PLSS: Jeremijenko One Trees

Dear TML Plant People,

Natalie Jeremijenko
One Trees Project

Natalie's one of the cleverest artists I know.   Her One Trees project merits some discussion, because I feel that, even if we might have similarly clever technologies underneath, PLSS is going somewhere else, developing more nuanced sensibilities.   

Thinking of (extra-)PLSS conversations with Flower, Jen, Nasrin, Harry, Laura  -- I wonder about  the difference between explicit and implicit action in the area of eco-political movement.

Here's a part of my wondering:

Ecology teaches that point-solutions and point-thinking can solve a local problem or meet a pointillistic need but head us toward global catastrophe.

"Pointillistic" could be replaced by "explicit," or "zeroth-order"  or "degree zero"  or "vulgar" (as in a vulgar form of marxist theory).

What would be an ecopolitical and non-pointillistic way to perform ecopolitical action?

Pace Deleuze & Guattari, I think that molecules are points, too, just lots and lots of them.   And I'll wager that modern governments and capitalists are much better equipped to molecularize than nomads.   While we play our human-sized games in civilized quarters, those governmentalities and instrumentalities are racing far into the nanotechnological under Feynman's characteristic banner: "There's plenty of room at the bottom."  (Can you hear the wagon wheels thundering?)  (No matter that nanotech is merely a re-branding of chemical engineering and materials science.)

So, if in the TML we follow our method of walking orthogonally to the beat of the drum, in what directions should we head out, initially?  (The comfort and the terror is that in an n-manifold, the complementary space to a 1-dimensional trajectory is n-1 dimensional, so... we have a boundless dimension of choices.)

Summarizing a bit from our PLSS chat last week -- we found it useful to think about

useful plants
ornamental (not in Patrick's sense) plants
hurtful plants ...
then there's everything else:
weeds

We could for example cultivate rice and return them to their weedy state of grass.   We could grow different species that grow at several different rates and rhythms, thinking ahead to how they sprout, race or dawdle, or how they respond differentially, and therefore contrapuntally to the environment.   Thinking as a media choreographer but at vastly slower scales as well as the usual msec scales.

There is a very definite infrastructure no matter what sort of plant you are ( turning and tuning our lab's operations is part of tilling the soil.)

So what about those weeds?

Xin Wei

PS. Personally, I've always believed there is no wild just as there is no chaos, except as names for the limits of our knowledge and power. Perhaps this belief may rest on a Spinozan attitude -- those of you who are reading Spinoza can tell me :)