I am walking outside, thinking about how I will start my first blog post here on the Digital Garden.
I’m contemplating: what do I know about gardening? What gardens do I like? Is it something neat, well-organized, or just a wilderness in which you can find whatever you like and just let it grow?
Something I learned quite early, if we look at Dutch art and design – which is my inheritance as well. We had artists like Mondrian, who started his career painting figuratively and then prune his worldview back to just some straight black lines and red, yellow and blue squares. On the other side of the spectrum we had people like Karel Appel, who said: “I’m just messing around.” Very intuitive, tacit, free form, straight from the heart.
Those are also my personality traits, I think. I have both. Because my garden of eden, the garden in my head, is pretty much an intuitive wilderness. And yet I tend to construct also Mondrian paintings, because that gives you have the idea you somehow have control over the madness inside your own head and in the outside world. Even though you know it’s a fictive control, because we’re all just temporal low-entropy clusters in the eternal flow of energy and matter.
Seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, drawing, talking, writing, typing. It is still great to have all these different modes to experience the world from many different angles. But even when I start contemplating what I want to do here in this experimental digital world, where i can do whatever i want, I start thinking about formats first. That gives me ease of mind. Then I know what to do, and the whole thing becomes more like filling in a template. But maybe I should just use this thing as the gardens I like most: the wilderness gardens, where you can just discover whatever you like and pick a flower here and there.
So, for now, I think I’ll do that.
This is an edited speech-to-text transcript. I think some guidelines are important. I will write or talk myself through it and edit it. I will not use any AI for the writing, only to clean up the “ums” and “uhs” that I just pronounced while talking, and then hand-edit it. So no AI involved there.
I think I will close each post with at least some tidbits. There will always be a song reference.
“Garden” by Magnapop, a track from their 1992 self-titled debut EP, produced with Michael Stipe of R.E.M. The song runs 2:21 and opens the record. Listen on: Apple Music | Spotify| Youtube