SAIMEI

Concept

DATUM

“Relentlessly wavering particles of light. Dancing rays of light. The sun is conjured up from the depths of one’s memories….I become weightless, and turn into a feather.”

One sunny afternoon in winter, I headed for the fields in search of some solace.
Bathing myself in the comfort of the light filtering through the trees, I found myself drawn to the shapes and tone colors of plants born from the density of silence.

While casually observing the mysterious sound through the lens of my camera, I noticed there was music and the dancing of life, brimming with tension and resolution, and ambiguity and suggestions, combined with incomplete, meditative questions.
The ethos of an optical vortex; it makes no effort, and does not speak or think….

Time itself existed through the variety of instances.
The instant I gazed intently, the thoughts that came to me alterd my entire awareness as if by some external force.

The eternal transcendent wavering between myself and the outside, its appearance within the pathos of imagery combined with my feeling of dizziness toward the emptiness, testified to others, or the non-ego, being passive and not active.


“She turns, always, towards the sun, though her roots hold her fast, and, altered, loves unaltered.” From “Metamorphoses” by Ovidius


“Contemporary physical science has progressed with the primary objective of banishing human sensory organs. For example, in using our ears, everything from periodic to pseudoperiodic curves can be represented as sounds. It is even possible to recognize the curves of a person’s facial profile, from the forehead to the jaw, by representing it as a continuous sound.” “Tsubaki-no Hana-ni Uchu-wo Miru (Finding Space within a Camellia Flower)” by Torahiko Terada


To gain an intuitive understanding of the passive and spontaneous behavior of plants in response to sunlight, as well as their active formative effect, Johannes Kepler (1571ー1630) carried out research on the morphology of plants, which was described in a book written by the physicist, Wolfgang Ernst Pauli.

Light waves are transmitted to our world from the stars with astounding precision. It is through this rotational movement that the nervous systems of plant species continue to radiate waves of light around them in the “monde hypophysique (sub-physical world).”
In other words, Kepler suggested that there were unknown optics (“dynamis” or potential)at work in the principles that govern the shapes and changes in plants.

According to J.J. Gibson, it is not the shape of the object itself which makes perception and awareness possible, but its static part which remains unchanged [information (vibrations) contained in the light that is independent of physical existence].

For example, the randomly formed inkblots in the Rorschach test is made possible only when “fake images that do not actually exist” are recognized as being “something else that actually exists in two dimensions.” Ascertaining what is real and what is not in the world of information has to be separated from the distinction between virtual and real images in classical optics.

*DATUM [Derived from] Latin word meaning “That which is given.”

Reference Material on Plants

(1) Plant cells are more complex in structure than animal cells.
They are different from animal cells in that they have a certain organelle. In other words, they contain chloroplasts.
The details on how animals acquired eyes, and how plants acquired photosynthesis can be found in “Life Ascending” (written by Nick Lane).

LIFE ASCENDING / The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane

(2) The memory of plants is a type of procedural memory, like the immunological memory of people. Procedural memory is memory that has no self-awareness.
The fact that roots look similar to neural networks has already been pointed out by Charles Darwin in the 19th century, but it has been attracting attention again in the last few years. It is a fact that Darwin came up with the “root-brain” hypothesis, and regarded plants to be intelligent organisms.
In 2005, the new field of plant neurobiology was established in science to study the informational networks of plants, creating an uproar in the world of academia.

“What a Plant Knows” (written by Daniel Chamovitz)
WHAT A PLANT KNOWS / A FIELD GUIDE TO THE SENSES by Daniel Chamovitz


(3) “Do Plants Sleep?” With the Latin name, Carolus Nilsson Linnaeus (1707 – 1778), the man who proposed this theory was also known by his Swedish name, Carl von Linné.
He was a medical doctor, an explorer and above all a researcher of plant classification. Through his research on plants, Linné announced a variety of ideas throughout his life. The theory that he announced with great confidence and surprising conciseness was that “plants sleep.”
Today, the established theory is that the fundamental biological function of sleep is closely related to the activities of the most highly evolved brain. According to studies in psychoanalysis, dreams highlight what exists in the subconscious part of our brains. Dreams are currently regarded as being a phenomenon that arises as the result of the learning and rationalization process, and it is created by the most advanced function of the brain.


(4) Plants are social organisms that have been refined through a long evolutionary process. It is not difficult to understand that plants exist on time scales that are completely different from that of humans. If things progressed at such a slow pace that it was undetectable to the human eye, it would appear meaningless to us.

If you cannot understand what I am trying to say, then I will be more direct. “Fast” or “slow” time scales are not absolute. There is too much difference between the speeds at which humans and plants move that our senses are simply being fooled.

In other words, if we tried to study the intelligence of plants, you would see that it would be almost impossible to understand the biological system involved in thinking that differs so much from our own.
If we were to be contacted by intelligent aliens someday, would we even be able to recognize their intelligence, let alone communicate with them? The answer is, “Probably not.” Humans cannot recognize intelligence that is different from our own, so although we are trying to find alien intelligence, perhaps we will simply end up striving forever to find intelligence that is similar to our own, somewhere in space.


(5) The main theme of plant neurobiology is to study plants as being organisms that are capable of predicting, sharing processing and using information gathered from the environment.
Research on the system of communication and socialization among plants (bioinspiration) has led to the launch of projects on “plantroids (plant-type robots),” as well as the building of the “Greenternet,” a network based on plants.

Perhaps a day will come when plants will tell us of approaching toxic clouds, give us information on the quality of the air and soil, or notify us of avalanches and earthquakes. This will be a computer that relies on new algorithms based on the computing capabilities and computing systems of plants.


(3) (4) (5) Verde Brillante (written by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, with foreword written by Michael Pollan)
VERDE BRILLANTE / Sensibilità e intelligenza del mondo vegetale by Stefano Mancuso, Alessandra Viola, Foreword by Michael Pollan.

Installation [ECHO]

This installation depicts the properties of a variety of types of fluid, including the interaction between everything from the delicate flow of water to its turbulence, with the sensing of the undulations of plants. It is an interface that interactively connects the unconscious, precursory phenomena of plants and humans.

What makes stars, like our sun, so wonderful is that the radiance of nuclear fission is converted into a sustainable flow of energy on our green planet.
In plants, this is carried out in an orderly manner by the green leaves, the roots that absorb nutrients from the soil, and the seeds packed with information for giving birth to clones. But what is even more interesting is the steady flow of energy through animals. In animals, this flow of energy can actually be felt. They pulsate, and even give off heat.

This tedium and motionless state are standard states in the greater part of atoms and space. While most substances in space have slid into a frozen ground state, a very small portion has succeeded in capturing waves of energy to rise to the surface and dance.
We are making steady progress in transitioning from the world of solid, heavy atoms to an intangible world in which we value the non-physical.

Imagine a silent, homogenous state with no light.
The divergence of space imparted inclination to matter.
Energy, like water under gravity, is unable to collect until the difference is annulled.
“Natural scenes” are created as the result of the effort to maintain this difference through resistance to entropy.

A powerful fluctuation in vorticity is one of the characteristics of turbulence, and another important property is that it is three-dimensional.
As for the structure of vortices, Leonardo da Vinci in his final years devoted himself enthusiastically to research on vortices by drawing sketches of them.
In imagining the helical structure on which life is based, created through repeated chemical reactions on Earth in primeval times, the dispersed structure on which life is founded is believed to have been created through the complex exchanging of energy between the three states of water, as a solid, liquid and gas. A calculation that continues endlessly is similar to water. Truly interesting
calculations are often found close to the points of phase transition between a solid, liquid and gas.

Live organisms mark the passage of time, and their internal states are constantly changing in response to the situations and phenomena they encounter in the environment. How can the information system found in organisms spontaneously appear in nature? How does a material system acquire the ability to handle information? And how does the ability to calculate spring up within a non-biological system as emergent attributes.


“We have never seen a living system, so it is the relationship between nature, information and
people that we must study.”
–Gregory Bateson


When Charles Darwin was researching the theory of natural selection, he was puzzled by the “eye.” He realized the difficulty in explaining how it evolved gradually. This was because the retina, lens and pupil of the eye are so perfectly evolved that the slightest deviation would result in something that was completely useless.

When the same pattern appears from nowhere on numerous occasions, such as the whirlpool that is formed by molecules of water when draining a bathtub, it is believed to be inevitable. The evolution of the eye, like a camera, is like a miracle even if it only happens once, but it has happened numerous times in the history of the Earth.
These patterns, like other original patterns that are recreated, are perceived by the brain unconsciously. That is because as fellow organisms, they are founded on internal inertia found in the complexity of the ability to self-organize.

The incredible optical structure that is like a “biological camera” is the result of convergent evolution, found in all species from octopuses to slugs, marine annelids, jellyfish and spiders.
Humans relied on ingenuity over several thousand years to eventually succeed in creating a practical, artificial camera-like eye. The way different types of technology change over time, like evolved designs, leaps of innovation, or the emergence of a system adapted to complexity, is similar to the pattern of the systematic evolution of species.
Life is a self-generating information system. David Bohm, the physicist, stated that science of the future will be similar to art. The original meaning of the word “theory” was to “look at.”

Wherein lies the physics of our minds?
In modern-day physics, it is important to note that gravity can be considered the geometric effect of warped space. Whirlpools of light originally exist in projective space in which light is seen as a spot.
Here, if we were to forget the existence of the three-dimensional space of the real world, and focus on just the “mirror,” one would realize that it is a strange world in which the “shadows” created by the light of objects exists.

Expanding the geometry (projective geometry) of light to a complex number converts it into a “mirror that projects nature” that is completely different from the dimension that our brains can comprehend.
In the world of math and physics, this world of mirror images is called a “complex plane (Gauss Plane),” consisting of a real axis and an imaginary axis, and it is formed by the “world of negative dimensions (haptic data),” which are indispensable in understanding space.

Turbulence (mirror) is a system of discernment (unbundling) found in nature capable of breaking things down into their most primitive elements, and it is regarded as a massive circuit for the cognitive function.


“Our minds are probably characteristics stemming from a certain strange and surprising property of a physical principle that controls the real world we live in, rather than just the characteristics of some kind of algorithm run by something that is the target of the structure of classical physics.”
– Roger Penrose


Consciousness began when the brain acquired the ability, the simple ability, to tell a story without using words.
Beneath the conscious mind is an underground cavity, and this cavity is divided into numerous levels. Certain levels consist of images (underlying nastic movements) that the mind has not turned its attention to.

Research based on experiments has revealed that the processing of spatial information and patterned information is carried out mainly in the right half of the brain.
The right hemisphere excels in sorting each part of matters into a pattern, recognizing the locations of dots and identifying numbers within patterns, or perceiving audio patterns such as melodies, as in a Kohs 3D pattern inspection.

Put bluntly, when the mind tries to process the information it has perceived of its own accord, everything is already embodied in the sensory chaos that has existed from the beginning. Phenomena are reality, and the mind is what we sense directly, while consciousness is a device that generates illusions because of its elaborateness.

Information is a measure of the unpredictability of a certain message. In other words, it is a measure of the level of surprise we experience from it. Civilization led by consciousness deprives humans of heterogeneity and contradiction, and tends to lower the quality of information experience.
“Strangers” and “others” may seem similar, but they are not necessarily the same. Here, we will refer to the issue related to the phenomenon of everyday “strangers” spreading to extraordinary “others” as the “theory of alterity.”


“Whatever is done by this thing called me feels like it has been done by someone bigger than myself within me.” – James Clerk Maxwell


Reference Materials:
- “What Technology Wants” by Kevin Kelly

- “Les Lois de L’imitation” by Jean-Gabriel Tarde

- “Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness” by John Briggs and F. David Peat

- “The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness” by Antonio R. Damasio

- “The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size” by Tor Norretranders

- “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” by Julian Jaynes

- “Penrose’s (Quantum Brain) Theory: In Pursuit of the Scientific Basis for the Mind and Awareness (Beyond the Doubting of a Shadow)” by Roger Penrose. Translated by Kaoru Takeuchi and Kenichiro Mogi

- “Steps to an Ecology of Mind” by Gregory Bateson
446th Night of “Thousand Nights for Thousand Books” by Seigow Matsuoka



“A characteristic of the media, which came about at the same time as the rise of contemporary semiotics was the ‘writing’ of text by machines.
Here, ‘writing’ refers to the text of technology, or to be more specific, the recording of ‘the passage of sound and light.’
Until the age of printed books, everyday life in the civilized world was based on the reading and handwriting of text.
‘Text written by technology’ is very distinct from printed text. It is characterized by the fact that it cannot be read by people.
This does not mean it is an illusion, but it testifies to the gap between human cognitive capabilities and the capabilities of machines.
It is this ‘cognitive gap,’ which integrates human perception and creates consciousness. This is exactly what Walter Benjamin referred to as ‘the age of mechanical reproduction.’

This gap is similar to the state in which it is difficult to distinguish and impossible to determine the difference between culture, dreams and reality cultivated by humans regarding dreams.
Dreams lack the ‘here and now’ experience. In other words, the forgetting, recalling or interpreting of dreams are carried out upon starting out from a state of nonexistence, rather than being a conscious act.

That is why people have been able to interpret the meaning of dreams in a variety of ways. The interpretation of dreams formed an important part of reality. This was also related to the symbols of primitive people, like the cave paintings of Lascaux or Chauvet, or it has to be connected at a fundamental level to the question of what artificial intelligence is. We have reached the stage where humans and machines can communicate through symbols, or in other words, the ‘overlapping symbols used by humans and machines’ have reached a level of physical contact.”
–“New semiotics” by Hidetaka Ishida and Hiroki Azuma


“I consider consciousness (the nerve system) to be a functional capability. For example, it is related to the contraction of the wave function caused by the effect of gravity. At the core of this idea is ‘non-computability.’
The physical principles we know today are all computable types.
In other words, we have to step outside the image portrayed by contemporary physics.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics have yet to be integrated, that is, the creation of quantum gravity (quantum brain) has yet to succeed and it is one of the most important issues in physics.

The important thing is that the warping of space affects the curvature of space-time, and it fundamentally, albeit subtly, affects the principles of quantum mechanics themselves.
This is one of the climaxes during the process of self-organization within the media of experiences like the mind, and this image overlaps with the ‘occasions of experience’ concept of Whitehead.”
– Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff