Wet Vermilion Crowd of Things: a Digital Garden

I am a scavenger on the rock-ridged beach, turning life-rubble upside down, soaking in the salt air, the wet vermilion crowd of things swarming underneath my prickled fingertips.

Hi, I'm Garance.

Welcome to my cozy corner of the internet, my own digital garden, where I cultivate notes about the things that interest me. This place is first and foremost my personal media space, it allows me to share about my life, my friends and my passions. It is like a journal, it documents my growth as an individual and all the thoughts and moments that shape me.

Secondly, it is a space for learning and creativity. It arose from the need to break free from modern ways of consuming media, and as such, it is a repository of the most striking and personal pieces of media I've immersed myself into. But beyond that, it's like a notebook full of study notes, bits of knowledge, mini-essays, half-finished thoughts and personal projects. I hope it can be a testament to my brain and the efforts I put into making it bloom.

In the following few paragraphs, you can learn about how to navigate this site, what digital gardening is and my whole thoughts about this way of creating, consuming and growing. 

Navigating this site

This website will forever be a work in progress. However, it is one now more than ever. The entire writing process of this site began a little over a week now and it comes at a very busy time in my life. Most of the pages are unfinished and I've only collected two Thoughts so far.

The site is inspired by the idea of a second brain and has been designed for exploration, for hopping between pages and getting lost in forgotten corners. Here are a few starting points for you to begin your journey:

• The best way to start exploring this site is to choose a Portal from the list I have linked here. They are small essays sprinkled with links to other notes and ideas for you to hop on. Choose one that interests you and discover my views on it. Unfortunately for you though, none of them are even remotely done at the moment.
• Start with Source Materials if you are looking for a specific media to see my thoughts on it and to which idea I've connected it to.
• It is about time I introduce to you my "Thoughts". They are decontextualised ideas that I usually get from a source material, and on which I write what some would call a "mini-essay", that is to say, a few sentences to a couple of paragraphs on this specific idea, linking back to multiple source materials and other thoughts which I found to be related. I regularly come back to these notes to grow them as I find new source material which makes me think of them or as I develop my thoughts on the concept. These notes should always be taken with a grain of salt (read the epistemic disclaimer below for more info).
  • They are categorised into "Seedlings", "Buddings" and "Evergreens" depending on the time, efforts, and regular tending these notes have taken to grow.
  • I always link back my notes to overarching themes, which you can find under Tags.
• If you're looking for more elaborate or thought-out pieces of writing, you should look at Essays and Projects. I often work on zines and complete essays that I would post there. At the moment, I'm writing my thesis on love in Japan and a zine on migration to educate myself on the topic.
• In Diverse, you can find collections of, well, diverse stuff? Go and explore.
• You can also check out more about me and my To-Read List.

If you need more information on the functioning of the website, check out the page Website Guide for a detailed description of how I write and maintain the site.

What is digital gardening?

I shall start my exploration of the concept of Digital Gardening by sharing the definition of Maggie Appleton¹:

A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren't strictly organised by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing.

Digital gardens move along the spectrum of personal notebooks, wikis and blogs, but they transcend their limitations and get closer to the ideal of the second brain by rejecting the idea that content should be organised linearly or chronologically. Instead they are organised like webs of knowledge, connected with hyperlinks of common themes, ideas and thoughts. Not only does it cultivates the gardener's ability to enter in dialogue with the thoughts they had in the past and to constantly grow and rewrite themselves, it also makes for a fascinating user experience.

A digital garden, as I see it, should capture the compelling feeling of following a rabbit hole, letting one's curiosity take the reins. It should be a terrain for exploration for both the gardener and the user. Maggie writes "You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream." ² It reminds me of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. Their non-linear structure allows for a deliberate and individual path to be chosen. They rebel, in a way, against the commercial, advertised, AI-generated internet that is pushed towards us nowadays. Instead, they are an unfiltered, destructured, consciously and humanely built space on the internet, where one can cultivate the seeds of their intellect and imagination.

In the first conversation I had with my boyfriend after discovering digital gardening, I expressed my need to break free from doomscrolling and content that I did not have time to or was unwilling to digest and process. Nowadays, it is so easy to be sucked into a mode of consumption which destroys the individual and aims to replace it was an advertisement machine, a brain-dead puppet for corporations to tramp on. Digital gardening and the process of taking notes and consuming content mindfully breaks from the bad habit of scrolling and offers a space to speak at length and get lost in thoughts.

Indeed, we are all fatigued by fast-paced commercial media, and we forget that the media we consume is what shapes us, not only as artists but also as individuals. Therefore, it is not really about consuming less, but about consuming more mindfully, and taking ownership of the thoughts provoked by the media we consume. We should not only let it change us, we should be critical thinkers who engage in a conversation with the art and the media that goes through us. We should disagree, add onto, reflect, and put in the work to cultivate ourselves mindfully. Anna Howard ³ puts forward the idea that a way to become more creative is to take notes. My main take-away from her video was that her idea of taking notes was akin to creating through thinking original thoughts and writing them down. It is no longer about copy-pasting content from an article or film. It is about digesting, reformulating, conversing with the art. The note taking that she does is less about the actual content of the media and more about her own vision of the world. It is inspired by it of course, but she makes it hers through the act of note taking. It is in my opinion very similar to the process of creation, through which we let ourselves be influenced by the works of others, and "digest them", mash them all down, mix and churn them into something uniquely ours. 

At their core, digital gardens rebel against the idea of what a website "should be" or "should look like". They aspire to be less perfect and performative than the usual blog or wiki, which we have been taught should look professional, official, consistent. But I am not a "tiny corporation" ⁴ . I am not politically correct, I am not objective, I am not fixed in time. I can choose to revolt against this limited view of humanity. Like ourselves, digital gardens are imperfect, unconventional, ground-breakingly unique, and in constant evolution. We are not are not structured by the subjunctive. We simply are, in all of our messiness and imperfection. This is what makes them so beautiful. Digital gardens capture the experience of picking at someone's brain and unveiling patterns and connections.

Finally, they allow themselves to be incomplete and biased. Writing with a partial and situated voice is a difficult exercise for my perfectionist self, but it is a healthy one. The mythical idea of perfection is against our human nature of evolution and change, and it is founded in authoritarian, objectivist and hierarchical views of knowledge. It is the birth of inequality. We all have a voice and a perspective, and we all grow and let ourselves be influenced by others. As such, no writing should have the pretension of holding the complete truth. The digital garden positions itself as a human piece of writing.

And why am I starting my own?

So, why am I starting my own digital garden?

Well, as of late, I have been trying to be a better creative. For me, that means not a better pixel-artist, a better game designer or a better writer, but instead, a better thinker. I think the main way someone can be creative is in connecting pieces of knowledge and in imagining the world around them. And it is this ability that leads to a flow of creativity in all other outlets.

It is not for the sake of "better art" that I set myself on this journey to become a better creative. It is the desire to retrieve some things which I thought I had lost to capitalism: ownership of my time and my attention-span, my childlike wonder, a researcher's endless curiosity and the deeply-seated knowledge that I am worthy despite my imperfection.

To make my first point, I have to repent and confess to having fallen into the trap of thinking that AI was better than me. A better writer, a better inventor, a better designer, overall, a better creative. The overwhelming embarrassment of feeling lesser than a machine and lesser of a human for letting myself be replaced by a machine pulled at me constantly, until I had no choice but to make the drastic decision never to use AI again for anything closely or remotely related to creativity (YES I still use it to debug code, sorry). In abandoning AI, I healed my fear of imperfection. As I have highlighted earlier, we are all human, biased, imperfect. This knowledge that a machine pretending to be neutral could never replace the importance of my own voice set me free, and got me started on the path to regaining my right to creation.

Which leads us into my second point: I consider doom-scrolling to be the alienation of my thoughts and of my right to creation, and I am profoundly concerned about its long term effects on myself as an individual. Fast-paced content leaves no space for original thinking, replaces our concerns with plastic and capitalist preoccupations and takes from us the ability and the time it takes to understand and produce new thoughts. Without sounding too existentialist, I believe if there's any meaning to human existence, it probably is to learn and to think anew. I am tired of worrying sounding too dramatic — we are being stripped from our humanity. No generation has been shaped by the mind-numbing practice of doom-scrolling like we have, and at such an early age. With the rise of fascism in so many places and the alienation from which we suffer through our mode of consumption, I am seriously worried about the future.

Finally, I want to retrieve the joy of childlike wonder and curiosity. When I was younger, I used to write mini-essays for the sake or learning and get sucked into rabbit holes as a daily practice. I feel like nowadays I have lost the drive to understand the world around me. I've been disillusioned and I got scared to reach a conclusion which will condemn us indefinitely. But these days I'd like to believe that nothing can strip the world of its beauty, and that it is just a matter of seeing the glass half full. I simply want to be interested again and to embrace my own ever-changing imperfection. I want to stop avoiding deep conversations. I want to seek joy and wonder. I want to leave myself a chance to make the world a better place, if only for myself.

The daily practice of gardening and the Artist's Way

IN CONSTRUCTION

Epistemic Disclaimer

You might have understood by now that I am a firm believer in positionality. I do think every thought is flawed and biased and deeply located, but perhaps some more than others. Isn't it my responsibility to inform a potential reader of this space to take each seed of belief on this website with a grain of salt, and to consider how much thought has been put into it?

I am not well-versed enough in epistemology to know the why or how of the reliability of knowledge, and I believe you should question everything regardless of the amount of polish it has received.

However, if I am entitled to tell my reader what to trust, I have left on my Thoughts a marker of attention. If a Thought has barely been formulated, you can call it a seedling. When it has received enough attention to be clear and well connected, to have been sparked from multiple sources, it is now budding. Finally, evergreens are for Thoughts and essays of which every imaginable path has been explored. It remains imperfect and located, but it is has been explained at length and therefore I am tempted to believe that its cornerstones have been questioned and reformulated to show deep understanding.