(summary of blogs) Of building a poetic reality: an homage to nature and her systems

I started my blog with posting about sourdoughs made form ancient Egyptian yeast cultures. This one was followed by some writing about salt, artificial intelligence and ritual magic. Further along I touched on air quality in an artistic sense and on how to appreciate clouds. I also took a look from the distance onto planet Earth and the human made satellites that are tracking and documenting Earth’s wellbeing. (Let’s stay in space) I mentioned art in space – to be seen with the naked eye. From there I explored how slime mould can hep to map dark matter. From macro to micro I talked about parasitic fungi attacking insects. Then I stumbled upon the first computer bug, just to land in another art project that imitates the human digestion system.

What a journey!

Looking at this, I’m seeing some sort of pattern. What I’m seeing is a juxtaposition of human culture / existence (and all complications with it) with natural systems – and us trying to understand who and what we are within it. Within this journey of understanding, sometimes strange things overlap and something interesting happens: a creation of a poetic reality. Artistic or scientific – it doesn't really matter, as the lines are often blurry anyhow. These are the moments I am looking for – when a poetic reality is created. There is tension and there is beauty. Then, there is a fascination, when we try to imitate natural systems and see their imperfection / mistakes (artificial intelligence because it makes mistakes and Cloaca by Wim Delvoye because a machine takes up a whole room to digest food while a human body is so efficient in space).

I’m going to attempt to juxtapose these two sides with the topics of my blog posts:


MATERIAL / NATURE
Yeast
Salt
Clouds
Slime Mold
Dark Matter
Insects
Fungi
Mycelium
Feces


ARTIFICIAL / HUMAN
Culture
Memory
Ritual Magic
Artificial Intelligence
Pollution
Art
Satellites
Computer
Machine


Much of the fascination comes from moving through two dimension, that lay above these two sides of the MATERIAL/NATURE & ARTIFICIAL/HUMAN – these are the dimension of time and space and the possibility to theoretical travel within them.

For example, the Egyption Sourdough reference travels through time, but on the plane of taste. Emily Parsons-Lord project 'Different Kinds of Air, A Plant's Diary' travels through time via the olfactory and haptic sensation. Any space project I mentioned (NASAs Earth Satellites or Trevor Paglens Orbital Reflector, even the slime mold mapping Dark Matter) travel through space – beyond the one visible to us. These are, as many of the projects I mentioned attempts to understand who we are as humans and were our place is. But especially it is an attempt to understand what we take for granted: the natural systems around us. Science as well as Art is hunting for that understanding. This is why many of these project are blurring the boundaries between these spheres too.
All in all this is a homage to nature and her systems. Unfortunately while we are trying to understand, we also destroy. In this category fall the projects that are about pollution and Earth awareness.