INSERTIONS

Time passes, and the girl finds one day that she is finished. She has detected, analyzed, and documented; essentially extracted, all of the city's secrets. In doing so, she finally resolves her peripheral relationship to it, establishing an omniscient, yet distinct, separation between herself and the organism. A consequence of this resolution, however, is a change in the city, as it reacts to the redirection of the energy flow generated by these new voids. To re-establish equilibrium, she will create her own secrets and insert them into the system. This incorporation requires a conduit between her body and the city, a bridge that allows the girl to breach the boundary of the surface and anchor herself in the soil below.

So, the girl pierces a hole in the earth and digs a foundation.

The ability to predict--foreseeing, in advance, an outcome by means of special knowledge or inference is the machine that drives sentient motion. Without it, all movement would be frozen, obstructed by the lack of any decision-generative information. A secret is an unpredictable condition, by definition or, rather, "previsible", the existence of which may be assumed, even desired, but is deliberately prevented from becoming visible. The city maintains these secrets, and the girl transforms them into empirically verifiable elements.

Now obliged to build, the girl designs conduit devices that anchor each structure into the whole. She considers the two fundamental modes of construction, new and existing, focusing on the interaction between the states of predictability of existing environments and that of an hypothetical intervention. These states range from unpredictable undisturbed earth, to partially (where visible) predictable existing foundations, to predictable existing structure above ground. Reflecting the interdependent nature of the urban ecosystem, the girl adopts an organic nomenclature to describe these interactions: Germinate, Graft and Splice. Germination represents the abiogenetic generative potential between unpredictable undisturbed earth and a predictable new building; grafting, the mutually beneficial exchange between a partially predictable state (via visual inspection above ground) and predictable new structure built upon it; and splicing becomes an ectoparasitic relationship between the predictable nature of an existing structure and a predictable new structure that is dependent on the host, but not harmful to it. Upon completion, new is transformed into previsible, and entropy decelerates.

The devices are the architectural manifestations of these interstitial spaces, and act as conduits between the girl and the city. Inserted secrets will be supported by one, or all three, of these foundations, as appropriate.