Notes from teleconference with Morgan, Laura, Xin Wei, February 17:
* elan vital => in interventions (environment)
* 'if it makes life good, its good'
* seek life in the world
* beyond Marx, not just economy
* not just a world that's better for humans [this requires thinking about]
* a test of us (the lab), can we make an environment that's good for plants?
* Laura: plants optimized to perform in their own
* plants as materials / particular needs (Spinoza)
* signal processing > semantics
* systematicity vs. particularlity
* classifying according to individuals rather than kinds
* what right do we have to modify or kill _any_ lifeform – deep ecology is "in our face"
* plants can invent their own actions, but the system is systematic
* putting something in front of us that we can put our hands on
* lets look at soil+water+software
* not a system, but a substrate (in which things are growing)
* sensors are part of the substrate (soil)
* can we really _add_ to the soil-water system?
* how do we compensate for hostile environment
* co-structuration: assuming a priori a conflict of interest among subjects, two independent monads: plant and human
* don't ask what the plant and the human want, what does it take for this complex, n1+n2+n3, to succede (n+1)
* should we just plants do their thing rather than trying to make a technical incubator for them? Is farming outside of "natural nature" futile?
* Should we make a cut between "natural nature" and "human nature"?
* Surely we can say that plants growing outside are part of a large interconnected, homeostatic process while plants growing inside are severred from their 'natural' support systems
* can we optimize plant health indoors in a different way from the way that they are nourished outside? (ref: Kiesler, "On Biotechnique")
* classical cathedral, forest, exhilirating. How can we mimic the living qualities of the wild indoors?
* we can't have the wild nature, so we have to do our best
* compensation for EV building (devoid of life)
* Hans Jonas, "The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology"
* biology through the lens of information systems
* Jonas is coming for a different place: not information system, but wet biology
* plant boxes
* water in at the top, or plants sucking from water at the bottom
* suspending boxes from the grid: too heavy? 25lbs per square foot
* size and modularity
* enough to support a rich soil ecology
* multiple size boxes? 1-3 sizes
* light sources: we have big windows
* mirror lighting
M