Laboratories & Playgrounds

AvantGarden Laboratories and Playgrounds is a series of worlds filled with proto machines and other supporting Internet-of-Things network actors. By diving in between threads, paths, sphere-nodes and proto-machine nurseries, we witness variable atmospheric conditions controlled by a multitude of actors. Underground and aerial hotspots and diverse water flows and fountains uncover complex poetic and vibrant playgrounds.

Like mythological Arcadian meadows as places for people from all walks of life, the Epicurus school of philosophy called the Garden or a Taoist philosopher’s garden, these out of the ordinary places that we temporarily inhabit have their own rules, gravity, time and ecosystems. Like noospheric playgrounds and laboratories, they offer us the option to step out of everyday routines and enter a place of probabilities, for thinking, feeling, sensing of and about the world – our world, and possibly other worlds, derived from our own, improved, imaginary yet real. 

Perpetual actions of proto-machines appear in different areas of Avantgardens. They might be parts of bigger distillation mechanisms, refineries of basic elements, quantum computing mega devices, factories of amalgams, crystal nurseries, cloud regulators, dew collectors, plasma reactors, or field farms of nanotubes. Meditative and playful, maps expand our knowledge about the world we live in and remind us that our humanity stems from the culture we have built over the ages. 

Some environments are structured more like playgrounds for synthetic objects and human companions while others are like open workshops devoted to specific subjects: treatment and production of water, air, energy or synthetic agents. As places of digital permaculture, these cybernetic alchemy gardens, inhabited with proto-machines, are inspired by quantum computers, nanomaterials, plasma physics and artificial intelligence. These emergent sentient biomimetic agents and proto-machines regulate our environments.

Workshops and playgrounds appearing in these maps give us insight into various ongoing processes and ur-elements, with their roots twisted across proto-machine nurseries.

We can witness proto-machines, themselves, coming into being, or minimal hi-tech water workshops or rare element extraction and refinement plantations. Club playgrounds arise as proto-disco balls are forming. Trees of life emerge from fountains in the slopes or volcanoes. Biomimetic workshops generate new proto-machines from existing patterns and solutions borrowed from nature.

Proto Machines are main actors in the networks of the AvantGarden permaculture. Through following their paths and proto-machine connections, the variable atmospheric conditions they control, underground and aerial hotspots and diverse water flows and fountains, we gain insight into the complex poetic and vibrant playgrounds these biomimetic digital artifacts inhabit. 

Alien beings whose growth we initiated distant ages ago have achieved their independence, including the possibilities of self reproduction and regulation of ecosystems. They are both familiar and foreign, inviting and threatening, seducing and sublime. Reminiscent of ancient sculptures imbued with multiple functions as psychological, mythological and religious actors and regulators of society, so do these soft and hard biomimetic agents offer a safe, ongoing future and serve as a curious sanctuary from ordinary life, a playful arena for rethinking society.