The Annotated Garden Compost

The Annotated Garden & Compost weave creative non-fiction and digital dramaturgy to meditate on garden pedagogies and ecological precarity, technological acceleration, and the entanglement of environmental and machinic systems.The Annotated Garden gathers site-rooted stories from a small urban allotment in Rotterdam, a plot threatened by encroaching property development and the climate crisis. Activated through QR codes and narrated by AI-generated avatars modelled on the author’s likeness, its annotations move between the garden and its cottage. Encounters with birds, plants, soil, and seasonal changes form narrative knots that ask how a modest plot might hold lessons far exceeding its borders.Compost operates as the project’s conceptual understory, an active method that churns through the work’s processes and theoretical underpinnings. As a body of writing, it mirrors its title and remains deliberately in process and open-ended.Together, these strands propose an attention ecology rather than an attention economy, attuned to interdependency, decay, renewal, and stewardship across so-called natural and digital worlds.Note: The Annotated Garden is published as part of VIS #15, and the accompanying Compost is self-published. keywords: AI, ecological grief, digital art, garden, annotations, digital narratives, non-human, compost, more-than-human, fragile ecologies, avatars, entanglements, precarity, AI generated images, AI generated voices, human in the loop