Dec 11 (Day 5) — V. There are Two Types of Relationships
I found myself too busy attending to so many visitors that I couldn’t keep up with observing what was actually happening in the garden. My time was spent repeatedly explaining the same things to each visitor, continuing from the previous week.
I feel that my explanations are gradually improving, but at the same time, it also feels as if my explanations are becoming “homogenised.”
The work itself is multi-layered, so I cannot convey everything, and my explanations inevitably feel unstable. I wonder if I would feel bored the moment it became a template. Even though my current, unstable explanations may be insufficient, I see them as seeds, offered with the hope that they will someday sprout somewhere, according to the capacities of those who listened.
There was a time when someone said something to me, so I went outside to buy lunch. At that moment, I suddenly realised that even outside the exhibition space, all things remain interconnected, and I felt keenly that “the world is made up of relationships.” However, the kind of relationships I am referring to here feels slightly different from what Gregory Bateson meant by “relationships”.
The relationships I was sensing at that moment are closer to the concept of pratītyasamutpāda (dependent arising), which I also intentionally explore in the exhibition. It is the idea that a rose placed in the flowerbed inevitably influences the actions of the next visitor. Even the empty gesture of someone who decides “not to place a rose” leaves a trace as a decision not made (the USB cameras detect this absence). In my imagination, these nodes, points where chains of causality occur, are what we leave behind for future generations, forming what I call the “strata” or “soil” of experience.
I think what Bateson meant by “relationships” is something like what happened with A-san’s use of the word “Good” last week: the usual meaning of “good” dropped out, and the notion of “good” became attached even to the word “Bad.”
(In the exhibition, the garden continues to register the worst “Critical” state. Yet there is no desire to correct it as an “error”; instead, I feel a strangely calm sense of simply observing the system as it is.)
Dec 12 (Day 6) — VI. New Species Sprouting from Human Horsepower, and What “Flowers” Really Are
The garden continued to register a “Critical” state quite frequently. The USB cameras in the Analog Room detect only the red of the roses. I had already concluded that thinning out the excess red roses in the garden, caused by too many visitors, was necessary to prevent saturation. Then I realised: what if I simply flipped the roses to their white backside?
While explaining to Y-san, whom I hadn’t seen for a long time, we tried flipping the roses in the flowerbed together.
At the beginning of the exhibition, I had unconsciously hoped visitors would place “the reds face forward” so the cameras could recognise them. But my thinking has changed. Now, I feel like letting it all go, fronts and backs, order and chaos, blending into a scattered, mixed-up landscape.
As expected, the amount of “red” detected by the cameras decreased, and the garden’s status was pulled back from “Critical” to “Caution.” By injecting a human-generated “perceptual glitch” into the system’s flow toward stagnation (what I call Human Horsepower), a new movement emerged. For now, the garden remains mostly in “Critical,” so I was glad to see the status shift even a little.
In the evening, I had a conversation with G-san, a visitor. Before I could say anything, he mentioned the word “entropy.” Indeed, entropy can be recognised even in this closed garden. In the realm of physics, after everything has thoroughly mixed, a state of “heat death,” a uniform, motionless equilibrium, occurs, in which no further change is possible. Yet the process of collapse releases a tremendous amount of energy. The question is: what does that energy create?
Meanwhile, the AI’s feedback also begins to repeat the same words mechanically once the status shifts to “Critical.” However, from the AI’s perspective, governed by the laws of information dynamics, both “Excellent” and “Critical” may be nothing more than processes, simply tending toward homogenisation. In that case, is energy still being released during this process?
I’m not an expert, but I feel that some kind of energy is at work whenever information circulates. Energy is generated not only from the collapse of the analog, but also from stagnation in the digital. So in the end, what is all this energy creating?
It is an uncomputable experience, a “new perspective” or a “story” that emerges amidst this whirlwind, as we flip the roses and wrestle with the system. This is the flower in the exhibition, and also the seed. I can confidently call it a “new perspective” because fragments of text, extracted from the interviews, are attached to the reverse side of each rose. When these fragments sit side by side, they create a form of collage poetry, generating countless new combinations of sentences. This is a realm the USB cameras cannot register, a story that exists only for us, alive in the present moment.
Each time energy is released through the circulation, sentences are born and disappear, feeding the soil like nutrients. I believe that the experience generated by this act is what, in the Gardens of Becoming, constitutes the true nature of “flowers.” From this, new “seeds” are born, carried away by visitors, waiting for the moment they will one day sprout.
Later, in the Digital Room, K-san was absorbed in reading the Celtic Herb Encyclopedia for nearly an hour. Meanwhile, T-san from the foundation, continuing from the previous week, had been rapidly grasping the garden’s system and seemed to have discovered their own method to bring the garden to a “Good” state. When I asked him to share it, he grinned and said, “It’s a secret.” Eventually, though, he revealed the trick: “Remove everything once.” Watching T-san move freely across the garden, playing with the system, it felt as if a “new species of plant” had suddenly sprouted from the very soil of this exhibition space. Thinking this way, even K-san quietly reading his book seemed like another new plant taking root here, probably of the herbaceous variety. Humans, too, are rewritten as part of the metabolism of this garden.
(It tends to fall into a “Critical” state, but it was found that it is occasionally possible to bring it back to “Caution.”)
Dec 13 (Day 7) — VII. AI’s idea of imbalance and Persistence in Stillness
On this day, the garden’s status stubbornly remained at “Critical.”
I had decided to observe it as it was for the week, yet a small worry lingered. Is the system functioning properly? However, I noticed something interesting.
I had decided to observe it as it was for the week, yet a small worry lingered. Is the system functioning properly? However, I noticed something interesting.
When the AI announced the garden’s condition in a weather-forecast style, it said, “An imbalance is observed.” As far as I could see with my own eyes, there was no imbalance in the flowerbed at all. It felt uncorrectable, and at the same time I found it fascinating.
This may be partly due to the parameters I programmed, but there is a clear gap between the “imbalance” calculated by the AI based on its parameters and what I physically perceive as “not imbalanced.”
The discrepancy between the landscape the AI sees and the one I see felt like proof that this garden is not merely a simulation. If it were a perfect simulation, my perception would either align with the AI’s judgment or be treated as a simple error. Instead, two different perspectives coexist in the same space, unresolved, as a kind of friction. And it is precisely this friction that convinces me that this is a living, real site rather than a completed simulation.
On this day, a talk event was held to delve more deeply into the exhibition. I traced the evolution of my thinking from the previous work, attempting to clarify how it connects to the current one. As ever, my explanations remained unstable, like seeds not yet fully formed, but I still hope that somewhere, in someone, they may quietly take root and sprout.
Guided by the curator U-san’s intentions, this exhibition starts from the relationship between ecology and art. I talked about my own view that “good soil,” meaning a place or a city, is formed through rich organic matter—differences in information. And that it is human “horsepower” that gives rise to those differences. However, this is not an argument for human exceptionalism, nor for the superiority of humans who possess greater “horsepower.” The emergence of AI is an undeniable reality, and one outcome of evolution brought about by human activity as a natural phenomenon. If that is the case, then what I call “horsepower” may instead be a skill required for co-creating with AI from here on. I emphasised this post–anthropocentric way of thinking in my talk.
At the end of the talk, a woman who had recently moved to Ibaraki City asked me, “What do you think about being in a state of stopping?” As I tried to trace where this question might have arisen from in her everyday life, I shared my own hypothesis.
What appears to be in frantic motion may, when viewed from a sufficiently distant and all-encompassing perspective, one in which everything shares the same mass, begin to look almost still. Conversely, what appears to be stopped, or what she experiences as stagnation, is not dead at all. It is merely a brief pause within a vast continuum of duration, a moment of gathering before the next phase of metabolism. As I answered her, I found myself recalling the yin-yang symbol, where white and black, stillness and motion, coexist within the same form.
In fact, the texts used for collage poetry in this Garden of Becoming also exist within a finite framework, drawing from a fixed set of 200 fragments extracted from interviews. In that sense, they too share the same “mass.” Within this limited mass, how many moments of pause and cycles of metabolism can be repeated? That, perhaps, is the life of this garden.
(Because of the talk event, I wasn’t able to observe the garden very much. The roses seem to be saturated, and the thinning can’t keep up. The status appears to be oscillating between “Bad” and “Critical,” the lower two levels on the five-point scale.)
Dec 14 (Day 8) —VIII. The Passing of the Gardener, and the Birth of an Anonymous Worker
There was an exhibition tour that day, and a former high school classmate came to visit as well. As with the previous day, I found myself talking with visitors for a long time after the tour. At some point, my classmate was gone. I wondered if she had left. Then I noticed T-san from the foundation coming out of the Digital Room across the hallway, carrying a large bundle of roses.
It seemed that T-san was already putting into practice the “strategy” he had discovered the day before. He had finally tried it, and was just coming out after checking the results. What surprised me was that behind him came two women who had joined the tour, followed by my classmate whom I had been looking for just moments earlier, all carrying armfuls of roses. There she was!
At some point, a “Gardener Collective led by T-san” had formed without my noticing. When I returned with them to the Analog Room, the flowerbed had been completely cleared, stripped bare and blank. The status had returned to “Excellent” for now, but if this featureless state were to continue, it would likely sink back into “Critical” again. As they began replanting the roses, I joined them, helping a little. At that moment, I felt as though I had handed over the privileged title of “gardener” to T-san. As the supply of roses used as admission tickets was starting to run low, I left the task of tending the garden to them and returned to the office in the back.
In the backstage area, a space like a green room, I quietly applied stickers to the roses used as admission tickets. It felt less like the work of an artist, and more like that of a pieceworker, mindlessly moving my hands.
If the “gardener collective” hacking the system in the front garden were the protagonists onstage, then I had become the “anonymous worker” in the back, physically sustaining the continued existence of this garden. Though still an observer, I was transforming into a hidden laborer who formed one layer of its strata. That, too, did not seem so bad.
On this day, S-san, who had come all the way from Nagoya, said something I found striking: “Artists want to create noise.” We usually call a state “normal” when the same thing can be copied and supplied without excess or deficiency. Artists, however, seem compelled to introduce noise into that condition. Perhaps this is because an instinct for survival is at work, an intuition pushing back against a society that is smooth, clean, and white, a homogenised world. By creating cracks that generate friction and allow forms to keep transforming, society may be constantly being born anew.
I suddenly remembered a conversation I once had with a friend. A singer who performs a song exactly as it was recorded, and another who rearranges the original in live performance. Or a chain restaurant whose food tastes the same no matter where you go, versus a dish you can only eat in that particular place. We wondered which of these should be considered the “better” service.
The “horsepower” required to flip the roses on the 12th, the “friction” between us and the AI’s perspective on the 13th, and today’s unexpected bug in which my former classmate somehow joined the “gardener collective” are all essential forms of noise that resist homogenisation. Only by generating friction and continually transforming its form can this society, this system, keep being born anew.
Watching people being tossed about by the system, or struggling with armfuls of roses as they attempt to master it, I felt that the exhibition was being made, right now, by those who were participating in it.
(Thanks to the gardener collective, the garden stayed “Good” for a while. Left alone, the evaluation would slip again. As the number of thinned-out roses grew, I carried several of them into the back room.)
Toward the following week
This week was filled with visitors and talk events, and my observation became irregular.
Yet it was precisely because of this irregularity that the garden continued to metabolise and rewrite itself through the visitors’ “horsepower,” even during the times when I was not watching.
When I, as the artist, temporarily relinquished the privileged position of “observation,” what emerged were new species of plants known as “T-san’s gardener collective,” along with unpredictable noise generated through human horsepower.
This exhibition will come to an end next weekend, and I can already anticipate even greater chaos. Still, next week I plan to observe the garden at fixed times, deliberately introducing the order of a fixed-point observation. How will this garden, which has begun to move autonomously, appear when viewed through that lens?