Born in a town on the periphery of London (1997, Anthropocene). Prior to this, ice covered the land throughout the Anglican Glaciation. 1000m deep ice drifted around, diverting the River Thames to its current flow (1.8-0.01 mya, Pleistocene). Once the whole of Great Britain drifted, as it departed from Pangaea, encountering a series of floods by the Atlantic. A mass extinction preceded the flooding, deeply affecting life across the biosphere (240-145 mya, Triassic-Jurassic).
Joshua Keith Richards
Nature Cache
Wandering through digital space, reality is weightless. Measurements are by the thousands. Mirroring a mental experience, a para-physical experience that is conjured by a mind whose faculties are failing. May stood for 4 hours to water a potted plant. They suffer from dementia. Individuals' experience of the condition can be very personal. May’s encounter caused seemingly unconventional acts to occur, permeating the boundaries between home and nature. A new understanding of nature must be imagined, as current forms of ecology are taken away by human control. Nature Cache wanders a new way to live with nature, a permeable relationship constructed through the memory of May.
The para-physical quality of the memories in question entail the application of virtual space, as realities parameters do not suffice. The weightlessness of the mind in a state of decline, an imagination that is not bound by conventional regulations of human thought is likened to the abundance of parameters in digital space, floating is possible when gravity is transformed to -1. Nature is uncanny online.
Nature Cache utilises the metrics of digital space to reconstruct and extend memories during May’s experience with dementia. Simulating natural events within a virtual vacuum, questioning new permeable ways of living with nature. Warping the home beyond its physical state, extending it beyond its perimeter, leaving a digital stain. Like Derek Jarman’s garden, boundaries are permeable and endless, merging home and land together.
Lamb in oven –
A porous recollection, as nerve cells and networks become obstructed, then broken, by proteins in the brain. Connections between sections of the organ are taken away, causing symptoms of loss.
Breeze to a gale –
Notes and thoughts lose hierarchy, as phone numbers are written onto obituaries.
One brick, polygon mesh: 62 vertices, 28 faces –
Digital mesh of memory.
Your water bill –
Watering a single potted plant for four hours. To contain four hours of water the utility room is extended to the pond at the end of the garden.
The Gannel –
A memory of the landscape.
A stream runs through the garage –
Towels and bedding left to dry in the sun of the garden are affected by the simulation of water, expanding bed sheets graze the surface of the stream as water is filtered through it.
Picture frame on the streams bed –
The floor became waterlogged allowing pond ecology to meet photo frames kept in storage.
Towel draped over the sliding door into water, polygon mesh: 279137 vertices, 92928 faces –
Merging with the memories of the garden.
Monday, September 5, 1983 –
As autumn approaches prevailing winds blast the coastal landscape. Trees become unsteady, collapsing into the living room.
A day (4 minutes, 18 seconds) in a field –
Within the virtual vacuum nature takes on inconceivable properties in reality. A tree in a storm may bend as the mesh is subdivided into the thousands.
Crumpled rug, tea time –
Bricks became as heavy as leaves, gliding across the living room floor, crumpling rugs in their path.
Enter the forest –
The image of the forest is revealed in the void created by the simulation.
The living room –
The front extension to the living room experienced a gentle embrace of the cedar tree, as the simulated nature fell. Traces of the home are kept in photo frames and ceiling roses, intertwining with the new nature.
Mesh of a tree falling through the roof
Photo album –
On their routined morning walk, they slumbered in a leafy glade.
Wandering –
The memory of a moment.
They slumbered in a leafy glade –
Considering their bedroom to extend to the field.
West Pentire fields –
The quality of a fragmented memory leaves voids in the simulation that cannot be complete. Areas beyond or hidden within the construction of model space. Allowing vacancy for the landscape of the memory to infill.
Simulating this merging of domestic and nature, the leaves of a tree in the front garden are blown by the wind.
Mesh of the field –
Since they would sleep on the land, the floor becomes a mattress. Taking on its properties, leaves lay there for a limitless amount of time, and begin to sink.