Pea Patch

I've had several ideas for some time now, each seemingly unrelated, each equally attractive. Finally, last night, I visualized how they might all link together into a single _thing_.

I've long wanted to create a slowly growing, evolving garden of plants that I would make a part of my home page for this site. Trees and shrubs would compete for space and survival, tangling with each other, accepting votes for particularly beautiful structures. The votes, along with other factors, would contribute to a plant's ability to further its genetic code and create more variations of itself.

I've also wanted to create more variations in my archive series. (Here's one, called the text archive I just dragged from the abyss of my hard drive and dusted off, just to see it living again on my site). The chief problem with these archives is getting people to contribute to them. They aren't very interesting until there are a few thousand contributions. Then the words start to create unexpected fragments that hint at some meaning you can almost grasp, but not quite. To me it's exciting to see the list of words get longer and know my project is growing, but the archives always suffer, I think, if I'm not there to explain how they work. (And nothing is ever improved by adding more links to more text...)

So, to meet the goals of: beauty, evolution, art and collaboration, I came up with the following idea:

There's a garden on my web site, as imagined before, slowly evolving, interesting but perhaps not so intriguing that somebody will come back and check it out later. Add a single mechanism, nonsensical, but just fine for art: One must feed the plants in order that they survive. How does one feed the plants? By talking to them. You type into the garden and your words and letters fall gently to the ground around the plants. Plants then take sustenance from the words. The words are absorbed (much like they are now in my text archive.) The plants grow. People who bother to talk to the plants influence their health directly by choosing which plants to type over. I think this has the proper confluence of mechanics that people might actually come back.

The final twist for this idea is to enable people, via a simple bit of code that anyone could paste into their blog or web site, to grow their own gardens. You could subscribe to my garden server. It would give you your own garden space. You could decide for yourself whether you would allow other people to talk to your plants or just yourself, whether it was private or public. And, the plant structures that would evolve would be unique to your garden.

The best part of all this is that growing plants and the necessary genetic database I'd have to maintain would not require frequent server traffic - it would be beautiful, personal and low-bandwidth.

No, the best part would be that the plants you grew would directly benefit from the words you typed, the thoughts you shared with them. The process of feeding your plants itself would be the primary art experience.