Hermenautic Circle blog

glitchnews:

Nasa’s Curiosity rover revealed the first clear evidence of past flowing water at its landing site in Mars’ equatorial Gale Crater. The robot has returned pictures of classic conglomerates - rocks that are made up of gravels and sand.

If an Algorithm Finds and Defines a Trend, Is It Still Cool?

Part of long-term movements’ success stems from being given the time to simmer and spread organically. While we’d love to hear what “Birth of a Trend” discovers (and you know, congratulate ourselves if we’re already in on whatever it may be), we’re equally interested to see how the program’s discovery affects, for better or worse, the arc and popularity of the very movements it defines.

arealliveghost:

pep talk at the end of the world from @horse_ebooks

Our friend and HiLobrow contributor Franklin Bruno recently came up with the following high-lowbrow “DIY discominimal mashup” experience. Here are Bruno’s instructions.

STEP 1: Start the two songs below. They’ll go in and out of phase w/ each other, so it doesn’t matter which you start first or if there’s a gap of a few seconds.

STEP 2: Adjust relative volumes to taste.

STEP 3: Trip the fuck out for about 8 mins or as long as you can stand it.

Above: the semi-aleatory “In C” (1964), by Terry Riley — often cited as the first minimalist composition. It consists of 53 short, numbered musical phrases, lasting from half a beat to 32 beats; each phrase may be repeated an arbitrary number of times.

Above: “Love in C Minor,” the influential 1975–76 debut song by French disco drummer and singer-songwriter Marc Cerrone — in collaboration with Alec R. Costandinos.

UPDATE: Thanks to Boing Boing traffic, this is now the most popular HiLobrow post of the past 12 months… and one of the 25 most popular posts we’ve ever published! CLICK HERE to check out lists of our other most popular posts…

He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them.  Emma was like all other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language.  He could not perceive—this man of such broad experience—the difference in feelings that might underlie similarities of expression.  Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness; one had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.

He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them.  Emma was like all other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language.  He could not perceive—this man of such broad experience—the difference in feelings that might underlie similarities of expression.  Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness; one had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.

He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them.  Emma was like all other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language.  He could not perceive—this man of such broad experience—the difference in feelings that might underlie similarities of expression.  Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness; one had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.

He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them.  Emma was like all other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language.  He could not perceive—this man of such broad experience—the difference in feelings that might underlie similarities of expression.  Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness; one had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.

BLACKSOCKS | Smarter Socks - Probably the smartest socks in the world (by BLACKSOCKS.COM)

From late September 2002 through early 2006, HiLobrow’s Joshua Glenn wrote THE EXAMINED LIFE, a weekly three-item column for the Boston Globe‘s Ideas section; and from late 2006 though mid-2008, he wrote BRAINIAC, an Ideas section blog that was repurposed as a three-item weekly column in the paper. This series reprints a few Q&As from Glenn’s two Ideas columns. [Brainiac image via 4CP]

December 11, 2005
BLUE LAWS

Like small children still do, natural scientists and others, from Leonardo da Vinci to Johannes Kepler to Descartes to Newton, long wondered why the sky is blue. As recently as 1862 the celebrated astronomer Sir John Herschel was forced to admit that the color of skylight remained one of the “great standing enigmas of meteorology.” The enigma was solved, more or less, in the 1870s by British physicists James Clerk Maxwell and Lord Rayleigh. But according to Peter Pesic, a physicist and author who teaches at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, its solution remains fascinating because it contains “deep realizations about the nature of the universe.” Pesic, whose book Sky in a Bottle has just been published by MIT Press, spoke with me via telephone from Santa Fe.

IDEAS: Why do children ask why the sky is blue?

PESIC: Because, I suspect, it’s such a striking and amazing phenomenon that we see all the time — and because the color seems to be so distinctive. As far as we know, though, thousands of years of human history passed before someone wondered about the sky’s color. Neither the [pre-Platonic] Greeks nor the ancient Chinese wrote about it.

IDEAS: When did scientists begin to ask the question?

PESIC: The question emerges for the first time in a treatise attributed to Aristotle, one that presciently suggests that the color of skylight has something to do with an interaction between the air and outside influences — that is, the surrounding darkness. But why blue, as opposed to another color? No one asked themselves this question until Descartes. He attributed the color of the sky to particles floating and spinning in something later called “ether,” and which turned red or blue depending on whether they were spinning more or less rapidly. But this was, of course, sheer speculation.

IDEAS: You claim that art and science arrived at the solution simultaneously.

PESIC: In his 1869 lectures, the English art critic John Ruskin claimed that the sky’s blue is caused by what he called the “divided air” — which is to say, not by a watery vapor or particles in the air, as was widely believed, but by what the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, working around the same time, claimed were the molecules of the atmosphere itself. Maxwell was a pioneer in convincing scientists in the physical reality of atoms, though one couldn’t see or feel them. If the sky’s blue depends on the diffraction of light, as experimentation at the time suggested it did — but if, as Maxwell believed, there were no particles suspended in “ether” to do the diffracting — then one had to accept a far-reaching conclusion, that those “particles” must be air molecules. Atomic theory is perhaps most attractively proved by the sky’s blueness.

READ MORE essays by Joshua Glenn, originally published in: THE BAFFLER | BOSTON GLOBE IDEAS | BRAINIAC | CABINET | FEED | HERMENAUT | HILOBROW | HILOBROW: GENERATIONS | HILOBROW: RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION | HILOBROW: SHOCKING BLOCKING | THE IDLER | IO9 | N+1 | NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | SEMIONAUT | SLATE

Cool Breeze - Judy Pace, Thalmus Rasulala

Over the next decade, changes in computing power will enable teams of hi-tech drones to operate virtually on their own, or as “robotic wingmen” to piloted aircraft, said Werner Dahm, the Air Force’s former top scientist. At a testing range in the Arizona desert, Apache helicopters are flying together with unmanned choppers in experiments the Pentagon believes will serve as an eventual model for future warfare. “We’re not far away from having a single piloted Apache or other helicopter system and a larger number of unmanned systems that fly with that,” said Dahm, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Arizona State University.

Robot is my wingman: The next wave in US robotic war: drones on their own - Hindustan Times

The book itself is typed and mimeographed or photocopied, staple-bound with some awful art. The whole thing - production, erratic rules, bad art - reminds me very much of Arduin Grimoire, and it's obvious that the thing was a labour of love. And I've kept my copy for very many years.... Eventually we came up with a game we called Mazes. As far as I know, this was an original development by us. You drew a maze and someone had to navigate their way through it. Then we added traps. Then an item you could pick up to avoid a trap - you could get past the fire if you had a fire extinguisher, for example. Then monsters: we used Daleks. If you'd found the machine gun, you could kill the Dalek before it got you, and your exploration continued.

The book itself is typed and mimeographed or photocopied, staple-bound with some awful art. The whole thing - production, erratic rules, bad art - reminds me very much of Arduin Grimoire, and it's obvious that the thing was a labour of love. And I've kept my copy for very many years.... Eventually we came up with a game we called Mazes. As far as I know, this was an original development by us. You drew a maze and someone had to navigate their way through it. Then we added traps. Then an item you could pick up to avoid a trap - you could get past the fire if you had a fire extinguisher, for example. Then monsters: we used Daleks. If you'd found the machine gun, you could kill the Dalek before it got you, and your exploration continued.

jomc:

The flight was even captured by Digital Globe’s satellite as it flew over White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in the image above that was highlighted today on Google Earth Blog. This great image is an interesting, almost sad reversal of the photos we are used to seeing of the shuttle heading away from Earth toward space. (via Space Shuttle Endeavour’s Final Flight as Seen From Space | Wired Science | Wired.com)

The book itself is typed and mimeographed or photocopied, staple-bound with some awful art. The whole thing - production, erratic rules, bad art - reminds me very much of Arduin Grimoire, and it's obvious that the thing was a labour of love. And I've kept my copy for very many years.... Eventually we came up with a game we called Mazes. As far as I know, this was an original development by us. You drew a maze and someone had to navigate their way through it. Then we added traps. Then an item you could pick up to avoid a trap - you could get past the fire if you had a fire extinguisher, for example. Then monsters: we used Daleks. If you'd found the machine gun, you could kill the Dalek before it got you, and your exploration continued.

The book itself is typed and mimeographed or photocopied, staple-bound with some awful art. The whole thing - production, erratic rules, bad art - reminds me very much of Arduin Grimoire, and it's obvious that the thing was a labour of love. And I've kept my copy for very many years.... Eventually we came up with a game we called Mazes. As far as I know, this was an original development by us. You drew a maze and someone had to navigate their way through it. Then we added traps. Then an item you could pick up to avoid a trap - you could get past the fire if you had a fire extinguisher, for example. Then monsters: we used Daleks. If you'd found the machine gun, you could kill the Dalek before it got you, and your exploration continued.

The book itself is typed and mimeographed or photocopied, staple-bound with some awful art. The whole thing - production, erratic rules, bad art - reminds me very much of Arduin Grimoire, and it's obvious that the thing was a labour of love. And I've kept my copy for very many years.... Eventually we came up with a game we called Mazes. As far as I know, this was an original development by us. You drew a maze and someone had to navigate their way through it. Then we added traps. Then an item you could pick up to avoid a trap - you could get past the fire if you had a fire extinguisher, for example. Then monsters: we used Daleks. If you'd found the machine gun, you could kill the Dalek before it got you, and your exploration continued.

The book itself is typed and mimeographed or photocopied, staple-bound with some awful art. The whole thing - production, erratic rules, bad art - reminds me very much of Arduin Grimoire, and it's obvious that the thing was a labour of love. And I've kept my copy for very many years.... Eventually we came up with a game we called Mazes. As far as I know, this was an original development by us. You drew a maze and someone had to navigate their way through it. Then we added traps. Then an item you could pick up to avoid a trap - you could get past the fire if you had a fire extinguisher, for example. Then monsters: we used Daleks. If you'd found the machine gun, you could kill the Dalek before it got you, and your exploration continued.

The book itself is typed and mimeographed or photocopied, staple-bound with some awful art. The whole thing - production, erratic rules, bad art - reminds me very much of Arduin Grimoire, and it's obvious that the thing was a labour of love. And I've kept my copy for very many years.... Eventually we came up with a game we called Mazes. As far as I know, this was an original development by us. You drew a maze and someone had to navigate their way through it. Then we added traps. Then an item you could pick up to avoid a trap - you could get past the fire if you had a fire extinguisher, for example. Then monsters: we used Daleks. If you'd found the machine gun, you could kill the Dalek before it got you, and your exploration continued.

The book itself is typed and mimeographed or photocopied, staple-bound with some awful art. The whole thing - production, erratic rules, bad art - reminds me very much of Arduin Grimoire, and it's obvious that the thing was a labour of love. And I've kept my copy for very many years.... Eventually we came up with a game we called Mazes. As far as I know, this was an original development by us. You drew a maze and someone had to navigate their way through it. Then we added traps. Then an item you could pick up to avoid a trap - you could get past the fire if you had a fire extinguisher, for example. Then monsters: we used Daleks. If you'd found the machine gun, you could kill the Dalek before it got you, and your exploration continued.

The book itself is typed and mimeographed or photocopied, staple-bound with some awful art. The whole thing - production, erratic rules, bad art - reminds me very much of Arduin Grimoire, and it's obvious that the thing was a labour of love. And I've kept my copy for very many years.... Eventually we came up with a game we called Mazes. As far as I know, this was an original development by us. You drew a maze and someone had to navigate their way through it. Then we added traps. Then an item you could pick up to avoid a trap - you could get past the fire if you had a fire extinguisher, for example. Then monsters: we used Daleks. If you'd found the machine gun, you could kill the Dalek before it got you, and your exploration continued.

Essays

• This Is a Game: A (very) Brief History of Larp Part 1
• Guide to Future-Present Archetypes Part 4: The Commodity Swarm

Interviews

• An Interview with Philippe Morel
• An Interview with Superlative TV

Artist Profiles

• Julian Oliver

Five Videos

• Lucky PDF’s Sincerely Yours
• Ming Wong’s “Forget it, Jake… it’s Chinatown.”
• Adham Faramawy’s Leave the Ordinary Behind

Prosthetic Knowledge Picks

• Computer Graphics & Art 1976 – 1978
• CurAudio / DocuMP3

More

• Jeff Noon’s Sporecast
• Recommended Reading: Captives of the Cloud by Metahaven for E-Flux
• Digital Gallery Hoping
• Recommended Reading: Net Narrative catalog
• A Tribute to John Cage on his Centennial

philmfotos:

The Warriors (1979)

Posted by: @Moloknee

The AR aesthetic. The hand that reaches into the photograph, and peels back time.

(Plenty more on the excellent philmfotos tumblr.)

We would like to take a brief moment to thank this month’s sponsors. These are the organizations and companies that keep us publishing, so be sure to check them out!

Featured Advertisers

• Brooklyn Museum- GO is a community-curated open studio project. Artists across Brooklyn opened their studio doors, so that the public could decide who will be featured in a group show at the Brooklyn Museum
• NYU Steinhardt -  Offers graduate art programs in Studio Art, Art Education, Art Therapy, Visual Culture: Costume Studies, and Visual Arts Administration. Admission Deadlines: January 6, 15 & February 1, 2013
• Creative Time - The Last Pictures, Trevor Paglen has developed a collection of one hundred images that will be etched onto a silicon disc to be sent into orbit onboard the Echostar XVI satellite in Fall 2012, as both a time capsule and a message to the future
• Vera List Art Project - Culture Vulture, a new commissioned print by acclaimed artist Barbara Kruger, has been released to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Vera List Art Project
• International Center of Photography –  The ICP-Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies offers a curriculum of professional and studio practice, critical study, and Resident Artist Projects. Application Deadline: January, 18, 2013
• Association of Public Art - Open Air, an interactive art installation that allows participants’ voices to transform the night sky over Philadelphia’s historic Benjamin Franklin Parkway. September 20 and October 14, 2012
• Norte Maar - To be a Lady: Forty-Five Women in the Arts,  is on view at the 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery featuring the work of forty-five female artists born over the last century. September 24, 2012 – January 18, 2013
• Guggenheim - Stillspotting nyc: bronx, the fifth and final edition in the stillspotting nyc series, Improv Everywhere presents Audiogram, an interactive audio experience and theatrical group hearing test designed for the South Bronx. October 13-14, 2012
• Vilcek Foundation - Now accepting submissions for dARTboard, a digital art space that invites foreign-born artists living permanently in the United States and specializing in new media art forms to submit their work for exhibition. Submission Deadline: October 22nd 
  

Network Sponsors

• Art Systems – Professional art gallery, antiques and collections management software
• Scott Chasse Art Panels - Quality artist’s painting panels, made-to-order in Brooklyn, NY
• TNC Gallery - App* Art: Painted Paper,  Continues Peter J. Ketchum’s interest in the past as it is encapsulated in printed matter. September 11- October 25, 2012 
• Safety: An Art Exhibition - Group exhibition curated by Cassandra Young about actively seeking contentment and in ascending towards needing nothing. On view at Leloveve Gallery, September 2012
• TheBowerbirds - brings together a collection of art from various Asian artists and makes them available to everyone as art prints
• Brooklyn Comics Festival - an annual curated event consisting of four parts: artists and publishers displaying and selling publications; gallery exhibitions; films and performances; and lectures and conversations on comics. Free to the public, Saturday, November 10
• Waterfront Toronto - Seeking proposal submissions from artists for three public art opportunities on Front Street East in the West Don Lands. Submission Deadline: October 22, 2012
• Western Front - Pro-Am is a three day conference about internet art practice, bringing together a range of thinkers and practitioners to explore the implications of the changing role of artists as ‘users’ online. September 28, 2012 
  
• Western Front - Announced the launch of their new website  
  

If you are interested in advertising on Rhizome, please get in touch with Nectar Ads, the Art Ad Network.

A few examples of landscapes waking up after long periods of time lying dormant have been in the news recently.

[Image: Maria Thereza Alves's Seeds of Change garden, via Facebook].

First, there is artist Maria Thereza Alves’s “ballast seed garden” project, called Seeds of Change, which arose from a moment of revelation:

Between 1680 and the early 1900s, ships’ ballast—earth, stones and gravel from trade boats from all over the world used to weigh down the vessel as it docked—was offloaded into the river at Bristol. This ballast contained the seeds of plants from wherever the ship had sailed. Maria Thereza Alves discovered that these ballast seeds can lie dormant for hundreds of years, but that, by excavating the river bed, it is possible to germinate and grow these seeds into flourishing plants.

While Alves seems not to have literally dug down into the old layers of the river in order to harvest her seeds—instead sourcing contemporary examples of species known to have sprouted from mounds of ballast over the last few hundred years—her project nonetheless has the character of a long-lost landscape waking up, popping up like a refugee amidst the rubble in a return to visibility.

[Images: The ballast garden, via Facebook].

This idea of accidental ballast gardens—heavily detoured landscapes-to-come lying patiently in wait before springing back to life several centuries after their initial transportation—is incredible; I might even suggest parallels here with such 21st-century problems as how we might sterilize spacecraft before sending them offworld, to places like Mars, lest we, in a sense, bring along our own bacterial “ballast” and thus unwittingly terraform those distant locations with escaped landscapes from Earth. Might we someday culture “ballast gardens” on other planets from the tiniest of remnant organic compounds found on our own ancient and dismantled ships?

[Image: Maria Thereza Alves's Seeds of Change garden, via Facebook].

Meanwhile, in a headline that reads like something straight out of Stanislaw Lem or H.P. Lovecraft, we read that “Nunavut’s Mysterious Ancient Life Could Return by 2100 as Arctic Warms.” In other words, forests that thrived in the hostile conditions of “Canada’s extreme north” nearly three million years ago might return to re-colonize the landscape as the region dramatically warms over the next century due to climate change.

This is a relatively mundane resurrection—after all, it is just a forest—but even the suggestion that future climate conditions on Earth might re-awaken ancient ecosystems, dormant environments in which humans might find it less than easy to survive, is an incredible cautionary tale for the future of the planet. That, and this story offers the awesomely mythic image of human explorers wandering across the thawing earth of the far north as strange and ancient things bloom from cracks in the ground around them.

[Images: Various herbaria pages].

In both cases, I’m reminded of an essay published in Lapham’s Quarterly a few years ago, by novelist Daniel Mason. There, Mason writes about “nature’s return,” a scenario in which dormant and waylaid seeds thrive on the rubble of the present-day landscape. “In the dusty cracks between the concrete, seedlings would germinate, grow,” Mason writes, heralding unpredictable landscapes to come.

[Images: More herbaria pages].

However, referring to these remnant seeds left over from older landscapes, Mason writes that “most would not germinate straight away,” even if given free rein over an empty field or cracked streetscape. “Rather,” he adds, these seeds “would lodge in microscopic nooks and crannies, some to be eaten or crushed, others to be paved over, but most, simply, to wait. A square meter of urban soil can contain tens of thousands of seeds persisting in a state of suspended animation, waiting to be woken from their slumber. After the fire brigades rescued the London Natural History Museum from German incendiaries, Albizia silk-tree seeds bloomed on their herbarium sheets, liberated from two hundred years of dormancy by the precise combination of flame and water.”

A square meter of urban soil can contain tens of thousands of seeds persisting in a state of suspended animation, waiting to be woken from their slumber. In Mason’s words, this return of dormant life “suggests the parallel existence of a hidden world, fully formed, simply awaiting the opportunity for expression.”

Whether dredging up old riverbeds full of ballast from previous centuries, or watching new storms form over the Arctic, bringing back climates unseen for millions of years, what might yet wake up from the ground around us, return from dormancy, resurrect, as it were, and make itself at home again on a planet that thought it had since moved on?

(Ballast garden link spotted via Katie Holten).

A few examples of landscapes waking up after long periods of time lying dormant have been in the news recently.

[Image: Maria Thereza Alves's Seeds of Change garden, via Facebook].

First, there is artist Maria Thereza Alves’s “ballast seed garden” project, called Seeds of Change, which arose from a moment of revelation:

Between 1680 and the early 1900s, ships’ ballast—earth, stones and gravel from trade boats from all over the world used to weigh down the vessel as it docked—was offloaded into the river at Bristol. This ballast contained the seeds of plants from wherever the ship had sailed. Maria Thereza Alves discovered that these ballast seeds can lie dormant for hundreds of years, but that, by excavating the river bed, it is possible to germinate and grow these seeds into flourishing plants.

While Alves seems not to have literally dug down into the old layers of the river in order to harvest her seeds—instead sourcing contemporary examples of species known to have sprouted from mounds of ballast over the last few hundred years—her project nonetheless has the character of a long-lost landscape waking up, popping up like a refugee amidst the rubble in a return to visibility.

[Images: The ballast garden, via Facebook].

This idea of accidental ballast gardens—heavily detoured landscapes-to-come lying patiently in wait before springing back to life several centuries after their initial transportation—is incredible; I might even suggest parallels here with such 21st-century problems as how we might sterilize spacecraft before sending them offworld, to places like Mars, lest we, in a sense, bring along our own bacterial “ballast” and thus unwittingly terraform those distant locations with escaped landscapes from Earth. Might we someday culture “ballast gardens” on other planets from the tiniest of remnant organic compounds found on our own ancient and dismantled ships?

[Image: Maria Thereza Alves's Seeds of Change garden, via Facebook].

Meanwhile, in a headline that reads like something straight out of Stanislaw Lem or H.P. Lovecraft, we read that “Nunavut’s Mysterious Ancient Life Could Return by 2100 as Arctic Warms.” In other words, forests that thrived in the hostile conditions of “Canada’s extreme north” nearly three million years ago might return to re-colonize the landscape as the region dramatically warms over the next century due to climate change.

This is a relatively mundane resurrection—after all, it is just a forest—but even the suggestion that future climate conditions on Earth might re-awaken ancient ecosystems, dormant environments in which humans might find it less than easy to survive, is an incredible cautionary tale for the future of the planet. That, and this story offers the awesomely mythic image of human explorers wandering across the thawing earth of the far north as strange and ancient things bloom from cracks in the ground around them.

[Images: Various herbaria pages].

In both cases, I’m reminded of an essay published in Lapham’s Quarterly a few years ago, by novelist Daniel Mason. There, Mason writes about “nature’s return,” a scenario in which dormant and waylaid seeds thrive on the rubble of the present-day landscape. “In the dusty cracks between the concrete, seedlings would germinate, grow,” Mason writes, heralding unpredictable landscapes to come.

[Images: More herbaria pages].

However, referring to these remnant seeds left over from older landscapes, Mason writes that “most would not germinate straight away,” even if given free rein over an empty field or cracked streetscape. “Rather,” he adds, these seeds “would lodge in microscopic nooks and crannies, some to be eaten or crushed, others to be paved over, but most, simply, to wait. A square meter of urban soil can contain tens of thousands of seeds persisting in a state of suspended animation, waiting to be woken from their slumber. After the fire brigades rescued the London Natural History Museum from German incendiaries, Albizia silk-tree seeds bloomed on their herbarium sheets, liberated from two hundred years of dormancy by the precise combination of flame and water.”

A square meter of urban soil can contain tens of thousands of seeds persisting in a state of suspended animation, waiting to be woken from their slumber. In Mason’s words, this return of dormant life “suggests the parallel existence of a hidden world, fully formed, simply awaiting the opportunity for expression.”

Whether dredging up old riverbeds full of ballast from previous centuries, or watching new storms form over the Arctic, bringing back climates unseen for millions of years, what might yet wake up from the ground around us, return from dormancy, resurrect, as it were, and make itself at home again on a planet that thought it had since moved on?

(Ballast garden link spotted via Katie Holten).

A few examples of landscapes waking up after long periods of time lying dormant have been in the news recently.

[Image: Maria Thereza Alves's Seeds of Change garden, via Facebook].

First, there is artist Maria Thereza Alves’s “ballast seed garden” project, called Seeds of Change, which arose from a moment of revelation:

Between 1680 and the early 1900s, ships’ ballast—earth, stones and gravel from trade boats from all over the world used to weigh down the vessel as it docked—was offloaded into the river at Bristol. This ballast contained the seeds of plants from wherever the ship had sailed. Maria Thereza Alves discovered that these ballast seeds can lie dormant for hundreds of years, but that, by excavating the river bed, it is possible to germinate and grow these seeds into flourishing plants.

While Alves seems not to have literally dug down into the old layers of the river in order to harvest her seeds—instead sourcing contemporary examples of species known to have sprouted from mounds of ballast over the last few hundred years—her project nonetheless has the character of a long-lost landscape waking up, popping up like a refugee amidst the rubble in a return to visibility.

[Images: The ballast garden, via Facebook].

This idea of accidental ballast gardens—heavily detoured landscapes-to-come lying patiently in wait before springing back to life several centuries after their initial transportation—is incredible; I might even suggest parallels here with such 21st-century problems as how we might sterilize spacecraft before sending them offworld, to places like Mars, lest we, in a sense, bring along our own bacterial “ballast” and thus unwittingly terraform those distant locations with escaped landscapes from Earth. Might we someday culture “ballast gardens” on other planets from the tiniest of remnant organic compounds found on our own ancient and dismantled ships?

[Image: Maria Thereza Alves's Seeds of Change garden, via Facebook].

Meanwhile, in a headline that reads like something straight out of Stanislaw Lem or H.P. Lovecraft, we read that “Nunavut’s Mysterious Ancient Life Could Return by 2100 as Arctic Warms.” In other words, forests that thrived in the hostile conditions of “Canada’s extreme north” nearly three million years ago might return to re-colonize the landscape as the region dramatically warms over the next century due to climate change.

This is a relatively mundane resurrection—after all, it is just a forest—but even the suggestion that future climate conditions on Earth might re-awaken ancient ecosystems, dormant environments in which humans might find it less than easy to survive, is an incredible cautionary tale for the future of the planet. That, and this story offers the awesomely mythic image of human explorers wandering across the thawing earth of the far north as strange and ancient things bloom from cracks in the ground around them.

[Images: Various herbaria pages].

In both cases, I’m reminded of an essay published in Lapham’s Quarterly a few years ago, by novelist Daniel Mason. There, Mason writes about “nature’s return,” a scenario in which dormant and waylaid seeds thrive on the rubble of the present-day landscape. “In the dusty cracks between the concrete, seedlings would germinate, grow,” Mason writes, heralding unpredictable landscapes to come.

[Images: More herbaria pages].

However, referring to these remnant seeds left over from older landscapes, Mason writes that “most would not germinate straight away,” even if given free rein over an empty field or cracked streetscape. “Rather,” he adds, these seeds “would lodge in microscopic nooks and crannies, some to be eaten or crushed, others to be paved over, but most, simply, to wait. A square meter of urban soil can contain tens of thousands of seeds persisting in a state of suspended animation, waiting to be woken from their slumber. After the fire brigades rescued the London Natural History Museum from German incendiaries, Albizia silk-tree seeds bloomed on their herbarium sheets, liberated from two hundred years of dormancy by the precise combination of flame and water.”

A square meter of urban soil can contain tens of thousands of seeds persisting in a state of suspended animation, waiting to be woken from their slumber. In Mason’s words, this return of dormant life “suggests the parallel existence of a hidden world, fully formed, simply awaiting the opportunity for expression.”

Whether dredging up old riverbeds full of ballast from previous centuries, or watching new storms form over the Arctic, bringing back climates unseen for millions of years, what might yet wake up from the ground around us, return from dormancy, resurrect, as it were, and make itself at home again on a planet that thought it had since moved on?

(Ballast garden link spotted via Katie Holten).

The Fall’s “Room to Live” album came out September 29, 1982. Here’s a live version of the title track from “In a Hole,” recorded a month earlier.