Greening

_pix — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:30:12 +0000

A long, long time ago, in the valley of the river Rhine, a young woman by the name of Hildegard von Bingen had a vision. She named it Viriditas. In one of her elated raptures, she experienced the power of a greening force, able to give life, offer solace and regenerate the world. Viriditas is a botanical, vegetative agency present in every being as the 'green side of the mind'. It enables deep connections between individual entities and the living environments around them. Viriditas binds all Earth-bound habitats into a single living system (aka Gaia), whose integral parts are the processes and structures of all beings in the Earth's biosphere.

In the 21st century, the age of climate chaos, wasteful consumerism and unstable political systems, Viriditas could become a guiding ethic for transforming and adapting our individual behaviours, social and economic structures. At FoAM, we began greening our minds by attempting to understand the complex relationships of robust and dynamic eco-systems. We look at morphology and evolution, collaboration and selection, and simulate them in digital eco-systems populated by artificial life-forms. We work with the physical materials and try to mimic the responsiveness of living tissues of plants and animals. Increasing in spatial scale, we began designing eco-systems in gardens on abandoned and unused urban sites. Inspired by holistic design systems such as permaculture and natural farming, we see these sites not only as places for cultivation of plants, but also of human beings.

Moving beyond biomimicry towards 'biokinesis', an activation of Viriditas, we are looking at ways in which human systems and societies could adopt some characteristics of plants - valuing diversity and collaboration over monocultures of competition; approaching problem-solving through whole systems thinking; redesigning industry and economics to adopt more cyclical, regenerative processes. Without forgetting that we live in a technological society, we are seeking to integrate the collectively imagined, organically grown and technologically assembled systems so that they could support, rather than threaten each other. In the process, increasing their robustness, as well as resilience. Oscillating between fiction and experimentation, speculation and actualisation, under the guiding viridian glow of Viriditas, we are slowly clearing the path towards a world that we call 'Luminous Green'. Hoping to end this story as a fairy tale - 'and they all lived happily ever after'.

FoAM - A-life

Greening