A Green Guide

Posted April 22, 2023 by Maja Kuzmanović, Nik Gaffney, Theun Karelse, Justin Pickard, and Maya Weeks

Greetings fellow Earthlings. We* gather at this hinge between worlds, at the trailhead of FoAM’s green route. You can expect to cross diverse terrain, from cultivated gardens to speculative wilderness.

🌍 #EarthDay 🌏 #EarthDayEveryDay 🌎

* The we, here, is an invitation to engage. We are the people involved in making this publication come to life and the wider we that includes you, the readers. We are all here, alongside and with each other inside the experience, even if not all at the same time. Nobody is walking the path alone.

Luminous Green: Rethinking the role of art, design and technology in an environment of turbulence.

groWorld {sym}{bio}{sys}: A preamble to FoAM's longest running initiative, exploring interactions between plants and humans from multiple perspectives.

We Cultivate Plants to Cultivate the Garden Within: On the Practice of Gardening or The Growing of Worlds

Plant Guilds and Earth Dumplings, And Other Examples of FoAM’s Gardening Practices

We are humus in the making: A dispatch from a nascent Natural Academy, an invitation to cook and discover soil together

Mud Futures: Concerning the material properties and worldings of mud, as particles in suspension; beyond rural pasts and formless nature, an exploration of what it now proposes, the futures it elicits or evokes

Moddertaal: A poetic dialogue between some bodies and the swampy landscapes whence they emerged

A Bog in Every Backyard: A premonition or prototype of a world to come, where marginality is to be championed rather than decried

Being Rural: A conversation about redistributing power around farming with natural fertilisers and bringing farmers and regulators into conversation with one another via the Farm Crap App project

Boskoi: A mobile database of ethnoculinary and ethnobotanic knowledge named after the ancient grazing hermits

.walk: Eating grass, Crunching Code: Searching for the forest in the city. Searching for the city in the forest. Psychogeography and Urban Foraging are involved

A Botanical Sanctuary: A gurukula is a community of apprenticeship with the Guru. In the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, our teachers are plants, animals, the forest as a whole

Solarpunk Remix: A hyperstitional conversation bricolaged from non-fictional texts written by eight physically embodied humans who identify themselves as solarpunks and/or its critics

Cities Clad in Green: Impressions of Urban Gardening writ large. A slow accretion of words and images, as lookouts with views across gardens at the scale of cities. Germinating, growing, overgrown

Echoes of lively conversation and fecund fragrance waft across the sinking fence. Clambering over, we land in a curious edge habitat, visible only through a mobile app. Our screens split in two, with parallel video feeds from rural and urban landscapes. On the left side, farmers monitor natural fertiliser levels. To the right, foragers map urban edibles: modern grazing hermits, eating grass and crunching code.

Looking up from our devices, we find ourselves in a different landscape. Amid the forested hills of a botanical sanctuary, we stop to wonder: where does the garden end and the forest begin? In our fruitless search for a clear and definite boundary, we stray over another invisible threshold. Time emulsifies, stranding us in a thickening blend of past, present, and future. Lost and confused, we stop for refreshments in an enclave shaded by biomorphic solar panels. Meeting the resident solarpunks, yarns are spun, and we’re treated to a chorus of voices, urging us to hope, to move quietly and plant things. Our onward path slithers between the biomimetic structures of a vegetal metropolis. Pausing on a high lookout, above the verdant tide of green roofs, vertical gardens, and pocket parks, we wonder: where does the garden end and the city begin?

Having been there: Some notes on fieldwork, as a situated, experiential way of learning

I Listened to Everything, Very Carefully: A conversation about site-specific, durational, and more-than-human approaches to artistic practices

Sonic Kayaks: A conversation about how kayaks fitted with environmental sensors facilitate recreation for local visually-impaired kayakers and provide necessary data for research

Not Fit for Statistics: When a species is simply unpredictable

Zandmotor Mammoth Soup: Tasting the Ice Age of an Artificial Sandbank

Practicing Attunement: An embodied research technique and a proposition for multisensory engagement with Earth-bound environments and their inhabitants

Giving Ourselves Over: On how we open our body onto the world

As Rocks Behave Like Fluids: A journey across the Sonoran and Mojave deserts as they are, as they were, and as they might be

How to walk like something is around you? The experience of unconditional hospitality in the Kerala rainforest

Knowing When (Not) to Interfere: Fieldnotes from the Island of Seili, including observations by the authors and their instruments; raw data from sketchbooks and spreadsheets; and a sonic translation of the experience

SjälöPoeisis_LottaPetronella_Aug22_Photo_Jussi_Virkkumaa

Exercises in Attentiveness: where artists and researchers gather to collectively develop work focusing on environmental changes in the Turku Archipelago, on the island of Seili in the Baltic Sea

Let the Green Speak Forth: Or Yet Another Attempt to Capture the Sensory and Mystical Experience of Viriditas in Words and Images

The Viriditas Chapel of Perpetual Adoration: A virtual reality inspired by visions and music of Saint Hildegard von Bingen, situated in the Cathedral-in-the-Clouds, an ongoing collection of digital dioramas for contemplation

Borrowed Scenery: In which gardens, landscapes, stories and songs entwine into an alternate reality where plants are a central aspect of human society

Rooted Hauntology: A constellation of fragments about the experience of being with plants

Patabotany: A herbarium of vegetal lenses for looking at the world(s) anew

In stillness, we let the green speak forth; immersing us in the colour, the radiance, the life-giving greenness. Through the leaves and branches, a shimmering guides us to a chapel anchored in virtual reality. The viriditas chapel calls for a pause, a moment of contemplation. All hail the greenest branch... Until the song ebbs and the chapel falls dark. Feeling our way forward, we step into a verdant greenhouse filled with song. Is this music human, vegetal, electronic? We can’t tell. The air is moist, saturated with oxygen. Beyond the glass walls, we find a garden that has borrowed scenery from its surrounding landscape. As the foreground blends into the background, our focus blurs and reality itself seems to soften. We pause and observe. Being with plants, the silence thickens. Haunted and haunting. The longer we linger, the more the world warps, delivering us to a place where plants and stories cross-pollinate. Raising their vegetal lenses to our eyes, we see the world(s) anew.

Thalience: Speculating on machine learning and artificial intelligence that support the flourishing of complex ecosystems

Cursory Speculations on Human-Plant Interaction: And translating plant signalling into languages understandable by humans

Machine Wilderness: In which arguments for environmental machine learning are brought forth and illustrative examples of augmented ecology experiments are described

Go Tell The Crows: A peopled world beyond the human, teeming with wily, intelligent others

Zoöp & the Practice of Zoönomy: Towards multispecies cooperation in collective bodies and regenerative economy

Lament of the Rogue Geoengineer: An Intercepted Transmission in which an Unmasked Rogue recants their scorned (al)chemical efforts to patch and repair a Broken World.

Terrafictions: On engaging with a world in which all is animate

We look at these lenses and the lenses look back at us. Asserting their agency as learning machines, more than mere interfaces between the human and other-than-human. Translating across otherwise incomprehensible languages, they reveal a series of peculiar outlooks across a machine wilderness. Vegetal minds interpret plant and human signals. Robotic agents and their digital contraptions chatter, teeter, and wobble across the augmented ecology they call home. A networked bird table provides an embassy for interspecies diplomacy, a backyard venue for iterated experimentation, mutual entanglement, and ad-hoc inquiry. Legal personhood stretches to enfold nonhuman entities through a mushrooming network of Zoöps. Perspectives proliferate, buzzing experiments perched precariously on the unstable ground of late-stage global capitalism. A crackling in the air, amplified, carries a message across the landscape. In an intercepted transmission, an unmasked rogue laments, bemoans, recants their scorned (al)chemical efforts to patch and repair a broken world.

Transfixed, we commence our final descent, glad to be landing on a planet where geological time, microbial contamination, life, and death coexist within and alongside deserts, forests, islands, and swamps. Immersed in the chorus of our animate planet, joyfully, delightedly Earth-bound, we reach for the stars.

Created: 22 Apr 2023 / Updated: 22 Apr 2023

A Green Guide

Greetings fellow Earthlings. We* gather at this hinge between worlds, at the trailhead of FoAM’s green route. You can expect to cross diverse terrain, from cultivated gardens to speculative wilderness.

🌍 #EarthDay 🌏 #EarthDayEveryDay 🌎

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