Project Pothosynthesis

The nostalgia for meaning permeates the human condition. Both internally and externally the existentialist declaration of purposelessness devastates and entropizes us. Albert Camus asserts that in the face of despair one must laugh defiantly. When meaninglessness looms one can dispel it with even the smallest iota of sentiment. This cosmos ripens, through us, worlds of meaning, care, and purpose. Meaning is as intrinsic to this cosmos as we are. A part of a part of a whole that is real.

This project was wrought from my own longing for meaning. The manifestations of that drive are present at the Threshold here. They are the torches with which I cast away despair. Tokens, omens, and talismans I wear inside and out of me that decorate my experience with tangible sentiment. Both individually in the symbolism their forms represent and as a body of work towards the greater goal of experienced meaning.

In a cosmos which conserves energy, it is much more sensical to have remained nothingness. My somethingness is a gift. I offer my gratitude in the form of creation, to Creation, through you.

Process

In the eyes of this Project, novelty is the fingerprint of endlessness. In that spirit, no work made manifest through this Project is meant to repeat itself. The forms that emerge are the result of processes designed around symbolic representation.

This is done primarily using the software from SideFX, fittingly named Houdini, as well as the occasional use of python. Each iteration is seeded individually for a unique, novel result.

Importantly, this seeding is far from random. Pothos drives the creation from this Project, for a manifestation to cross the Threshold from the flux of nonexistence into reality it must be wanted.

It is too arbitrary to've let each of these forms be queued alongside one another. In other words, if the 10th iteration of a piece from the Project was always seeded with the constant 10, then it would've been bound to exist so long as the piece had been manifested 10 times. Instead, each piece is deterministically bound to the moment of desire that arises in an individual.

Seeding

The first form to emerge from Pothosynthesis came in the shape of a ring, and subsequently sparked a fascination for circles. Circles represent unity as well as infinity, defined as all points sitting equidistant from a center. Within the fundamental relationship of a circle to itself, the distance around divided by the distance across, results in pi. A poignantly infinite number.

Living on a server, a digital entity recites these digits and transmits them here at a rate of 10 digits per second. Whenever an individual's pothos reaches through the Threshold, that moment is recorded through the most recent 6 digits of Pi streamed to this space, becoming the seed, fed through the process, and made real.

And, were it not wanted in that moment, never would have been made manifest.