A few weeks ago I was looking for some image references for an industrially-inspired cooling pergola when I stumbled upon some great photos of industrial decay on Flickr. Most of these photographs were of mysterious machinery and other oddities lost to time, but a few them had plants fighting their way into these spaces. I had a sudden epiphany as to why I had never thought of my thesis, or at least the process of "stratified overgrowth", as a mutation? That idea is effectively groundbreaking (pun intended) because it makes it easier to decipher stratified overgrowth as a process: something with a normal set of prescribed rules is injected with an anomalous condition which starts spinning those comfortable rules out of control and into new forms of evolution (and not necessarily biological). I never expressly meant  for stratified overgrowthto be merely biological though at the time this simpler form was the most accessible to a greater audience.

Interbreeding Field installed this construct that includes seating and a cafe in an abandoned paper factory in Taipei City, Taiwan

Nonetheless, mutation is such a fantastical concept that bending the traditional rules of program would be certainly attainable. What that means precisely is something unknown to me now, but in the past I was asked what people would be doing here in these spaces. I could never come up with a satisfying answer; it always seemed to be a compromise of something else. There was an idea of creating a physical game environment that was something like a labyrinth; there was an idea to turn it into a philosopher's retreat (but what would they do? such a task does not require fantastical landscapes); there was an idea to turn it into a special place for rites of passage (passages both esoteric and to accomplish a task) but, in the case of the latter, I would have to invent new rites of passage because modern society does not have such a need. But perhaps this warrants a visual investigation as I could tie it in with Interpositionism: how would a physical game environment, a philosopher's retreat, and a sanctioned place exist and evolve in a landscape of mutation and decay?

Look forward to this in a future post...