Paying attention to trees

I was just watching Ada Null's 2025 Roguelike Celebration talk, and there's a bit where she's riffing off Kate Compton:

Picture a garden full of wild trees of the same species. If you compare any two trees, you can clearly tell they're different trees that have grown in their own way. But you'd be hard-pressed if the next day I asked you to describe exactly how they were different. They're just, you know, they're different trees. They they branch differently, they're slightly different heights. These trees aren't characterful, at least not relative to each other. So, they aren't perceptually unique, but they are perceptually differentiated. Once more, this garden's kind of boring, but it's a different kind of boring from our topiary garden. I feel like we could walk through this garden forever and ever, and we'd know we're making progress through it and not just walking in circles, cuz these trees are actually different, but it's all just blah. It's not really a garden anymore, more an endless forest.

[timestamp, 44:50]

And that made me think about George Outhwaite, a painter who paints the same trees repeatedly, finding new things each time:

a few years ago i had an opportunity to pitch a book to a proper nature publisher, so i pitched a field guide to a single butterfly species, with 100s of illustrations covering every slight visual variation, it wasn't picked up

it was based on the time my mum saw a late season ringlet in the garden and after looking at a field guide decided it was a mazarine blue, which is extinct in the uk, the only way i could convince her it wasn't was to show her the natural history museum's digital collection of ringlets

I love scientific illustration but not it's tendency towards generalisation, i'm a portrait painter I can't paint the average

[Bluesky]

I guess the point of this post is just to make the kind of shallow point that the property of whether something is interesting depends as much on the attitude of the viewer as it does on the thing itself. This is one reason I enjoyed doing my podcast the machine gently stutters ❏❐❑❒ - every episode, I was reading out an instance of procedurally generated text. And, often this text is kind of bad, or is there to make a point by its volume, it's presence, it's overall structure, and is not really designed to stand up to the serious scrutiny of a line by line reading. And yet I found that when I did subject it to the serious kind of attention necessary to perform it, when I did try to infuse it's (often) lack of meaning with as much meaning as I could, that I could find something there.

I collect sentences I find striking on the internet, and often the sentences I am collecting are put out to fill space, because it's expected that there will be some text in a place and so some text has to be created to fill it. Text that's designed for machines (SEO), or text that's written carelessly. And yet the more you look at it the more remarkable it is. I can find as much to wonder about in this byproduct-text as I can in a seriously considered work of literature. Often this meaning is unselfconscious, or the observations are as much about the environment that selected for this text, but it comes through just the same.

In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all but very interesting.

At the New School once I was substituting for Henry Cowell, teaching a class in Oriental music. I had told him I didn't know anything about the subject. He said, "That's all right. Just go where the records are. Take one out. Play it and then discuss it with the class," Well, I took, out the first record. It was an LP of a Buddhist service. It began with a short microtonal chant with sliding tones, then soon settled into a single loud reiterated percussive beat. This noise continued relentlessly for about fifteen minutes with no perceptible variation. A lady got up and screamed, and then yelled, "Take it off. I can't bear it any longer:' I took it off. A man in the class then said angrily, "Why'd you take it off? I was just getting interested:'

John Cage, Silence, Lectures and Writings

Okay, that's all well and good, V, but it's more complicated than that because the trees that Ada is talking about aren't real trees. In the real world, the trees have infinite detail to them. The more you look, the more there is to find. But in the digital world, even the most intricately simulated bowl of oatmeal is going to bottom out at a certain point. The oats won't bear the marks of the particular processes that were applied to them since harvesting. The milk won't come from a particular herd of cows. The bowl won't have been made in a particular factory, out of clay sourced from particular clay pits, bearing the unique mineral composition that that signifies. The glaze - do you think this digital version will consider the glaze separately from the ceramic? Do you think that the choice of digital glaze will be decided based on having similar shrinkage factors to the digital clay, such that it isn't prone to crazing when run through a simulated firing schedule?

That's the thing about going outside. It's so much... so much everything more than the computer. And the computer can do some pretty amazing things, but the thing about a simulation is that it is not not the real thing. The thing about a map is that it is not the territory. The model is useful because it has made a choice for what to model. And that is where the art comes in.

There's also something here about the trees being within a garden. But I just got a book about gardens, so I will wait until I am deeper within that to have those thoughts.