So-Called Plants
With Jara Rocha, in the context of Possible Bodies, for a chapter in publication 'Plants by numbers' (edited by Helen Pritchard)


http://www.weareapriori.net/
http://algorithmicbotany.org/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decoding-mathematical-secrets-plants-stunning-leaf-patterns-180972367/
http://ngplant.org/webplant/webplant.html
https://biogeoblog161191733.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/leyes-de-mendel.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilisation_of_Orchids
https://greenspec.nl/growers-using-greenspec/tomato-grower/roel-dijkstra-vlaardingenaxia-naaldwijk-veredeling-van-tomaten/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recalcitrant_seed
https://foldout.eu/
https://foto.amu.cz/aktualne/abelardo-gil-fournier-the-vegetable-transfer-plants-crops-and-the-photographic-surface/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/0910.0387.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44792885_Trends_in_forestry_modelling
https://enibolas.com/2019/05/27/plantations-of-play-colonial-botany-in-videogames/


We write 'plant', or say 'so-called plants' has to do with the problematization of the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero wrote about when studying the socioenvironmental behaviour of aquifers.


[representing plants through math] Computed representations of vegetable kingdom continue to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence?


There are gaps but also connectors in-between plants [but also their elements/parts]; cracks and porous membranes in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence. Cracks can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable bridges; places to be in-relation (non-neutral and also not innocent at all): connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel form one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even the abyss are zones of the world in and for themselves.


it [plants?](I was reacting to the question above) becomes useable - understandable - simpler and somehow we learned to enjoy that as beauty - we also feel good through repetition with just slight changes (burning fire- streaming water, noise music)
left out is the messyness, the misfit, the glitch, all that what we have difficulties to live with, because this could be us/me, also it means we "train" ourselves to see with these representations, which leads to missing out on archea as a separate species for a long time, but is that important ...
???
you miss out on adaption and intra action, hmm, not sure ... biologist use patrons (fibonacci) as elements to compare "real aberrations / differences / variations" to and to research how different variations are related to circumstances which are again influenced by this "reality of plants" - that way ecology evolved ( through statistics partly)

as I somehow understood from Ann Laure this morning statistians are constant adapters - hierarchie comes in where ? as soon as profit and optimisation come in (agricultural studies)


Math-meets-plant vs language/naming meets plants (check: The Author of the Acacia Seeds)
what is being worlded/mattered in this making sense?


Beauty, pattern. Abstraction needs recognition-otherwise? Math and 'nature' confirming each other, holding each other in place.
Fibonacci is mathematically the most optimised occupation of space by elements who need space to find light for instance


What does it mean to regard plants through math -- plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities. (difference between nameable and countable/programmable)


Yusoff: plants "not configured through a mode of auto-affection, but through a mode of relating that is different to 'us' and holds fast to that indifference. (...) a project that attempts to configure parellel universes of sense, which are in excess of knowledge, but nonetheless reside in and beyond the virtual recesses of those knowledge-forming practices" vs the excitement for fibonacci


Not just patterning, but specific forms and formats that rely on circularity, centrality, smooth rhythms. The normative work of symmetry, circles and cycles (abberations vs ideal plants; specimen vs life)
symetry and so on are found in the molecules that make up the organic and the anorganic, so it was always already there ... ?

Plant-plantation. Making plants fit. Training trees.


DISCUSSION
Femke: started in Alchorisma when Mauro presented software for plant generation
outrageuous as a statement
in presentation he was constantly saying 'this generates plants', not making the separation between the generated and the plant, both weighing the software with life generating/god like ability and weighing the plant with the need to perform the software
This started to connect to research with Jara Rocha in Possible Bodies: looking at relation between so called bodies and 3D technologies
If you think about biomedical imaging, the virtualised 3D body stands for the body, without questioning what is different
the system erases the difference instead of working from what is taken away
getting more examples of the way ML, 3D mapping, Laider technology is used in agriculture for spray installations (detecting green fruits/leaves with hyper spectral technology, so you want only spray the leaves, nothing else) -> these are technologies that start to imagine fruits, refining the separation,...
bodies are individualized, held still, looking inside without consequences of looking inside...

Relation between computation and plants
how processes of optimization in computation operate on crops, fertilization...
trying to understand the tools, ran into Fibonacci
computation depends on maths - in articles plants are like computers, beautiful math is like plants... because plants are beautiful, math is beautiful
pleasure and celebration of patterns that are recognized both in plant life and computing, wondering what this does to plants and what it does to computation 
-> make equation between compuation and nature

Linked with fear of having something totally explainable? Predictable in reality? 
Suspicions are that it is all arguments for ideal plants, symmtrical/asymmetrical, crooked/straight.... politically problematic

trying to understand how a tree is constructed, therefore control
allows to negate specificity of tree

interview with retired math professor says: fibonacci is a lie, false examples. Myth making
wanting to control, to understand. I don't think it is a lie (what kind of lie?) it is used as a tool to "understand" and to imitate in technology - There is an idea that what nature produces is already optimised (survival of the fittest Darwin) through evolution, so all it invents is always "best"! so if we can imitate that we win. maths help to imitate

Better understand complexity (sociology)

The Answer is 42/13 ???? wat does this mean?

Fetishization of perfection, an idea of perfection

Looking at plants on line and in the field -- is very different.

Reverberation rooted in platonic/ideal with plantlife.
Fit nature into is.

Either it is god ... than it makes sense there is a logic? or not!

Can't reduce nature to formula. Economist want this too -- it is boring. A lot of hypothesis for the ideal balance to be achieved

Discussion we had with people from Plantentuin Meise: we know, but still use perfection/prediction because chaos doesn't work with systems and models
What is chaos helping us to do?
It allows to think that tree is a free being, expresses itself and its soul when it is growing
it is re-humbalizing us 

how to know, do we need to know what the tree communicates? (thoughts about accepting we can't communicate with plants, trees or stones, that might humbalize us and help us to be inter-dependant and with.

math and growing -- some bio-laws work
not everything can be explained by math

When writing about this with Jara, we were looking at critique/history of naming/taxonomy and computation/everything can always be separated.
When you use math to look at plants, is there a difference when math and plants meet and when language and plants meet? Annie thinks probably not math is a language.
Counting leafs, measuring ...

Tendency in mathematics: different schools; 20 years ago VUB professor performance: proof of existence of god
SO: read to history of math -- it is being abused as a ground layer -- computation 

Brutal non doubtful math is what figues in computation - it makes things work
math as a discovery vs math as an invention

math and computing: everything is predictable, there are formulas for everything...
maybe at some point AI wwill have some soul and act in ways we cannot control
cfr reading session: evolution of AI will be so quick that we cannot relate to things anymore

quantum mechanics and atoms that cannot be grasped -- 
upsetting scientific discourse.

what force is there that cannot be grasped
what cannot be controled 
coming through this through Karen Barad, upsetting of order of things through quantum mechanics, is too queer to hold
logic, simultaneity, linearity, cause & effect...

no one really believes that nature is like math
but when you look at agricultural operations, when singularity comes in, the critique is made but we continue doing whatever we were doing, operates within paradigm of computation, capitalism, existing systems...

unconventional computing
modest computing
non-binary computing
does these exist?

The intelligence of plants
-- unconventional computation 
using algos to understand nature better


in computation understanding always comes with exploitation at one point ! knowledge comes with exploitation

you cannot change attitudes with knowledge - 
can't you?