Category: Sufficiently-Advanced Nature

Playing with climate, casually

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I read this story on Canary Media with interest – “Solarpunk is going mainstream. This couple’s $1M Kickstarter proves it. Canary chats with the co-creators of the forthcoming video game Loftia, set in a renewables-powered utopia that celebrates community and climate optimism.”

I think it’s a little bit of a stretch to say that Solarpunk is going mainstream – but “cosycore” meets Animal Crossing x Ghibli aesthetic seems to be attractive. I’ve talked about the ‘protopia’ I call the “Chobani Cinematic Universe” before, and it seems in that vein.

At the end of the article it mentions an existing game, Terra Nil, which is available on Netflix and steam.

I downloaded it and started playing, with headphones in as recommended by the authors.

Terra Nil Game Trailer on YT

Smash cut to… oh, 3 hours later? It had gone midnight and I hadn’t noticed at all.

It’s game mechanics will be fairly familiar to casual gamers – you are tasked with transforming a map by introducing various types of resource in turn, with constraints on your budget to do so. The choices you make encourage different biomes / ecosystems to emerge and flourish. So far so fun.

But I think the sound design is something else.

It is immensely calming. Gentle repetition and seeming evolution in the soundtrack puts one to mind of many ambient favourites of the past, and the eno-esque ‘music as furniture’ feel contributes to your occupation / immersion in making “another green world”.

Ahem.

Anyway.

This put me to thinking about the use of ‘generative music as macroscope’, i.e. using generated soundscapes to create impressionistic understanding of large scale ecologies or systems that you’re embedded in.

Could that connect you more profoundly – or just pleasurably to the energy systems around you?

Or go further to ‘sonify’ natural systems that you’re entangled with (a nod here to Superflux’s recent work giving voice to rivers and watersheds via GenAI…)

Matt Brown made the Carbon Weather Forecast last year and in the past has made some lovely lyrical maps of the shipping forecast, as well as beautiful music-oriented pieces – including Making Future Magic’s soundtrack while we were at BERG.

I imagine he could do something rather wonderful in this arena.

What’s Pokemon Go meets Bloom meets Project Sunroof?

Centaur, Octopus, Plasma-potter

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Real-world RL: DeepMind controls a fusion reactor:
…The era of the centaur scientist cometh…
DeepMind researchers have trained a reinforcement learning agent to shape the distribution of plasma in a Tokamak fusion reactor. This requires training an agent that “can manipulate the magnetic field through a precise control of several coils that are magnetically coupled to the plasma to achieve the desired plasma current, position, and shape”. If that sounds complicated, that’s because it’s extremely complicated. The task is akin to being an octopus and needing to precisely shape a tube of clay that’s rotating at speeds faster than you can comprehend, and to never tear or destabilize the clay.

From Jack Clark’s Import AI Newsletter

Station Identification

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Flat holm island from Sandy Bay, North Somerset UK

When trying to understand the interactions of non-human organisms, it is easy to flip between these two perspectives: that of the inanimate behaviour of pre-programmed robots on the one hand, and that of rich, lived, human experience on the other. Framed as brainless organisms, lacking the basic apparatus required to have even a simple kind of ‘experience’, fungal interactions are no more than automatic responses to a series of biochemical triggers. Yet the mycelium of truffle fungi, like that of most fungal species, actively senses and responds to its surroundings in unpredictable ways. Their hyphae are chemically irritable, responsive, excitable. It is this ability to interpret the chemical emissions of others that allows fungi to negotiate a series of complex trading relationships with trees; to knead away at stores of nutrients in the soil; to have sex; to hunt; or to fend off attackers. Anthropomorphism is usually thought of as an illusion that arises like a blister in soft human minds: untrained, undisciplined, unhardened. There are good reasons for this: when we humanise the world, we may prevent ourselves from understanding the lives of other organisms on their own terms. But are there things this stance might lead us to pass over – or forget to notice? The biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation of the Great Plains region of the United States, observes that the indigenous Potawatomi language is rich in verb forms that attribute aliveness to the more-than-human world. The word for hill, for example, is a verb: ‘to be a hill’. Hills are always in the process of hilling, they are actively being hills. Equipped with this ‘grammar of animacy’, it is possible to talk about the life of other organisms without either reducing them to an ‘it’, or borrowing concepts traditionally reserved for humans. By contrast, in English, writes Kimmerer, there is no way to recognise the ‘simple existence of another living being’. If you’re not a human subject, by default you’re an inanimate object: an ‘it’, a ‘mere thing’. If you repurpose a human concept to help make sense of the life of a non-human organism, you’ve tumbled into the trap of anthropomorphism. Use ‘it’, and you’ve objectified the organism, and fallen into a different kind of trap.

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

Hills are always in the process of hilling, they are actively being hills.