On Neo-Etruscan Software for Groves

The primeval groves, the vast, unmapped, uncharted and unpredictable groves that once stretched throughout Europe, fragmentarily preserved in places like Slovakia and Belarus, have long ago been cannibalised by the necessities of war and commerce. This text deals with the rationale behind a small group of neo-Etruscan coders working on the computational design of a forest that will re-enact the psychogeography of these forests in all their sublime monstrosity.

A quote from Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough suffices to give a feel of the ways the forests inspired much of barbarous knowledge and practise:

"In the religious history of the Aryan race in Europe the worship of trees has played an important part. Nothing could be more natural. For at the dawn of history Europe was covered with immense primeval forests, in which the scattered clearings must have appeared like islets in an ocean of green. Down to the first century before our era the Hercynian forest stretched eastward from the Rhine for a distance at once vast and unknown; Germans whom Caesar questioned had travelled for two months through it without reaching the end. Four centuries later it was visited by the Emperor Julian, and the solitude, the gloom, the silence of the forest appear to have made a deep impression on his sensitive nature."

The neo-Etruscan software developer can only take the builders of the Sevilla cathedral, who exclaimed "It shall be so great, posterity shall think us mad", as inspiration, while coding the logical operations behind the massive psychological avalanche of greenwoods transforming the mind of every observer into a well of the fantastic and the grotesque. Then we will truly understand Wordsworth when he stated that fairies, werewolves, gnomes, ogre's and the like, are deliberate poetic inventions to harness the overwhelming psychological power of landscapes by 'humanizing' them as extravagant crypto-zoological theatre. HP Lovecraft too recognised the ancient connection between literature and fear for the boreal forests, adding it to his general category of cosmic terror that: "Appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races and is crystallised in the most heroic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings". Robert Graves in his most splendid of mythopoetics, The White Goddess, unearths an even deeper connection when he links each letter in the Ogham alphabet used by the bards as corresponding to a tree. When Pliny mentions the hercynia, a bird born in the Hercynian forest, "serving as a beacon for travellers because its feathers glow so brightly in the dark that they light up the path", it would be wrong to attribute this to savage superstition, as Frazer would do, but as yet another example of the wild imagination caused by the experience of a forest. Or as Holmes Rolston III said in an essay delivered at the Society of American Foresters Convention in Minneapolis in 1987:

"In the primeval forest humans know the most authentic of wilderness emotions, the sense of the sublime. By contrast, few persons get goose pimples indoors, in art museums or at the city park. We will not be surprised if the quality of such experiences is hard to quantify. Almost by definition, the sublime runs off scale."

The artificial recreation of these Yggdrasillic delights of the sublime, of the things not meant for mankind, have nothing to do with romantic improvements on landscape as found in many a Jane Austen novel or in so called radical landscaping or spiral jettiesque land-art: the coders of the Oak dismiss glorified garden design of any shape and any size as it in the end only amounts to an antidote of solitude, best appreciated after a long summer of parading on fashionable beaches and boulevards. The computational design of groves as proposed here goes way beyond the picturesque follies or beautiful walks ornamented with the obligatory garden hermit acquired through a newspaper add. A generatively designed grove is not meant to be appreciated by humans, if only because it will take at least a thousand years before it starts to evoke the true savage fear of hostile galaxies, articulated in trees. The absinthine psychogeographical abyss designed by gothic software can be dug only when it computes for the long now. Software that calculates in geological time, a priori of eons of avalanches and earthquakes, offering you in somewhat ironic fashion a drop-down menu for every 1000 years.

There can be determined a heuristic of what makes a forest as we recognize a forest from a mere group of trees when we see one. But the challenge to turn software in the oracle of the bushwhackers of the future needs the extra quality of insight we find in Horace Walpole: "I have seen never anything serious that was not ridiculous". But the Byronic coders, conspiring against the space age, have enough sense to not try to aim at a one to one copy of the Hercynian forest, as time will undoubtedly take care of that at one point in one far future or another. Not content with a recreation of the primeval forests as it once was, the software will create forests unlike anything seen before. Forests ultra-absurd, patterns of trees engineered like a surrealists exquisite corps, to be experienced as something as alien as the coelacanthic creatures from the deep sea.

The oak avant-garde are hiding out deep in the pockets of Hercynia that survived the trauma, living in tree-huts, shouting bits of code at each other, casting spells on the OS with snake-eyes, programming in tongues, debugging like a scorpion, intoxicated with the future of intelligence on earth. Deep inside the software there hides something bigger than the individual computational processes, like "strange sacrifice in a druidic grove, it assumed a terrible intensity", it's an artificial intelligence "writ in water". Tree for tree, bush for bush, it will tell us where to plant and where to let grow and where to interfere in nature's natural course, in the process reshuffling the odds of human civilisation by reprogramming everybody getting near it through subliminally messages encoded in the new forests that are like giant immersing soft machines whispering to us, in a matter impossible to resist, suggesting us things we must do, in a matter impossible to resist, resulting in unspeakable acts impossible to resist.

These are the things computer scientists won't talk about at gunpoint.