Deadline: September 22
(Autumn Equinox)

What I would like to gather for the fall 2026 issue:

1. Gardening and botanical documentation, as well as reflections on cultivation projects and summer excursions. These are the materials that really ground the project as it extends itself into oblique expressions and tangents.
2. Experimental, enigmatic audio. This has always been a cornerstone of this project, as I like to present it as a sort of "audio magazine", which traces back to my previous Record of the Month Club serial project.
3. Research and findings. I'm always happy to include excerpts of related readings and online discoveries. I have scanning and including book excerpts of my own. Old, short documentaries are another favorite.
4. Abstractions. I do love to include/reframe abstract designs that seem to demonstrate a plantae or fungal logic, even if the work wasn't created for this sort of setting. I find this to be a nice pairing with item #1 above.
5. Psychedelia, particularly the nonobjective stuff. I have always thought gardening and immersion in plantlife to be inherently psychedelic, and synaesthetic.
6. Tawdry genres, with some relationship to gardening & botany. I have my own preferences for sci-fi and horror, but perhaps there are other genre expansions of this project that would be worthwhile. Victorian erotica, anyone?

What I myself have been up to:

• Readings on plant intelligence and mycology
• Delving into botanical, cosmic and folk horror films
• Not much new gardening; mostly maintaining

Catie had sent me a Zillow photo of our backyard, before we transformed it.

My gardening work is confined to the early summer, and then the grounds go wild.

I have been preferring to look at wilder native gardens where the label of "weed" becomes too hard to apply. Unruly exuberance. This is the sort of aesthetic that influences my current artwork the most, and I think back to 10-20 years ago when my strongest aesthetic influence came from minimal, observational cinema.

As a "gardening magazine", I have wanted Botanical Readiness to maintain a spacious breadth: no-nonsense gardening information, botanical reflections, nonobjective designs, psychedelia, sci-fi, horror. An ecosystem of practical interests in plants, permaculture and soil+fungal life, and genres sharing a common post-anthropocene vision (and Lovecraftian is welcome).

Btw: both films above are free on Tubi: Gaia; Without Name. I'm supposed to see ads on Tubi, but I'm using Firefox with AdGuard Adblocker, and so the ads have been absent.

Ultimately, this is an urban project where nature is craved and sought, rather than a secure centerpiece of life and practice (as with many other collectives and residencies). Urbanites will do what they can with the few spaces they can get their hands on, and sometimes must be satisfied with innerspace explorations and projections (particularly during the half-year midwestern winters).

YouTube description:
In 1976, John Lifton, Tom Zahuranec, Jim Wiseman and Richard Lowenberg created sequences for the feature film production of The Secret Life of Plants, wirelessly monitoring plant bio-signals plus performers' brainwaves (EEG) and muscular (EMG) signals to control audio and video synthesizer output/feedback. None of this video was used in the film.