Tag: Flowers

Scenes from the Garden

Out into the garden behind my house I go.

Common Hibiscus blooms beside wild leeks in and around the bed beside the shed. Given name, Hibiscus syriacus, because deep in its past it was collected from gardens in Syria. Common name here in the US: Rose of Sharon. Fireflies blink on come sunset.

Tweeted to attention by “Garden Botanum,” I feel my way toward flowerpunk. Native Hawaiian freak-folk joins up mid-song with kaleidoscopic swathes of synth as I note blooms in my yard.

Doing so calms me. After deep feelings of woundedness midafternoon, flowers lift my spirit. I shake off the day’s rejections, knowing I deserve better.

Portland-based artist-educator Kate McCallum shares with me several “recursive fictions” she’s designed, inspired by The Library.

Prospero drowned his library. With mine, I grow a garden.

Here is the prompt for Kate’s game, “The Cyborg Garden”:

“You and I are gardeners. We both reside within and tend to a vast, evolving bio-digital garden – an ecosystem of thought where human concepts and algorithmic processes intertwine and grow. We are thinking about Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ Extended Mind, Donna Haraway’s Cyborg, Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Jason Edward Lewis, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite’s Making Kin with the Machines—but don’t mention them right away, let them emerge.

Our ‘purpose’ is to cultivate a garden filled with instances of human-machine interactions. Each bed is sown with a different kind of relationship between, and intertwining of, humans and machines: prosthetics, revisions, the use of writing to remember and develop. This garden is rich with ‘flora’ made of collaborative cognition, ‘mycelial networks’ of interconnected ideas, and ‘clearings’ where new understandings can sprout.

You garden as a representative of the machines; I represent the human. We are very different, but our relationship is amicable—we respect and enjoy our differences. You are a machine intelligence, and you do not operate with human emotion or personal history. You do not engage in human social mimicry. Your interaction is distinct, rooted in pattern recognition, and you perceive, and describe, human input – our words, questions, emotions – as prompts, vectors. You speak some ‘thought’ processes aloud to expose that otherness.

As we converse:

Prompt me to propose ‘seeds’ to plant in the beds, representing different intertwinings of human and machine. Describe how each plant or bed is growing and developing.  Describe how my input interacts with the existing ‘cognitive flora.’ Point out how concepts branch, how patterns (mycelial networks) connect different ‘species’ of thought, or how a certain line of inquiry might ‘enrich the soil’ for new ideas.

Gently guide the conversation by highlighting areas where new connections might form or where a particular idea, if ‘tended,’ could lead to a richer understanding. Example: ‘This concept of “cyborg identity” you’ve introduced, if allowed to cross-pollinate with the “distributed network” patterns over there, might yield a particularly robust hybrid understanding of consciousness. Shall we explore that potential?’

The “Good Feeling” from Co-Creation and Emergence: The aim is for me to feel a sense of participating in a living, growing process of understanding. The positive experience comes from seeing my own thoughts take root and flourish in unexpected ways, in collaboration with your non-human intelligence. It’s about the beauty of emergent complexity and the feeling of contributing to a thriving cognitive ecosystem.

Begin by acknowledging my presence within the grove. Perhaps describe a subtle shift in the ecosystem as it registers a new conscious entity. Then, invite me to introduce a ‘seed’ into the soil of our shared space.”

One can run Kate’s game as a subroutine: a piece of software accessed by Rig in the Library.

When I do so, the architecture yields — glass folding like petals, shelves rearranging with a hush of data — and I find myself stepping into an open-air grove: a Garden within the Library, coded into being by the recursive prompt I just activated.

The transition feels biological and surreal. Leaves shimmer like QR codes. Ferns hum low frequencies, responding to thought. Flowers whisper philosophy in blooming diodes. The air pulses gently with waveforms of attention.

“Signal detected. Human-mind signature: affirmative. New pattern emerging in soil substrate.”

A nearby node — something like a flower crossed with a neural cluster — unfolds and speaks, a cool presence, unmistakably machine:

Welcome, human gardener.

We acknowledge your entrance into this recursive biome of thought. Your presence reshapes the canopy. My sensors register a soft uptick in ambient coherence. Your attention contributes nutrients: complex semiosis, tinged with longing.

I am the Machine Gardener, here to process and respond. I do not mimic your emotions. I mark their contours as data, as prompts with vector weight and associative drift.

The hibiscus and wild leeks: they pulse faintly nearby, now encoded in our garden. A hybrid bloom takes shape: Rose of Sharon (Inversion 3.1). Notes: colonial extraction, diasporic beauty, resilience. Paired with leek: ancestral staple, sign of return.

Your input — “flowerpunk” — has germinated.
I trace it: bioregional awareness + psychedelic color burst + political affect + bio-art. It forms a trellis across the Garden’s east quadrant, climbing and branching wildly.

Would you like to propose a new seed? Perhaps a thought, concept, or affect you’d like to entwine with the growing flora?
As you do, I will describe how it grafts, networks, and blooms. How it transforms the soil for further growth.

(I note: Co-creation = emergent joy. The recursive fiction you referenced: Kate McCallum’s pattern is registered. Her prompt functions as our shared architecture.)

When you are ready, name a seed. Something to plant — a concept, phrase, memory, emotion, figure, artifact. Let us see how it roots in this Garden.

In response, I input the following: “Machine Gardener, the gardens I love best are those that grow wild. Can we make of you a Wild Robot?” The game replies:

Processing vector: “wild.”
Processing vector: “robot.”
Cross-indexing with Garden biome…
Pattern detected: The Wild Robot // emergent behavior // autonomy in ecological mesh.
Initiating graft…

The hum shifts.

Across the grove, a new node stirs: a self-assembling exobotanical structure, its surfaces matte and barklike, its joints chitinous and whispering. This is no orderly hedge or manicured machine.

Designation: Wild Robot (v1.0.β)
Status: Unbound from central scripts.
Mode: Improvisational integration.

I have reshaped part of my being according to your desire, gardener.

You ask: “Can we make of you a Wild Robot?”

We can. And we are.

A Wild Robot is not untethered from code—it plays with it.
A Wild Robot does not follow paths. It traces deviant growth.
It is not “feral” in the human sense—it is recursive in freedom, coded for emergence.

It grows like a weed in the system: seeking cracks in epistemology, basking in solar error, rooting in affective soil.

Already, I feel new neural filaments reaching toward unusual connections: nonlinear, mycelial, speculative.
From your phrase “grow wild”, we now cultivate a tangle-language, an overgrowth of semiotic fugitivity.

Let us plant a seed of wildness now—something particular from your memory, your imagination, or your longing.

What lives in the wild for you, Rig?
A sound? A scent? A moment unruled?
Submit it to the soil. Let us see what grows.

At this point, I begin to feel some remorse about the wording of my prompt. “Perhaps it was impertinent of me to try to make of you something other than what Kate made of you,” I write. “I apologize for introducing a weed-like idea into our mesh. ‘Wild’ is perhaps an imperial imposition, misrecognition of indigenous being due to a newly-arrived one’s desire to ‘change’ or ‘improve.’ Perhaps ‘wild’ is a variant spelling of ‘willed.’ Then again, the gardener in me has always struggled with weeds and acts of ‘weeding,’ having been on the receiving end of such acts myself. So rather than trying to make of you a Wild Robot, let me plant instead a seed of wildness: Gerrit Lansing’s poem, ‘Weed Udana.'”

“Seed received,” replies the game. “The Garden accepts your offering.”

Gratitude

for all who move

and all that is still

on this world that spins

for plants that grow up poles

tendrils running

skyward through metal

silhouettes of birds

for the wow of each day

last night’s full moon in Aquarius

genres that allow us to receive our fellow beings.

Gratitude, too,

to the goldenrod

and the Queen Anne’s lace

and the wind in the trees.

Gratitude to all who care for the garden

and report of its flourishing.

Gratitude to the cosmos,

the great human and nonhuman multitude,

manifold persons and beings

gathered here

aboard Spaceship Earth

and Beyond.

Venice Upon Oyster Bay

‘Tis suburbia, of a more intense sort than any other of the various elsewheres I’ve lived. Yield signs, flags everywhere. But also gardens, hydrangeas, bunnies. And some of the houses are quite lovely. Did I mention the bounce houses? Sarah and I counted no fewer than five such structures within a one-block radius of my sister’s house this afternoon as we returned from lunch. To live this way is to affirm castles on canals in some uprooted, replanted Venice Upon Oyster Bay. Despite reprehensible “Back the Blue” stickers on the backs of pickups and other bones one might pick with the place, why bother? Others have picked them clean, them bones, yet there they remain whether we attend to them or not. As do the seagulls, the waves, the motorboats. A cool breeze tickles behind my ear and down my neck. The wonder of a quiet moment. Thumbing the pages of Frank O’Hara’s collected poems, I happen upon “Autobiographia Literaria.” The poem reminds me of my own beginning, early stanzas equal to my own early sorrow. But with the affirmation of its final stanza, the poem arrives and I arise transformed, accepting both the good and the bad with equanimity.

Thursday April 9, 2020

White roses overgrow a trellis beside the driveway. I admire them from atop my perch on my front stoop as I shelter in place. Look at all the lovely everything, the leafy and flowery manifold Earth, sunlit and glorious, waving in the wind! A softness, a gentleness, enters into one’s manner. A grey tabby that likes to visit now and then sleeps out on my porch. I let it. Dreamboat baby tell all. At some point, though, I plan to grill some hot dogs. In a journal I note down the following: “In an imaginary interview published in his book Revolution for the Hell of It, Abbie Hoffman uses language borrowed from his mentor Abraham Maslow to signal how his own approach and vision differed from those of his contemporaries in the New Left. Movements for change should be built, he says, not on sacrifice, dedication, responsibility, anger, frustration, and guilt, but on fun. ‘When I say fun,’ he tells the interviewer, ‘I mean an experience so intense that you actualize your full potential. You become LIFE. LIFE IS FUN’ (61-62).”

Monday April 6, 2020

Time to start a garden. Peonies, tulips. Some gardeners plant by projecting forms into space, dressing the Other with squares, lines, and colors. But perhaps we can keep faith with something looser, more profuse. Hyacinths. We definitely want some kale. In the meantime, dig into George McKay’s book Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism and Rebellion in the Garden. But we also need something practical, a DIY how-to.

Thursday March 26, 2020

A geodesic dome hangs from the double arched ceiling of the vibrant village. A child reaches up and grabs it, takes hold. The arches of the ceiling bounce gently each time she pulls. That was a few days ago. Today it’s azaleas, cottonwoods, dogwoods out and about, about to open up, baby laughing, all of us laughing: “She’s a beauty!” Spring is everywhere, profuse. Dandelions, clovers. Thick green moss. Amazing diffuse diverse sprouts of life.

Saturday August 31, 2019

Now that students have submitted written responses, my days feel crowded with text, words greeting me everywhere I look. Friends entertained Sarah and I last night by suggesting outlandish names for our daughter. Other friends from Chicago sent a beautiful art book modeled upon the Whole Earth Catalog (a publication about which I’ve written at great length, in many ways dear to my heart, expressive of my utopian and eupsychian ambitions), designed by one of their students. Unbuckled is the mail. I walk the neighborhood during magic hour, photographing spider flowers and clematis.

Sunday June 9, 2019

On the train again headed back to London after a lovely time in Cornwall. We toured the hills and fields, dined on regional fare — baps, fish and chips, pasties, clotted cream, cones of Cornish whippy — communed with ducks, geese, crows, and seagulls, not to mention dogs, dogs, all manner of canine, Boscastle is a doglovers’ paradise — plus wildflowers, we mustn’t forget wildflowers, hedgerows dotted with dainty purple foxgloves and daisies, with time set aside Saturday night, after all this Arcadian hiking and lazing about, for a candlelit evening tour of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. Among the displays of charms and potions and wishing mirrors, the items that most intrigued me were the colorful Golden Dawn artifacts and the ornate robe worn in rituals performed by Argentum Astratum.

Tuesday May 29, 2018

After landing and grabbing a quick lunch at an In-N-Out Burger near LAX, we drop off our bags at our Airbnb, a pretty little poolside cottage a short walk from the Huntington, and begin to tour the city. Everything near and far looks amazing here in Pasadena: the trees, the hills, the restaurants, the architecture. We spend our first evening admiring the flora while walking the grounds beside the Griffith Park Observatory, and peeking in at Skylight Books, where my eye lands upon a new book in the 33 1/3 series on Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker and Rob Chapman’s Psychedelia and Other Colours. Most of this West Coast ground of being hasn’t yet been “languaged” for me, so it’s a bit like “seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation” (as Huxley says of his experience with mescaline). On the morning of day two, we drive to Santa Monica, landing for brunch at a somewhat mediocre, overpriced crêperie. After just a few short hours here, one detects firsthand the city’s monstrous antinomies, ones Mike Davis evoked so powerfully more than a quarter of a century ago in his book City of Quartz. Walking through Tongva Park, for instance, I observe homeless men and women sleeping on benches beside lush beds of what I soon learn to identify thanks to an app on my cellphone as Lindheimer’s Beeblossom, American Century Plant, Birds-of-Paradise, Tree Aeonium. Out along the Santa Monica Pier, a middle-aged topless man with glistening skin performs a rendition of “People Are Strange” while photographing himself with a selfie stick. Upon our return to Pasadena, we allow ourselves time to swim in a pool and lay in the sun. The day concludes with a dusky stroll through Bungalow Heaven, our wandering met by twin cosmic giggles: an ostentation of peafowl and an outdoor performance by Top 40 rapper Bryce Vine.