Groundwork

The parts nobody sells.

A world of this kind is usually built out of whatever can be sold. Trees, houses, vehicles · anything with a price tag gets made beautifully, and everything in between gets left out. What is left out is the ground itself: the roads, the rails, the planting, the way you get from one place to another.

These pieces are about that leftover half, and why we treat it as the actual product.

The whole argument

Elsewhere the tree is the product and the landscape is whatever happens around it. Here the landscape is the product, and the tree is infrastructure · like a road.

Written for the planting piece, but it holds for every one of them.

The pieces

photograph to come

Piece one written

Planting

A tool for planting vegetation instead of buying it has been in the viewer since 2004, and in OpenSimulator ever since. It went quiet because the economy grew around selling objects. We picked it up, filled it with plants of our own, and made them cost one land impact each.

What planting actually does to a specimen, why the price is the argument, and the three rules that keep a neighbourhood liveable.

Read it

Not just reading

Most of this was built by somebody who asked if they could help.

The roads, the bridges and the village greens are handed out as projects with a brief, a place and a reward. If reading about the groundwork makes you want to lay some, that is the door.

Public Works See the continent