Plants. Green, juicy, sensuous beings and sophisticated chemical factories. Expendable individuals, robust communities. Violent enemies and seductive partners. Tasty to humans and other selected animals.

Humans. Inventive, impulsive, mobile and adaptive creatures, able to fashion tools, cultivate living things (including ourselves) and manipulate symbols. Tasty to plants, particularly when decomposing.

From single, isolated sprouts in scorched deserts, to unstoppable tangles in dense forests, from huts on top of mountains to sprawling urban jungles; humans have always had a curious relationship with plants. Plants and humans eat, consume each other and each other's waste products. Humans need plants, yet they are also seen as a threat. Plants provide humans with air, food, fuel and shelter. They are sources of inspiration, imagination, beauty and mystery. At the same time, the more aggressive plants crack their walls, invade their crops and poison their foods. Slowly, relentlessly, patiently… So familiar, yet so alien. For a period of time, humans attempted to keep plants out of their cities and homes, to construct a world in which they could be independent from them. In which they could suck the knowledge out of the plant temples and leave them to die. The plants waited… Slowly the world started to crumble. Slowly, the plants began to move back into the human world, through the cracks in the pavements and doors blown open by turbulent weather.

This time around humans changed their tactics. They were going to become symbionts with plants. Human-plant-hybrids. It was going to take a long time, but they were determined to succeed. The alternative was slow but certain death of most humans and quite a few species of plants.

They began to grow plants beyond mere food and fuel crops. They began to cultivate plants to cultivate humans. Aside from still sprouting delectable foods, gardens became places in which things could generate, grow and transform. At first, people cared mainly about the food that the gardens produced. There was one difference though, they attempted feeding the whole eco-system rather than humans alone. Not only that, the humans wanted to feed a culture that would help them creep out of an overstressed, slightly schizophrenic social and economic systems that they were living in. Some of them called it permaculture, others open re/source culture. Many names and many approaches to find a way forward, without forgetting the past. One of these cultures decided that changing the world could only happen if you would start growing your own world, an eco-system that can sustain itself and reach out to others.

People thaught each other in small communities, a few neighbours at a time. Soon after, they connected to other communities and learned from them, using all available means of communication. An alternative map of the world was created – the one that connected the gardens and the paths of the gardeners. Their thoughts grew beyond their small patches of green and reached out to entangle the whole planet into a fertile ARG, augmented reality garden.

etc…

Version 0.1 Feb 2008

project_groworld