bio
Biopiracy is one of the most menacing by-products of the global economy. Several transnational biotech concerns have elaborate intellectual property mechanisms that endanger the evolution of flora and fauna worldwide. This process has its roots in the colonial era, when the indigenous plants and animals were treated as scarce exploitable resources, and whole species were exterminated before the local popular constituencies could act. Furthermore, small farmers and horticulturalists, unable to compete with the large industries have been forced to breed monocultures that diminished the genetic diversity of the local ecology. Today, the transgenic crops are not only slowly wiping out the existing eco-systems, they cause quick and drastic mutations in some plants and animals, rupturing the habitat's balance. The local farmers are discouraged from cross-breading and developing new species, as they might be infringing a patent and consequently could be prosecuted. This all may sound like a science fiction recipe of eco-disaster, according to which the Earth strikes back by growing an army of macrophages that threaten to destroy the human race. Fortunately, there are several local and global movements that are monitoring these affairs, and are acting upon them on different levels. GroWorld proposes a small addition to these valuable efforts.

The ecological strand of GroWorld involves building a trans-local network of public gardens concerned with sustaining local bio-diversity. Around the globe, there are several private and communal gardens grown by local scientists, landscape architects and neighborhood communities. They are sites evolving on their own accord - becoming patches of autonomous organic wilderness in the midst of an urban jungle, grown and molded by their care-takers and temporary dwellers. However, they are too often isolated, overlooked or taken for granted.

GroWorld will attempt to map these weedy actions, that have managed to grow beneath the radars of the transnational biopirates, bring these gardens in contact sponge with each other, so that instead of being private and isolated utopias, they form parts of a diverse, worldwide distributed habitat, connected via the contact sponge and exchange of the people involved. The symbiotic relationship between the physical gardens and communication technologies develops in a spontaneous and autonomous manner.

(Autonomous does not equal uncontrolled, or totally unconstrained. We can see the effects of such development in the sprawls of Los Angeles and Atlanta and residential districts built after WWII in Italy)

An evolving map, based on principles from Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map that "reveals a One-World Island in a One-World Ocean" (www.bfi.org) - rendering this distributed wilderness as interconnected, rather than divided by arbitrary historical or economic boundaries.

Some of the gardens will sprout from the locales of GroWorld participants. They are devised both as growing environments in which the visitors can comfortably linger, surrounded by specific local flora, and instruments allowing their players to collaboratively shape and steer the environment's processes of growth, decay and transformation.

This strand is currently in the process of feasibility research and informal contact sponges with communities in several localities, such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Croatia, UK, USA and Australia.

sys
The strand that will potentially be most useful across of a variety of public spaces is the "sys" technological strand of GroWorld. Its results should be accessible to different communities and should be adaptable for several social, ecological and cultural contexts - adaptable to both indoor and outdoor spaces, different climates and cultures. The overall objective of this work is to enhance existing public wildernesses with interactive media and technologies. Social interaction and communication determine function and form of these spaces, and should therefore become a crucial part of technological development.

[The purpose of this work is to identify, analyze and incorporate studies of different types of informal or conversational public activities, that are less based on rules and more on improvisatory and social interaction.]

The specificity of public spaces demands a high degree of adaptive capabilities from the technologies to be integrated within them, such as sensitivity to context, climate and culture. Christopher Alexander, in his book, The Timeless Way of Building, considered every space as becoming alive through events that were induced by the geometry of that space. Schematizing Alexander's description, the geometry of a public space helps give a shape to the imagination of its visitors, the imagination inspires the behavior, and the behaviors build the events. Mixed reality technology introduces one new element in this experiential spiral: the synthetic responsive media logic infusing the space, the imagination, the anticipation and the event. Adding computational functionality to already existing elements of a public space augments ordinary objects which become able to interact with their surroundings and evolve based on that interaction.

Examples of materials
developed by Evelina Kusaite,
based on movement organs
of shrimp and jelly fish