<h1>now</h1>
<p>A place containing a summery of the current locus of Jona‘s practice. Big and small, this is a space for the ideas which keep lurking around in the mind, the things touched by the hand.</p>
<h2>The top ideas of my mind:</h2>
<p>Scale</p>
<ul>
<li>When to be big, when to be small. Growing up I was often implicitly told that bigger is better, now I believe scale is much more complex than that.</li>
</ul>
<p>The visual representations of ecologies in digital environments</p>
<ul>
<li>In a world of climate crisis it is of vital importance to envision new ways of visually representing the networks of life that surround us.</li>
</ul>
<p>Computers and culture, gods, rituals</p>
<ul>
<li>Computers as an entity deeply embedded in culture and practice. How should this realisation influence how we live with computation?</li>
</ul>
<h2>Current projects:</h2>


a fourteen by fourteen blue and white woven paper heart

paper weaving

a pixelated screenshot from a game, a drop is crawling up a green vine surrounded by slowers.



A droplet formed from the flow of water through the earths crust, dripping onto a coal spoil.

scale game

An image of a candle and a vase with flowers with blinds as a backdrop




> In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.
<cite>Jorge Luis Borges - *On Exactitude in Science*</cite>

In David Graeber's book Debt there is this section digging into the importance of context in relation to identity. Essentially, a person is defined by their context, the set of social relations formed with the people and environments they know. A stranger is a stranger because they are encountered outside of their social context.

In a similar vein I have been trying to understand whether a computer is a close family member or a perpetual stranger. There are good arguments for both. On the one hand I have spent thousands of hours intimately together with my computer, getting to know it,  existing with it in different ways. On the other hand I am also constantly faced with the sheer lack of understanding of it.

Perhaps this alludes to how a computer is a fuller, more complex presence in our lives. Something which, like people, never reveals itself completely to us. Something which must be understood by what is in the gutter just as much as what is said.


Sometimes I close my eyes in an attempt to comprehend what computers are. I think of how they are made from materials dug up from below in places all over the world before they are brought together, processed, synthesised into something which can carry currents and data at unimaginable scales.

I try and think of the networks of cables suspended above sea floors — linking continents and enabling networking at incomprehensible speeds.

But most of all I think of the computer as a complex compound of culture, power, and history. A radical technology which, like many other technologies before it, remade humans understandings of each other and the world in which they find themselves.

What computes are at their core, like much other technology, is contested. Most agree on the fact that this technology is of immense transformative power. Yet, what is the nature and source of this power and how does it interface with other historical and spiritual structures which mediate power?

This essay is an attempt at considering not just the mechanical essence of what computers are, but the its current and future potential as a cultural and perhaps spiritual entity. It is written in the belief that computing must break free of its military-modernist origin-story to become something which is truly intimate and emancipatory for communities in different places.

## The hybris of leveraging the digital to try grasp all of the analogue world

In the context of the military-modernist origin-story the desire to grasp the whole world, like the hand of god, is a given. Within this context it is common to see the future as something that has already been determined. The narrative goes something like this — we are part of a march towards a world where the digital and the physical collapse onto each other as a result of an ever deeper embrace of computational sensing. The philosopher Yuk Hui likens this teleological view of computation to the desire to become god.

> technological historical time synchronized and converged towards one end point which we have called before technological singularity, or if you prefer you can also call it the apocryps or homologues, the becoming of god. 
<cite> Yuk Hui - *[From the universality of progress to cosmotechnics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dni6UJDFUuw&t=2005s/)*</cite>



> Why? Why did you die?  — — — God is here.
<cite> Serial Experiments LAIN</cite>


> We’re not living in an algorithmic culture so much as a computational theocracy.
<cite> Ian Bogost - *[The Cathedral of Computation](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-cathedral-of-computation/384300/)*</cite>

There are many cathedrals in existence.
Meta is the missionary church.


<table>
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <th colspan="2">Ontologies of Computers and Gods</th>
        </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <tr>
            <td><b>computers are gods</b></td>
            <td><b>computers are created by god</b></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>”Unlike today’s virtual assistants, the gods of KamiOS are not all-knowing or all-powerful. They are limited, fallible, and have different agendas and loyalties.” 
            Keiichi Matsuda - GODS </td>
            <td> ”Since computers are a part of the creation, and God commanded ourancestors to exercise dominion over the creation (Genesis 1:28), then the proper relationship between people and computers is for people to exercise dominion over computers.” Joel Adams - A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE ON COMPUTING</td>
        </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>




## Another kind of computation

> The sailing/computing duo Hundred Rabbits are pilgrim-poets of permacomputing.
<cite> Robin Sloan - *[The slab and the permacomputer](https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/slab/)*</cite>

Seeking new computational ontologies by computing where it is rarely done by moving off land entirely.
travelling cathedral builder


## What is the nature of the universes which rise out of the digital?

It feels obscene to think of computer programmers as creators of new universes. Yet, what is it that programmers are creating?

> I always imagine that each man-made object is surrounded by a ‘Magical Circle’, just like those radiant Circles in Japanese Magical girl anime. Imagine a stool silently unfolds its ‘Magical Circle’, urging people nearby to sit in it.
<cite>Weiyi Li - *Function as Narrative*</cite>

> KamiOS is different. It is based in pagan animism, where there are many thousands of gods, who live in everything
<cite>Keiichi Matsuda - *[GODS](https://arena-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/13686745/a9e686464f00f1a2990822b30796dfef.pdf?1635021002)*</cite>

computers and gods

A pixel art work with green vines, some 2d platforms, and a green lizard



Recently I have been thinking a lot about how living things are visually represented in digital environments. Going about our lives online we are constantly exposed to pictures, sounds, and other representations of other living beings. I probably encounter more species and ecologies in digital worlds than in real life. I most likely have closer personal relationships with  digital representations of beings which have been extinct for millennia than a lot of the living beings that inhabiting the park down the street. 

So, representations of living things are clearly abundant in digital spaces. But how do different communities visually represent  nature in digital spaces, and why do they represent ecologies in this way? I believe asking these questions are important. 

Our understanding of what nature is is increasingly mediated by our experience of digital worlds and our experience of ecologies are increasingly facilitated by digital environments. Additionally, one only needs to consider the urgency of the climate crises to appreciate that the way we represent living things online will inform the form and shape of climate action. However, asking this question only because of climate change misses the point. 

Asking this question takes as a given that values give rise to visual representations and that visual representations in turn act on and influence values. So, asking how why and nature is represented digitally is really asking what our values about nature are? In the end asking this question is about the cultural relationships we have with non-humans. 

Reductionism versus Relationism
Instrumentalism 
Legibility versus Illegibility
Anthropocentrism versus Pluriverse
non-agency versus Agency
Scale



-


1. The grid-based ecology of xxx created by foreign objects
2. The lidar landscapes of forensic architecture and Liam Young
3. The binary essentialism of game of Life
4. The romantic and elegant representation of Flower by thatgamecompany
5. The knotty entanglements of feral atlas
6. The passive backgrounds of super Mario
7. The chaotic audiovisual landscapes of orca
8. The bot assemblages of Tega Brains xxxx
9. The scale bending aesthetics of Hermippe
10. The colonialist extractivism of mining and farming games
11. The speciesism of Pokémon(perhaps there is a better example?)
12. The static nature of most game environments
13. The temporal orientation of trash garden game


-



The way ecologies are represented digitally are historically continguous and constructed by the assemblages of affordability of digital media and computation more broadly.

Considering the exhibits it becomes clear that there are certain representations which are structurally encouraged. These include but are not limited to:

1. Reductivism. An over-emphasis on individual species and under emphasise on networks, relationships, assemblages.
2. Anthropocentrism. An over-emphasis on the agency of humans and an under-emphasis on the agency of non-humans and the non-living.
3. Extractivism. An over-emphasis on singular or quantifiable benefits.

The tendencies outlined above are dominant, yet they are not unchallenged. A number of digital currents are actively probing the possibility of ecologically aware representations of nature online.

Communities within environmental media studies and environmental Humanities more broadly are actively demonstrating what low-carbon, assemblages oriented representations of ecologies might look like
The programming and artistic movement around permacomputibg are questioning the very basis of computation as as medium.

