five days of being a city cyborg: day 3

Cassandra H
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read

Today I did my walk up near Central Park, enjoying the greenspace and less crowded sidewalks.

Part of today’s walk

While I was there, I found a field at 60 W 100th Street. I decided to take a more micro approach to my photos today, looking closely at the pattern of the grates themselves. Kneeling down to try to get a good image of the pattern, I found this little plant growing stubbornly out of the grate.

Speaking of a micro approach. I wondered what it would be like to make a sketch about an electromagnetic field from the perspective of a plant. What does a plant living in a grate within an EM field feel? Does it perceive the field at all? Does it affect its lifeways? I thought too of Harpreet’s work with plants, and wondered if anyone has tried to use plants as EM sensors yet.

All of this, of course, is tied to broader questions about nonhuman beings in the city. I’ve been hearing some talk of nonhuman intelligence already in DT, questioning what it means that we judge artificial intelligence against standards of human intelligence, when in fact it is possible that AI could think completely differently. In indigenous studies, nonhuman beings are also important parts of conversations about indigenous lifeways, intellectual traditions, and models of environmentalism. Specifically, in indigenous studies, nonhuman beings are often discussed in consideration of the central question: what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be human in relationality to the rest of the planet’s inhabitants?

This relationality continues to haunt me. For now, I decided, I would think about the plant and its environment: the grate, and the field.

Later in the day, I met up with some friends at the Cooper Hewitt, to see the Senses exhibit. I was struck by one piece in particular: one of the scent experiences, near the entrance.

The scent emerging from the letters attempted to describe this experience in one form. I thought, perhaps, it might also be a way to characterize the experience of a plant’s improbable and stubborn growth in the middle of a sidewalk grate.

I experimented with different juxtapositions in Photoshop:

Decided the first was too simple and not intentional enough for me.

I liked this one — the splitting of the typography, the slightly haunted look of the colors that my selector had picked up. I decided to pop it into Processing, where I had Big Ideas(tm) regarding Dan Shiffman’s recursive tree sketch.

I took Shiffman’s recursive tree and flipped it upside down so that it became a root system. After some trial and error, I also reduced the maximum angle degree so that the tree wouldn’t overlap with the plant and the text so much. But I still wasn’t totally happy with the readability of the text and its overlap with the roots.

Ultimately, I ended up with this:

I played with a couple of different effects to represent the field itself, but ultimately decided that they were all too visually busy and that it made more sense to keep it simple. I do like the element of interactivity (which I inherited from Shiffman’s code), and the way that the root system begins as a narrow line within the confines of the grate and spreads out to subtly break against its pattern. Given more time, I would probably do some more work in Processing, particularly to continue exploring the themes that I mentioned earlier about nonhuman actors.

queer white human. writing on indigenous digital media and sf. currently @MFADT learning to make all the things.

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