The Hidden Connections of Panda Trees

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The insight reveals how pandas are examples of interconnected organisms where what we see above ground as a forest of aspen trees is actually one single organism with a common root system. Each tree is a shoot of the same root system, sharing the same DNA, highlighting the narrowness of our perspective in perceiving organisms. This realization of interconnectedness was not recognized until the 1950s or 1960s, leading to a complete reframing of the concept of an organism, exemplified by the panda, one of the largest and oldest creatures on earth.

You might want to take a walk with this one. It is big and full of brain food and an enlivening opening of imagination to possibilities that are emergent now: the notion of the “broad commonwealth of life” that we are “inextricably entangled with and suffused by”; the paradox that the more accurately you try to measure some things, the more unmeasurable they become; the way words we use all the time have kept our cellular belonging to the natural world alive, even as civilization forgot.

The technologist/artist James Bridle brings all of this into interplay with an intriguing, refreshing lens on our lives with technology — and with all that artificial intelligence is and might become.

You might not think of intelligence the same way again, or the truth of mythology, or the letters of the alphabet, or what it means to be human. And you will smile next time you access the place where your digital life is stored and realize what it says about us that we named it The Cloud.

James Bridle is an artist and technologist and author of the books Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence and New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. Their writing has appeared in The Guardian, Wired, The Atlantic, and many other places. Their art has been exhibited around the world, including at NOME Gallery in Berlin.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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