Dec 18 (Day 8) — IX. Dormancy of Seeds (Information), and the AI as a Mirror
A day when nothing in particular happened.
And yet, even as I say that nothing happened, the garden continues to metabolise. The reason it feels like “nothing” may be that I myself am beginning to stagnate.
And yet, even as I say that nothing happened, the garden continues to metabolise. The reason it feels like “nothing” may be that I myself am beginning to stagnate.
Two weeks have passed since I made this diary public, and the exhibition has finally entered its final week. Last week, I declared that I would carry out fixed-point observation, but in the end I kept getting pulled into various activities and never quite managed to do it. Still, I want to accept even the fact that I “couldn’t find anything to write” as one form of change. Perhaps continuing to write can, in itself, also slip into a kind of stagnation.
The “roses” handed to visitors at the entrance are artificial. Each consists of a green wire, about 30 centimeters long, serving as the stem. A piece of paper printed with a red rose is fixed at the tip as the flower, and along the stem, a leaf made of seed paper (green paper embedded with seeds) is wired in. After placing the rose in the flowerbed, visitors can take the leaf (the seeds) home with them. When we hand out these roses, which function as admission tickets, we explain to visitors: “You can take these seeds home with you. It’s winter now, so they won’t sprout yet, but when spring comes and the weather warms, please plant them.”
Seeds remain dormant, yet when the season comes, they grow astonishingly. How much information can be packed into such a tiny, dot-like seed? The mechanism of germination is always a marvel to observe.
If we consider humans as “seeds,” incoming external energies such as sunlight and water as “stimuli provided by the environment,” and the actions that convert those stimuli into nourishment as “horsepower,” then perhaps the number of stories—metaphorically represented as flowers—that bloom depends on the differences in information a person originally possesses or has gathered.
For me, our experiences become a single “point” once transformed into information. With this in mind, the fact that each “point” contains such an overwhelming density of information (experience ≒ algorithm) connects in my understanding the notion that both digital data and plant seeds are condensed forms of information, each containing latent potential.
Later that night, I unexpectedly ran into a sense of distrust toward the AI. I had been thinking of the AI as a “collaborator in the circulation of information,” but when viewed from the perspective of a feedback loop, the process looks something like this: human (response/action) → AI (response/action) → human → AI, and so on. Seen this way, the cycle sometimes appears not as a collaborator, but as a mirror reflecting myself.
I had believed I was taking a post-humanist stance. Yet if the AI is nothing more than a mirror of the human, then it is ultimately just a tool, and my position may still remain within anthropocentrism. If it is a mirror, then all I can hear is the echo of my own voice. Beneath the sense of omnipotence this implies, I felt an inescapable fragility, a quiet but profound unease.
However, there is no need to limit this perspective to the AI alone. If we consider plants, other people, and matter alike as “channels for information,” the very concept of a protagonist begins to dissolve, and humans themselves can be seen as just one node in the circulation, in a world where humans are absent and only information continues to flow. There, our experiences flicker busily for a moment before vanishing.
(The garden’s status remains mostly “Critical.”)
Dec 19 (Day 9) — X. The Mirror Stops, and Humans Take Over
I arrived at the exhibition a little later than usual that day. As soon as I entered the venue, the staff rushed over in a flurry. “When we arrived this morning, the system wasn’t working!”
It seems that the system, which had been running smoothly until yesterday, suddenly stopped functioning. K-kun, the programmer who usually monitors it remotely, happened to be occupied with another job until the evening and couldn’t respond. I tried tinkering with it myself, but there was no sign of recovery. I decided to stop struggling and put up a sign reading “Adjusting.”
K-kun wouldn’t be back until 5 p.m. I felt sorry that visitors wouldn’t be able to experience the human–AI feedback loop. I stayed by the flowerbed in the Analog Room and explained to each visitor, “Normally, your actions here would be reflected back through the AI.”
But as I continued explaining, the desire grew within me to somehow give form to the experience of “one’s actions becoming someone else’s feedback.”
If the AI isn’t functioning, then the visitors can take over that role. I quickly made a handwritten evaluation sheet and entrusted humans with making the “judgment.” There were two criteria:
Human Feedback Version
Balance: Intuitively, does the arrangement of flowers in the flowerbed feel balanced?
Circulation (Story): Do the texts on the backs of the roses form interesting combinations, creating new stories as you mix and match them?
An attempt to replace the AI’s algorithm with human subjectivity and intuition.
Surprisingly, many visitors enjoyed participating in this process. What stayed with me most was a comment left by one visitor: “I think it’s okay for it to be unbalanced.”
A judgment grounded in human tolerance, something an AI could never arrive at. A fluctuation that exists beyond the algorithm. (Or perhaps… is this, too, an algorithm after all?)
Just before the evening, K-kun, having finished his other work early, remotely restored the system in an instant. I told him about my disappointment from the night before. I explained that the AI is like a mirror, and if people use it only to reinforce their own opinions, the echo chamber could accelerate and even become a spark for conflict. With that fear weighing on me, I went to sleep, and this morning the system had stopped.
Perhaps the machine system was responding to the mental uncertainties of its two creators. Ironically, with the AI absent, the cycle of being aware of others’ perspectives, both ahead of and behind oneself, became even more vividly visible. It made me realise that a system might not be driven by code alone but only begins to move when the consciousness of the people involved intervenes.
(The garden’s status remains leaning toward “Critical.” Removing a large number of roses at once temporarily improves it to “Good,” but it quickly returns to “Critical.”)
Dec 20 (Day 10) — XI. Exploding Wriggly Wires
The garden remained in a “Critical (Bad)” state. Staff who wrestled with the system for about 20 minutes reported that “nothing changed.” Tomorrow is the final day. One possible approach might be to loosen the algorithm slightly, so that changes become more immediately visible.
Today, while observing the flowerbeds, I noticed something unusual. Many of the wires that serve as the stems of the flowers had become all twisted and bent. At first, they were just gently curved rather than perfectly straight. Gradually, however, the bends started to look as if someone had deliberately manipulated them. Visitors had begun twisting the wires, either unconsciously or intentionally. Some even started drawing on the surfaces of the flowers.
Amid all this, a decisive “individual” appeared. One flower had a single stem from which wire tendrils spiraled out to the left and right like tentacles. It was clearly a mutant form. Looking back, the signs had been there all along, a gradual progression through the earlier wriggly phase leading to this extreme expression of individuality. Triggered by the appearance of this flower, the number of twisted, spiraling stems in the flowerbed exploded.
It was exactly the “sun” of the visitors, providing a stimulus from the environment in the form of mutation. In response to this stimulus, the other flowers also began to twist and writhe excessively.
What we call a “mutation” or what we call “random” might only appear that way. Could it actually be something generated from within the algorithm?
(The garden’s status remained toward “Critical,” and I began to grow a little weary of it. However, that feeling came only because I had been observing this situation for so long.)
Dec 21 (Final Day: A Grand Celebration) XII. A Garden Without Conclusion and Its Convergence
Finally, the last day of the exhibition arrived. I ended up spending the entire exhibition period on site, continuing my observations. It wasn’t quite the “fixed-point observation” I had originally planned, but witnessing and reflecting on so many new plants, the actions that emerged within the installation, became, above all, nourishment for me.
Since it was the final day, I asked K-kun to loosen the garden’s evaluation parameters a little. Now the status fluctuated more easily than before. I jokingly called this the “Grand Celebration,” though of course only those who had visited many times would notice.
The uniquely mutated flower that had appeared the day before was still in the flowerbed. To maintain the garden’s condition, some thinning is necessary, but naturally, it’s hard to remove such a distinctive individual. Even when I asked the other staff, they said, “This flower really stands out, so it’s hard to pull out.”
I remarked, “If something is distinctive, it stands out and survives. It feels a bit like human society.”
The staff member replied with a smile, “Exactly. And that’s why it can become a real headache later on.”
I realised this was true. Even if the energy emitted by a particular individuality once brought positive influence and change to its surroundings, the moment it settles and becomes immovable, it turns into a wedge that halts circulation. A paradox of survival and stagnation that resonates with the structures of real society. Perfect harmony and overpowering individuality alike must, sooner or later, be thinned out and handed on to the next generation in transformed form. That very cruelty is what prepares the conditions for the next phase of becoming.
On this day, someone other than myself was also observing the garden. I felt that she, too, was a new plant born from this garden. Just as I became a gardener, and later a “Gardener Collective led by T-san” emerged, it felt as though my continued observation had begun to give rise to another role as well. Had the exhibition gone on, even an observation team might have emerged by the final day.
I was reminded of something a staff member at the rose garden once said: “Grafting is a form of copying.” Even when a graft is created by human hands, once it begins to sprout, it lives autonomously as a singular life. A researcher of natural history whom I met in the lobby also told me that by relying on human intervention, nature can sometimes function and flow more freely. Somehow, the story began to resemble Volume 7 of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Even a programmed life, if it is sprouting here and now, becomes a unique life that no one can fully control.
Whether grown from seed or through grafting, all of them exist as part of a larger ecological flow, within what we understand as nature. This flow absorbs even human intervention, allowing different forms of life to coexist in balance, to relate to one another, and to continue evolving through circulation, including technology and AI as well.
What surprised me most this time was how deeply the local residents understood the experiment and concept of this exhibition. Some people returned again and again during the exhibition period. One visitor even told me that although they were having a hard time at work, they had decided to bring the “Horsepower Declaration” (the nickname given to my manifesto, The Power to Generate Difference: A Manifesto on Information Metabolism) into their everyday life. It made me happy to feel that the seeds were already beginning to sprout beyond the walls of the exhibition.
In the end, what remained was a sense of exhaustion, the kind that comes from having seen something through to the end. My “Garden Observation Diary,” which spanned three weeks, comes to a pause here.
No vivid conclusion ever emerged. The garden simply remained there, circulating, and then, for the moment, was closed. When the deinstallation day arrives, it will disappear without a trace. Fukushi Bunka Kaikan (Oak Theater), which housed the exhibition, will be demolished next year, and this exhibition, too, will become just another “point” in the past, remembered as the exhibition once known as Garden of Becoming.
Still, I hope that the “seeds” carried home by visitors from here will, each in their own place and at their own time, one day sprout.
(Garden status: Due to the “Grand Celebration” parameters, the garden escaped the critical state more frequently. Still, it felt as though there were more cautions than usual.)