Well, I took that device, and fabricated using a Wen scroll saw and Dremel tool and some experimentation a set of handles to drive the syringe actuators, to be able to more smoothly control the drawing motion. I’m calling them ohara style controllers because I think the will-scarlet >> scarlett-ohara semantic bridge made some sort of intuitive sense, with shades of thematic connection maybe to… flying and O’Hare International Airport? I don’t know – I only work here. I’m just making this shit up on the fly, and trying to keep it all straight in my head.
The ohara controllers anyway came out great, you can see the video sample of the motion and some other images over on this Imgur gallery. Here’s a closeup of the controllers – hopefully Butlerian Jihad-safe:
I finished this very version 1 initial prototype of a robotic drawing arm made from willow branches from my garden, and using syringe hydraulic actuators (no electronics or motors). Terrible picture again, sorry. One day, I’ll do some better quality photos of all these things.
This is one style of a SCARA arm used in robotics, where the S and C stand for selective and compliance, in that it can move horizontally in xy axes, but not vertically in z. In this case, the movement is provided via a human operator pulling and pushing the water-filled syringes and tubing to actuate the joints of each arm segment. (Here’s some related concept art I did for this using AI before/during the actual build.)
I spoke about this and some of my other low tech human drawing bots (or “biobots“) in this episode of the Silicon Synapse show. I’m trying to find that mystical crack in the world between human-whatever and AI-whatever where something stops being a human-ish thing, and becomes a “mere mechanical process” such that it becomes according to the bureaucratic gods who deem it their role to interpret such omens… UNCOPYRIGHTABLE!!!
I, of course, have a lot more to say on these topics, but am trying to document at least minimally some of the highways and byways that I have traversed this past year while investigating these issues creatively. I’ll also do a demo drawing with this machine in the coming days and post that here.
Unfortunately, this initial design is pretty limited in its range of motion, which is okay because I was more just trying to understand how the mechanisms work, and now I have something adequate to experiment with which I think will be able to tell me through experimentation proper dimensions and alignment for an updated version with a greater range of motion.
Some photos of new IRL non-AI willow baskets, one with miscanthus leaf woven in uploaded here, and linked below:
Still a little janky as far as technique goes, with a bit of cracking, but getting better and more fluid with the patterns. I have enough materials soaking to I think maybe complete 3 or so more baskets in this style for this season.
I’m doubling out the size of my production in the Spring, as I really like growing willow and all the side benefits like basket-making that it brings in addition to biodiversity and general awesomeness.
I know most people use landscape fabric to suppress competition from grass, but I have a personal prohibition against using anything plastic-based in the garden because of fragmentation, and the already ridiculous levels of contamination of micro- and macro-plastics in natural environments. I’ve carefully followed this prohibition at least ten years on now. So instead I’ve experimented with successively thicker types of brown kraft and paper for construction applications. This latest round, I’m trying something called Ram Board which is extremely thick. I’m laying three overlapping layers of that down, followed by a second course of each if I have enough. Then I’m mulching over that.
What I’ve seen previously is that thin papers (with mulch) don’t do much to suppress grass long-term, though they might last a few weeks and possibly give cuttings a bit of a headstart. Thicker ones tend to do better but still break down and let a lot of grass through in first season. I weeded the new plots out that I planted of various ages, stock sources & types, and only ever weeded those beds three times this season. There’s grass growing but I don’t see it having negatively impacted the growth of the cuttings too much.
I will leave most of those newly planted plots to overwinter, and harvest only in Spring when the ground is unfreezing, and take both my basketry material and planting stock at that time. I know other people harvest and store in Winter, but not having somewhere to store cuttings at the right temp over winter, figure they may as well just stay on the stools and I’ll cut them then. I did that this year with some others and they grew back huge, so not too worried.
I have some dogwood I’ll also harvest, though that plant material live is also really useful as fascines for erosion control which I’m exploring, and I want to try the same method I did on the river edge in my regular garden: take fresh dogwood cuttings, make them into a bundle, dig a shallow trench, cover them back up with soil. Voila. I’m curious if willow will also grow that way? Could be a means to get multiple shoots coming out of the same buried stock linearly that could be easily integrated into hedgerow armature… More experiments await in this area.
Tim Boucher’s “Organic Data Weaving” seamlessly merges the organic vitality of nature with the abstract logic of digital hyperreality. Woven willow sculptures, embodying the natural profusion of growth, stand alongside AI-generated projections that evolve across the gallery walls. The dynamic interplay between the physicality of willow forms and the insubstantiality of digital projections invites viewers to contemplate the convergence of artificial and organic intelligence.
The woven willow structures reflect the interconnectedness of data networks, echoing the visual representations of data relationships in the projected images. The sculptures’ interlocking patterns and dynamic curves mirror the fluid and shifting nature of data itself, presenting a dialogue between natural growth and the abstract forms of digital information. By juxtaposing these tangible and intangible elements, “Organic Data Weaving” reveals the complex, evolving narrative of our relationship with technology, nature, and the blurred boundaries of hyperreality.
That’s a curatorial statement I had ChatGPT help me write for a recent project of mine, an exploration of what woven willow sculptural forms juxtaposed with AI projected lights and imagery might look like. Photos from the “exhibit” are here.
I’ll pull out a few of my favorites to highlight below.
Without any more context or knowledge about the origins of these images, I would personally be hard-pressed to not take them at face value and believe they were actually cool sculptures which exist somewhere, or did at one time.
But in actual fact, they are nevermades which exist in a hyperreality adjacent to ours. They are aspirational image explorations on a theme, some using Dalle, some Ideogram AI. They are part of a larger experiment in misinformation as art.
But these raise a million other important questions for me as an artist. Namely, if I could essentially simulate a lifetime’s worth of artistic achievements in an evening, and get basically high-quality gallery photos of them as though they were real physical things, where does that leave us existentially relative to actual real physical things? Where does that leave us relative to a lifetime’s worth of artistic achievements?
In a world increasingly centered on the cult of the Almighty Image, and the Almighty Image is continuously exposed as a liar on its own altar at every turn, how are we to proceed?
I saw “real” photos from an art gallery setting in London earlier, and thought to myself, some of these look less high-quality than what I was able to generate with AI. They look literally better than the real thing…
I think that’s hyperreality, is getting sucked down that wormhole, and it’s exactly where we’re stuck now collectively and individually.
Charlie Warzel’s piece in The Atlantic on hurricane disinfo goes down a parallel path in a somewhat different direction, interesting at least here though with our current one:
What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political.
Hyperreality stands out to me as a relevant and still potentially useful analytical framework that is wider and not so fraught, and which can encompass this idea of the “artist as propagandist” who creates unreal things in order to change or influence real things.
Also from Warzel’s piece:
But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
Interestingly, in other contexts outside of conspiracy fear-mongering, we often refer to be people who can cling to an alternative vision of reality in the face of overwhelming opposition “visionaries,” and we culturally usually cheer them on as they succeed in implementing that vision in actual reality. Unfortunately, an exceedingly great number of such “visionaries” in our day and age have been subsumed by vanity and wealth, and where they might have been or might believe themselves to be luminaries, emit only a kind of sticky darkness…
To me these willow-works, both my IRL ones and my ORL (outside real life?) hyperreal ones, play somewhere in a space that lays orthogonally in opposition to all that. Willow to me is profusion, proof of abundant life, of generous, ridiculously abundant and productive life, of reified embodied living sunlight. The reality of that when you feel it in your hands shatters all false darknesses, and returns us somehow deeply, instinctually, ancestrally, immediately back in tune with the Overwave, the wave from which all other waves are born…
