[conceptual I/O]
[1/ Food sovereignty / self-fabrication / energetic selfsufficiency /permaculture]
In preparation; on autonomy and networks
[2/ the cherry tree; buildings like trees]
In preparation
[3/ Micro-cosmos, four elements, 5 senses]
Water, irrigation systems and agriculture are imagined to be closely connected to the origin of cities. Ancient civilizations, and in particular the Mediterranean civilization, combined the relevance of water and agriculture with environmental design and the pursuit of beauty through the practice of gardening, of building and tending gardens. In the ancient, mythical mentality relevant places were conceived as micro-cosmos, that is, a small scale recreations of the world. Traditional Mediterranean gardens [Persian, Roman, Islamic…] were, indeed, conceived as an actualization of the original Paradise. Typically this meant a reordering of the four elements, – earth, water, air and fire -, a clear separation from the exterior world, the construction of a symbolic center connecting the underworld, the humans’ world and the skies, and an artistic approach to landscaping. We could say, too, that the Mediterranean tradition of gardening combines the productive [fruits, herbs…] and the artistic, it is rather orchard [huerto] than garden [jardín]. As an inhabitable space, the Mediterranean garden addresses simultaneously the body – through the five senses: vision, hearing, smell, touch and taste – and the mind: composition, symbolism, quiet.
In nowadays questioned and contested reality, we are hardly able to think of micro-cosmos and think instead of heterotopias or heterotopies.
[4/ gardening agencement / agency]
Félix Guattari and Constantin Petcou, contrast the idea of gardening with that of building. Petcou of aaa [atelier d’architecture autogereé], proposes the concept of agencement jardiniere [gardening assemblage] to define their practices in the social production of urban space. Guattari explains thatecosophic becomings should be compared to the cultivation of gardens, rather than to the construction of a buildings.
[5/ garden of microchips, an eddy inside a river]
Toyo Ito, ca 1993.
Instead of regarding with nostalgia the loss of the city,
“it makes much more sense to search for the attraction hidden in nowadays urban space… Huge networks superimposed in multiple layers… More and more, invisible flows dominate urban space… Over the real space constituted by buildings there is another city that has its origins in phenomena like light, sound, images, etc. An abstract space woven by the signs that we call media.”
“As if it were an archaeological excavation, we have to bring into the light the delicate network of flows hidden by these other presences. We could call this city, for the first time, a garden of microchips, the moment that the superimposed layers of manufactured new technologies and natural flows begin to generate mutual effects.”
In a later text, ca 2006, Ito comes back to the relationship between natural and electronic flows. Here he states that the relationship of modern-electronic man to electronic flows makes us rediscover the one we have with natural flows. The feeling of working-thinking in front of a computer screen is similar to that of having your feet inside water, he writes. In this age, for Ito, architecture should be like remolino in a river, barely defining an inhabitable site within the flows; – natural and digital, we may add.
[6/ ecologic machines / machinic ecology… living systems]
Félix Guattari, once again, proposed in the late 80s the concept of ecosophy, as a variation on ecology. Ecosophy would be a transversal view on ecology that stresses the interdependence of environmental, technical, social and subjective issues in order to produce changes in the way we are humans on Earth.
Guattari thus speaks of three ecologies: environmental or technical, social and mental. And when he elaborates on technical ecology he affirms that we need to understand it as a machinic ecology – not being able to interpret in an efficient way the world we live in in the 21st Century unless we assume the interdependent and inseparable condition of what we could call natureand technosphere. I always enjoy and repeat the example of the octopus mentioned by Guattari: an octopus was shown in a tv program happily swimming in an aquarium filled with water form the port of Marseille from where he came from. As soon as it was moved into a clean water container the octopus started to feel sick and shortly died. As early as the late 1980s Guattari conceptualized that this technical ecology was not only made by buildings and material infrastructures but also by communication, media, images etc blurring the limits of technical ecology with social and mental ecologies.
A digital garden could be thought of as an ecosophic heterotopy or spelled in a different way as a prototype or a laboratory for an ecosophic machine, in which to test relationships between nature, technologies, social formations and subjectivities.
programming nature 