July

 

I feel gardening as an antidote to the flattening of the senses brought about by increasing immersion in the digitized world. A way of regaining the reality of Earth. While gardening, one can recover a form of stillness eroded by the endless whirlpool of deterritorialized algorithmic communication and manipulation. In the garden, one is allowed to reconnect with the physical pulse of life by tuning in to nature’s rhythms and engaging all of one's senses. Gardening acts as a countermeasure against the annihilation of reality, an antidote to the liquefaction of the real in service of the artificial. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC) July 2026.

sequel

The tapestry finished in May is the sequel to «Connected», "covering very different ground and ending up in unanticipated places", behind the mountain on the upper left side of last year's tapestry.

While reading the transformative book The Entanglement by Alva Noë, the weaving of this new tapestry gained a new direction, opening up new meanings along a line of questions that I had been avoiding. Perhaps the tapestries were not about nature, but more about finding myself within nature. 

Photo of part of the tapestry «Interconnected» (102 x 82 cm) by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC), May 2026.

March

"Achieving transformative change requires that the fundamental drivers of overconsumption are addressed, through changes in personal values, norms, economic and social operating rules, technologies and regulations. Given the interconnected nature of climate change, loss of biodiversity, land degradation, and air and water pollution, it is essential that these problems are tackled together urgently." (p. 107) United Nations Environment Programme (2021). Making Peace with Nature: A scientific blueprint to tackle the climate, biodiversity and pollution emergencies.

May

“Growing our connections to nature will allow us to push past mere intellect to embrace sensory experiences, emotions, intuition. (…) For the first time, a large body of research is illuminating the fact that our world arises from a sprawling, highly dynamic set of rhythms and relationships. (…) An especially intriguing aspect of this scientific shift – of this effort to break science out of the intellectual boxes we built for it – is the effort by some to merge traditional science with indigenous wisdom.” Gary Ferguson, 2019. Eight Master Lessons of Nature. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

August

"Mycorrhizal networks (also known as common mycorrhizal networks or CMN) are underground hyphal networks created by mycorrhizal fungi that connect individual plants together and transfer water, carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients and minerals. The formation of these networks is context dependent, and can be influenced by factors such as soil fertility, resource availability, host or myco-symbiont genotype, disturbance and seasonal variation."  Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

artifacts interconnections with personal life

Jung et al (*)

Elaboration on the construction of a framework for (digital) artifact ecology in order to elicit the interconnections that take place among multiple artifacts. They do not mention any non-digital artifacts, such as notebooks, diaries, scrapings and their place in the artifact ecology. So this ecology should be considered as «digital artifact ecology».

For my study it's as much important to understand the «digital artifacts» as it is importante to understand «non-digital artifacts» and their inter-relations and interconnections, specially when we are facing the re-creations of the «office on the go». Understanding «why» mobile workers choose to use «non-digital artifacts» might bring better ideas for (new/better) digital artifacts, then understanding «why» they use «digital artifacts».

(*) Jung, H., Stolterman, E., Ryan, W., Thompson, T., and Siegel, M. (2008). Toward a framework for ecologies of artifacts: how are digital artifacts interconnected within a personal life?. In Proceedings of the 5th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer interaction: Building Bridges (Lund, Sweden, October 20 - 22, 2008). NordiCHI '08, vol. 358. ACM, New York, NY, 201-210.