Matthew Pak
Mattville
Pixel farming, Suburb, Systems
Context
The lawn is a kind of remnant of the American agrarian pastoral dream that experienced its realization through the Jeffersonian grid and of the post-World War II American suburban dream that we are familiar with today. This dream is subject to constant reproduction and distribution. Because of this there are dispersed, tangible remnants and effects of this dream.
Lawns & Systems
An unruliness in lawns belies withdrawn systems that are regenerative, resilient, and sociable. As if there is a body of constituents in a restorative balance. As if our relation and interaction with these constituents has been one of imbalance.
Should these systems choose to make room for us, there would be an opportunity to engage holistically as inputs in this consensus formation. Birds eat seeds of plants and help move the plants around. The plants could have made their seeds poisonous, and some do, and this would be a case of not making room for extra constituencies. Plants will choose sociability or otherwise, in their response to machine behavior and our practices—much as they have done for other constituents. And through an open-ended system, machines can adjust and respond in ways that are sociable and dialogic.
New Aesthetics
An open-ended system can engage these systems in their complex, dialogic, and sociable terms. It can become a system that forms a new aesthetic based on a more holistic consensus involving interspecific bodies. In this case, these bodies are the plants and related systems. These bodies and systems have built-in organizations that will be accepted as inputs for a new and inclusive aesthetic.
This aesthetics has potential to imbue ideas of diverse environments, sustainable landscapes, and parallel markets. Ideas which imbue progressive qualities. Qualities that could be marketable so to be leveraged for the aid, deployment, and reproduction of models that engage the systems.
Either way, when seen as a new aesthetic formed by a holistic consensus process, or as a progressive project in a capitalist environment, there are implications for the house. In the first case, the house becomes an element that intermediates its inhabitants and the external bodies of the consensus system. In the second case, the house communicates symbolic ideals and discards incompatible legacy elements that cannot reconcile with the “project” formed by the aesthetics.
In optimistic terms, there is an engagement with potential for nuanced relation with existing lawn systems. This iteration of pixel farming aspires to be an intermediary tool to enable engagement with constituents of lawn systems through a shared consensus.
Seed Dispersion Mechanism
Seed Dispersion Post Process 01
Seed Dispersion Post Process 02
Seed Dispersion Post Process 03
Prototype A
Prototype B