, involving the whole society and most of the gods. Both activities (smithing and farming) involved ritual, but in the case of technē the rituals were secret and individual, whereas erga are public and collective.” |
| ==== Borrowed scenery ==== | ==== Borrowed scenery ==== |
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| Human culture needs non-human nature to evolve. As Hakim Bey says: “The elimination of the non-human invokes the elimination of the human: culture can only be defined in relation to what it is not” (Bey 1996). The interplay between culture and nature is beautifully embodied in the concept of “borrowed scenery” in Chinese and Japanese gardening. //Jiejing// and //shakkei// gardens borrow their surroundings as elements of their design (Mehta and Tada, 2008). Mountains and rivers, sky and rocks are drawn into the garden and become a part of its narrative. Even though the plants cultivated in the garden and the untamed formations of faraway landscapes are topographically separated entities, they are experienced as part of one whole. The origins of jiejing lie in Buddhist temples, where gardens were designed as meditative spaces, with a hint of geomancy. Early Buddhist temple gardens in Japan used shakkei as a way of teaching humility and the interconnectedness of all beings in a layered reality. Several Buddhist meditation practices (such as //mettā// or //tonglen//) start with a focus on oneself which is gradually expanded, layer by layer, to include the Earth, the whole universe, and all sentient beings. Similarly, a shakkei garden includes its human visitors and their gaze, drawing them from the cultivated foreground towards the focusing frame of the garden's edge, and finally into the background – the wild, uncontrolled, borrowed scenery. Over the centuries the spiritual connotations faded, and shakkei became a design technique used to give the garden a painterly depth and let its edges humbly diffuse in the surroundings. Borrowed scenery gardens can be seen as miniatures of a botanically-inspired culture, with plants and humans as interconnected layers of a planetary ecology. Rather than seeing them as separate entities, we shift perspective and treat cultures of plants and humans as a part of the same picture, where they complement and enrich each other. | Culture needs both human and non-human elements to evolve. As Hakim Bey says: “The elimination of the non-human invokes the elimination of the human: culture can only be defined in relation to what it is not” (Bey 1996). The interplay between cultivated and wild, or man-made and and non-human is beautifully embodied in the concept of “borrowed scenery” in Chinese and Japanese gardening. //Jiejing// and //shakkei// gardens borrow their surroundings as elements of their design (Mehta and Tada, 2008). Mountains and rivers, sky and rocks are drawn into the garden and become a part of its narrative. Even though the plants cultivated in the garden and the untamed formations of faraway landscapes are topographically separated entities, they are experienced as part of one whole. The origins of jiejing lie in Buddhist temples, where gardens were designed as meditative spaces, with a hint of geomancy. Early Buddhist temple gardens in Japan used shakkei as a way of teaching humility and the interconnectedness of all beings in a layered reality. Several Buddhist meditation practices (such as //mettā// or //tonglen//) start with a focus on oneself which is gradually expanded, layer by layer, to include the Earth, the whole universe, and all sentient beings. Similarly, a shakkei garden includes its human inhabitants and their gaze, drawing them from the cultivated foreground towards the focusing frame of the garden's edge, and finally into the background – the wild, uncontrolled, borrowed scenery. Over the centuries the spiritual connotations faded, and shakkei became a design technique used to give the garden a painterly depth and let its edges humbly diffuse in the surroundings. Borrowed scenery gardens can be seen as miniatures of a botanically-inspired culture, with plants and humans as interconnected layers of a planetary ecology. Rather than seeing them as separate entities, we shift perspective and treat cultures of plants and humans as a part of the same picture, where they complement and enrich each other. |
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| “For planting ground is painting a landscape with living things and I hold that good gardening takes rank with bounds of the fine arts, so I hold that to plant well needs an artist of no mean capacity.” | “For planting ground is painting a landscape with living things and I hold that good gardening takes rank with bounds of the fine arts, so I hold that to plant well needs an artist of no mean capacity.” |
| ==== From plants to stories: patabotany ==== | ==== From plants to stories: patabotany ==== |
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| Designing games where humans play a plant based on a human understanding of plants can sound rather paradoxical. To take this incongruity to its extremes, groWorld folds human interpretation of plants back on itself in a creative experiment named patabotany. Patabotany is a hybrid between ethnobotany (the study of cultural, spiritual and medical uses of plants) and pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions (Jarry, 2001). Patabotany poses the question: what if the metaphors, cultural rituals and myths associated with plants could be discovered in their physical properties – in their shapes, colours and functions? If mushrooms were in fact aliens attempting to communicate with us, what organs could mushrooms and humans grow to improve reciprocal communication? If red roses were able not just to symbolise love, but write love letters through chemotropism, guided by lovers’ pheromones? If the soil purifying plant could in fact turn heavy metals into precious rings? Patabotany is a cross-pollination between myth and reality: it is an interpretation of interpretation, an abstraction of abstraction, emerging at the edges of poetry, magic and biology. Patabotany subverts the contemporary drive to instrumentalise culture and nature in economic or utilitarian constructs. It describes a world where the believable is grafted onto the improbable, where logic is pollinated with a hybrid of sensuality and paradox, where botany and permaculture mutate into an epic of nurturing and seduction in relentless cycles of living and dying. | Designing games where humans play a plant based on a human understanding of plants may sound rather paradoxical. To take this incongruity further, groWorld devised a creative experiment which folds human interpretation of plants back on itself. Patabotany is a hybrid between ethnobotany (the study of cultural, spiritual and medical uses of plants) and pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions (Jarry, 2001). Patabotany poses the question: what if the metaphors, cultural rituals and myths associated with plants could be discovered in their physical properties – in their shapes, colours and functions? If mushrooms were in fact aliens attempting to communicate with us, what organs could mushrooms and humans grow to improve reciprocal communication? If red roses were able not just to symbolise love, but write love letters through chemotropism, guided by lovers’ pheromones? If the soil purifying plant could in fact turn heavy metals into precious rings? Patabotany is a cross-pollination between myth and reality: it is an interpretation of interpretation, an abstraction of abstraction, emerging at the edges of poetry, magic and biology. Patabotany subverts the contemporary drive to instrumentalise culture and nature in economic or utilitarian constructs. It describes a world where the believable is grafted onto the improbable, where logic is pollinated with a hybrid of sensuality and paradox, where botany and permaculture mutate into an epic of nurturing and seduction in relentless cycles of living and dying. |
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| In groWorld patabotany was grafted onto tarot, a known storytelling and divination platform with its roots in card games and magic of italian Rennaissance. FoAM cross-breed tarot archetypes and ethnobotanical properties of plants - as the adventurous fool or the mysterious high priestess with patabotanically evolved Morning Glory and Lady's Mantle. Some of the chosen plants share history, morphology or geography with the human archetypes, others are able to induce archetypal body- and mind states or inhabit the same pata-ecology. Patabotanical tarot builds on a peculiar and mysterious history of plant books, which includes such curiosities as The Voynich Manuscript (Kennedy 2005, Voynich, Retreived 2011), Parallel Botany (Lionni 1978), Codex Seraphinianus (Serafini 1981) and Tolkien’s plants of Middle Earth (Hazell 2007). The Voynich Manuscript, for example, allegedly written in the 15th or 16th century, contains hundreds of herbal, astronomical, biological, cosmological and pharmaceutical drawings and recipes. The manuscript is not written in any known language, and has resisted all attempts at translation; many believe it is a hoax. The plants detailed in this strange manuscript do not match any known species. In a way, the Voynich Manuscript represents a “secret knowledge” of a possibly fictional, possibly alchemical universe, and as such it has engaged and fascinated scholars for hundreds of years. Parallel Botany, a more recent example by a known author, is a collection of faux scientific descriptions of plants, backed by invented mythologies and folktales from around the globe. Parallel plants have the ability to defy perspective, exist as music, or evaporate when touched. There is so much that we don’t know about our vegetal neighbours that even the most scientifically-minded among us have been unsure how much of this work is fact and how much fiction. Patabotany is a similarly entangled milieu, where botanical truths are questioned through juxtapositions with traditional myths and popular beliefs, interspersed with personal dreams and collective speculations. | In groWorld patabotany was grafted onto tarot, a known storytelling and divination platform with its roots in card games and magic of italian Rennaissance. FoAM cross-breed tarot archetypes and ethnobotanical properties of plants - as the adventurous fool or the mysterious high priestess with patabotanically evolved Morning Glory and Lady's Mantle. Some of the chosen plants share history, morphology or geography with the human archetypes, others are able to induce archetypal body- and mind states or inhabit the same pataecology. Patabotanical tarot builds on a peculiar and mysterious history of plant books, which includes such curiosities as The Voynich Manuscript (Kennedy 2005, Voynich, Retreived 2011), Parallel Botany (Lionni 1978), Codex Seraphinianus (Serafini 1981) and Tolkien’s plants of Middle Earth (Hazell 2007). The Voynich Manuscript, for example, allegedly written in the 15th or 16th century, contains hundreds of herbal, astronomical, biological, cosmological and pharmaceutical drawings and recipes. The manuscript is not written in any known language, and has resisted all attempts at translation; many believe it is a hoax. The plants detailed in this strange manuscript do not match any known species. In a way, the Voynich Manuscript represents a “secret knowledge” of a possibly fictional, possibly alchemical universe, and as such it has engaged and fascinated scholars for hundreds of years. Parallel Botany, a more recent example by a known author, is a collection of faux scientific descriptions of plants, backed by invented mythologies and folktales from around the globe. Parallel plants have the ability to defy perspective, exist as music, or evaporate when touched. There is so much that we don’t know about our vegetal neighbours that even the most scientifically-minded among us have been unsure how much of this work is fact and how much fiction. Patabotany is a similarly entangled milieu, where botanical truths are questioned through juxtapositions with traditional myths and popular beliefs, interspersed with personal dreams and collective speculations. |
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| If patabotany can inject stories and other products of human imagination into botany, could it not also inspire the development of a "vegetal mind" in humans? What would happen were patabotany to seep back into the reality of everyday life? What if patabotany could sprout through email clients and cracks in pavements? People would encounter it online, through games and apps, and in the real world – in gardens, parks and green patches by the side of the road. By straddling the online and offline world, the realms of gamers and of gardeners, patabotany could engage people in an immersive story and reinvigorate the relationship between people and plants. | If patabotany can inject stories and other products of human imagination into botany, could it not also inspire the development of a "vegetal mind" in humans? What would happen were patabotany to seep back into the reality of everyday life? What if patabotany could sprout through email clients and cracks in pavements? People would encounter it online, through games and apps, and in the real world – in gardens, parks and green patches by the side of the road. By straddling the online and offline world, the realms of gamers and of gardeners, patabotany could engage people in an immersive story and reinvigorate the relationship between people and plants. |
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| Attempting to infuse physical spaces with patabotany, a group of people at FoAM created Borrowed Scenery, a story about an alternate reality (past, future or parallel) where plants are a central aspect of human society. Borrowed Scenery encourages us to re-imagine our cities as places of sinuous interaction between humans and plants: where plants don’t just provide us with food and materials but become neighbours, teachers, and gateways to the "planetary Other". Borrowed Scenery is an alternate reality narrative about the dissolution of borders between reality and fiction, mysticism and technology, nature and culture. It is a story that wants to become reality. Its characters - a team of patabotanists attempting to re-establish human-plant communication - are evolved tarot-plant hybrids, as well as living humans. They leave physical traces, such as notebooks, used teacups and experiments-in-progress. Their words appear in online forums, on Open Street Maps, in a game and a wiki. They speak various plant languages as well as Hildegard von Bingen's Lingua Ignota. The patabotanists remain elusive and always just out of grasp - they have just left on a field trip or are about to wake up. Yet their lab and their arcane equipment, collected specimen and a peculiar library is always open to curious passers by. In a hidden indoor jungle, people can discover the patabotanists' world, meet their research assistants, get involved in ongoing experiments, or sip a cup of herbal tea in their dandyist lounge. From this HQ their work spills out onto the streets, to map remarkable plants and gardens, seeking out plants, people and places with most porous edges between the human and the vegetal. By 'borrowing' the setting of everyday life in the city, it attempts to infuse our habitual activities, such as walking or eating, with a vision of a possible future where insatiable economic growth is superseded by an atmosphere-based economy, where nature has a voice. A voice that we can hear in the weather, in software communication protocols and in our own thoughts. In Borrowed Scenery we can viscerally experience ourselves as inseparable from the world, with our feet connected to tangles of mycelium, roots and soil, while our awareness mingles with the vegetal, animal and elemental. | In an attempt to infuse physical spaces with patabotanal essences, FoAM created Borrowed Scenery, a story about an alternate reality (past, future or parallel) where plants are a central aspect of human society. Borrowed Scenery encourages us to re-imagine our cities as places of sinuous interaction between humans and plants: where plants don’t just provide us with food and materials but become neighbours, teachers, and gateways to the "Planetary Other". Borrowed Scenery is an alternate reality narrative about the dissolution of borders between reality and fiction, mysticism and technology, nature and culture. It is a story that wants to become a reality. Its characters - a group of patabotanists attempting to re-establish human-plant communication - include evolved tarot-plant hybrids, as well as living humans. They leave physical traces, such as notebooks, used teacups and experiments-in-progress. Their words appear in online forums, on Open Street Maps, in games and wikis. They speak various plant languages and sometimes communicate in Hildegard von Bingen's Lingua Ignota. The patabotanists remain elusive and always just out of reach, yet their lab and their arcane equipment, collected specimens and peculiar library is open to curious passers by. In a hidden indoor jungle, the patabotanists' world can be found, with their research assistants, ongoing experiments, or a cup of herbal tea providing an entrance. From this makeshift lab their work spills out onto the streets, to map remarkable plants and gardens, seeking out plants, people and places with porous edges between the human and the vegetal. By 'borrowing' the setting of everyday life in the city, it attempts to infuse our habitual activities, such as walking or eating, with a vision of a possible future where insatiable economic growth is superseded by an atmosphere-based economy, where nature has a voice. A voice that we can hear in the weather, in communication protocols and in our own thoughts. In Borrowed Scenery we can viscerally experience ourselves as inseparable from the world, with our feet connected to tangles of mycelium, roots and soil, while our awareness mingles with the vegetal, animal and elemental. |
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| “If the light is sufficient to disclose to us the way of contemplation that lies within ourselves, we may by pursuing it to the end. We may know – not as a mere static dictum but as a winged intuition, carrying an infinitude of significance both for mind and heart – that the One IS the Manifold, and the Manifold IS the One.” | “If the light is sufficient to disclose to us the way of contemplation that lies within ourselves, we may by pursuing it to the end. We may know – not as a mere static dictum but as a winged intuition, carrying an infinitude of significance both for mind and heart – that the One IS the Manifold, and the Manifold IS the One.” |
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