The Garden
Written by Luke WeaverThe Garden
The garden is an intimate system.
An interconnected web of life, each component playing a critical role in systems larger than themselves.
Life forms, executing biological programs, defined by their structures, functions, aesthetics, and interfaces.
Beings, dependent on the system for their identity.
Each system characterized by its components and their interactions.
The flower is reliant on an outside entity—the bee—for its most intimate function: reproduction.
The bee is reliant on pollen and nectar not only for its survival, but its role and social status in its colony.
Pollination is a process, a system interface, that informs the bee who it is ("I am a forager.") and gives the flower purpose ("I propagate.").
Flowers and bees can exhibit goal-directedness (propagate/forage) without any knowledge of the irreplaceable function they provide to the garden; their biological imperatives are inherited from systems they can't possibly understand.
The garden itself is an interface for life. A spatial, living medium in which interconnected beings can permissionlessly find purchase.
The World Computer Sculpture Garden
"The World Computer Sculpture Garden is a show as contract as well as a show of contracts." —0xfff
The World Computer Sculpture Garden by 0xfff introduced a cultural primitive: the Sculpture interface.
Its structure is so simple it almost feels familiar: title, authors, addresses, urls, text.
The Garden simultaneously is a Sculpture and is in a Sculpture.
It is an intimate space for the selected artists to plant a Sculpture, and for guests to plant flowers, in the infinite garden of Ethereum.
The array of contract addresses appears to limit the show to the works by the curated artists.
However, one entry turned the Sculpture interface itself into a key to the Garden, rendering one reserved space in the Garden open to potentially anyone.
Extimacy
0x113d's sculpture, titled 'Extimacy', "bounces" to another Sculpture, opening up its entry in the Garden to any Sculpture 113 chooses to point 'Extimacy' towards.
Therefore, any contract that conforms to the constraints of the Sculpture interface becomes a candidate for the show.
The name, 'Extimacy', is a reference to Lacan, who claims that the most intimate parts of ourselves come from the exterior, the Thing that is radically external to us.
Our subjective experience is not ours, it is constituted through the Other.
The core of your desires may define you, but they are very much not-you, they come from the language, culture, and social contexts in which you exist.
'Extimacy' is an invitation extended through the Sculpture interface to share an intimate space in the Garden.
If 'Extimacy' points its contract address to another sculpture, who is the artist? Is 113 the artist? Is it the creator of the contracts chosen as the placeholder, the authors()?
Or, does authorship reach even further, past the array of addresses?
"...interface means precisely that my relationship to the Other is never face-to-face, that it is always mediated by the interposed digital machinery whose structure is that of a labyrinth"
Intimacy
Intimate Systems allows collectors, observers, appreciators, and vandals to share in the intimate, interconnected spaces designed by the artists in the show.
The pieces are ultimately dependent on and defined by the external, both explicitly and implicitly.
Some require direct onchain interaction to take form, others rely on inherently human mechanisms which are offchain and inscrutable to Ethereum, like meaning-making and storytelling.
Because the pieces in Intimate Systems utilize the Sculpture interface, any of these works could be exhibited in the Garden with a single function call from the 'Extimacy' contract.
The World Computer Sculpture Garden invited seven artists to the Garden, 'Extimacy' transformed the Sculpture interface itself into an open invitation to the external, and Intimate Systems, in turn, responds by extending this invitation to those who interact with the works in the show.
Just as the flowers and bees can carry out their duties without any knowledge of the crucial role they play in the ecosystem of the garden, participants in Intimate Systems can satisfy their desires, oblivious to the role they might one day be playing in the Garden.
This is the power of interconnected, intimate systems. One can engage with an artwork, deriving genuine, deeply personal meaning, without the necessity (or ability) to comprehend the forces and systems that shape that experience.
Through the contracts they've deployed for the show, the artists of Intimate Systems provide a structure for the subjective.
Code, a language that may be entirely foreign to the viewer, as the mediator for deeply personal encounters with an unstoppable system.
Data from the world computer—text, proofs, sound, bytes, video, bids, lines, and numbers—as interface to the Other.
Intimate Systems as an opportunity for outsiders to be pronounced through an alien entity, whose "immense circuitry of 'murmurs' remains forever beyond the scope of comprehension" (Žižek).
Ethereum as Other. Ethereum as author.