On Being Moss
Over the past couple of years, I have been focusing on mosses. I learned a lot about moss, but to really understand it, I actually started embodying and reflecting moss-like behaviours in my working practice. I began to become like the moss. Thinking through moss affords a different way of practising and being in the world. I employed a ‘methodology of moss’ to guide my practice, a set of principles for eco-activist practice that draws parallels between the ecology of moss and eco-arts practice.
The power of moss is in its smallness and its slow persistence. It’s both interesting and challenging to align these principles with the fast-moving worlds of emerging technologies, new media and AI.
Mosses, like artists, tend to thrive in strange and difficult niches, liminal spaces between; in doing so, they can enrich communities through their slow encroachment; a protective biocrust provide anchorage for collaboration, and teh development of tools and ideas. I like to think that embodying the quality of moss in my work has had a genuinely transformative effect on my practice. On the downside, such quietly attentive, slow-moving practice keeps me at the periphery and well out of the spotlight. However, in these shady moist neices I find a rich substrate, full of like minded individuals and new ways of being and practices that have insperied me.
Becoming Pond – A statement of intent
This particular moss journey has brought me back to the origins of my artistic practice in ecological and bio arts, while pulling those early concerns forward into my current ecosystem: a new personal terrain where ecomedia, sustainable UX, carbon literacy and AI intersect. I’m now asking what it means to carry a moss-like methodology into this “post-AI” world, and to let it seep into the design of interfaces, machines and stories.
Moving forward, I am redirecting my research back to pond life, which was the subject of my BA degree final project.
Ponds share many similarities with mosses. They are overlooked and undervalued ecosystems. Ponds develop quickly and are often temporary, liable to dry up or become overgrown quickly. Therefore, pond-specific organisms must adapt rapidly to environmental changes. Teh interseat with mosses, and wetland ecosystems sometimes become bogs.
This return to pondlife was partly inspired by reading James Bridle’s ‘Ways of Being’. Bridal reminds us that AI systems are modelled after the corporate model of intelligence, designed to maximise efficiency; they are competitive and extractive. So, what would an alternative model of a computer intelligence look like? What other intelligences might be modelled artificially: institutions, beings, ecologies, and non-human intelligences? This led me to reflect on Stafford Beer’s early work in cybernetics, in which he alludes to a ‘pond-brain experiment’ but provides no specific details. The concept of the “pond-brain” uses a pond’s ecological dynamics as a model for understanding complex systems. He suggests that the interactions and feedback loops within a pond environment could inform cybernetic approaches to problem-solving, emphasising the importance of adaptability and resilience in both biological and artificial systems.
My immediate thought was, what if you created a ‘pond computer’ or pond-based AI? What is it to think like a pond? How would this then guide my practice? What does a metyhodology of pond feel like? What would one do with a pond computer? How would we interface with it?
As yet i am not sure but i am looking forward to learning about experimenting cybentices and feedback systems. So far, the project has taken me on a thought journey, meandering between plant thinking, Turing’s O’ computer, Tarot cards and other oracular interfaces, which I intend to write about soon. This project has also required me to gain a better understanding of how AI works and whether I could train my own model. (see Plato’s cave experiment here). But most enjoyable it has necessitated reflecting on the ecology of pondlife and how to simulate this, to test the computer (and sometimes just for fun) See pond life simulator v1
