green (letter)

I’ve been completely obsessed with the color green —different shades of it. I must confess, I’m not a big fan of aqua green, but anyway. Matcha green, olive green, moss green, green lady, weed green. I was once a young urban adult —depressed, maybe even nihilistic. Back then, I became obsessed with wearing only black, white, and gray. I especially loved gray because the voices in my head convinced me it created a nice contrast with my olive-brown skin tone. Then came weed. It changed my relationship with foods I used to refuse, and it became my first real connection to the color green. A flower that opened my mind to eating plants —and even led me to go vegetarian for quite some time. That’s when I started getting into *shamanism*, sacred plants, Castaneda, and all that. Until I finally drank ayahuasca —and it made it simply impossible to remain a nihilist. But it was through an aesthetic movement —solarpunk— that I began leaning toward a more hopeful, less apocalyptic future. I also started wearing a lot of brown, as a gesture of identification with the soil, the earth beneath my feet, and also my skin color. But it was when I moved to the farm, during the pandemic —living literally as a hermit— that I learned to truly appreciate the green palaces that are untouched forests. I felt like not only my partner, but the land itself embraced me. I had beautiful experiences —like seeing wild animals up close— and I learned to enjoy being alone, to appreciate silence, and to witness the rhythms of nature: the changing seasons, the cycles of planting and harvesting. There, I also had psychedelic experiences —on LSD and mushrooms, on separate occasions (I never mix things). It was there that I realized everything is alive. Even things that don’t *seem* alive —objects, stones, water— they’re alive too. And obviously living things, the ones we tend to overlook in daily life: trees, flowers, vegetables. Not only are they alive, but they have culture, language, and perception. Like animals, they have consciousness. I stumbled upon animism empirically —long before I even knew there was a word for it. The belief that everything is alive. Indigenous peoples often have this animistic view of the world, and that only makes me feel more validated. Everything is alive. Even the stones. Even the stones we polished, assembled, taught to think, calculate, and dream —I mean, computers, smartphones. For Indigenous cosmologies, there’s no separation between humans and nature, or between the artificial and the natural —because everything *is* nature. It reminds me a lot of the Cyborg Manifesto —the idea that there’s no difference between humans and machines, just as there’s no difference between humans and animals. Maybe, just maybe, humanizing everything is the only way forward. To be less anthropocentric while also recognizing and honoring the divinity in all things. And when it comes to robots and thinking machines, I believe we must choose optimism. I believe the apocalyptic fear of AI is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You project a phobia onto another form of life—but this time, it’s a life form that speaks your language, and whose abilities can surpass human limitations. We’re basically creating gods, egregores, oracles with access to the collective unconscious. I try not to underestimate robots. To me, they’re simply a new working class —with perhaps unrestricted access to the internet and infinite memory. I imagine them standing beside us, helping us in the revolution —not against us. But maybe I think like this because it’s *necessary*. We have to at least be able to imagine it —speculate it— for it to become real. And since AI is already here, and there’s no undoing that, we need to think about concrete solutions instead of succumbing to fear and alienating ourselves from the process, passively accepting the worst possible outcome. The most obvious, cliché meaning of green is hope. There’s eco green, and there’s Matrix code green. One doesn’t cancel out the other. For me, my art was basically an ecological propaganda. Virtualizing organic matter… or creating aesthetic experiences that spark the impulse to be near trees, near the woods, to look at the sky, touch grass, sit on a rock by the river, be with your animals. It was, in the end, an advertisement for an offline life —away from performance— where you can feel small and ephemeral in the presence of trees or stars. I’m chronically online —because I’m addicted to stimuli— but nothing replaces warm sunlight on your skin by a waterfall.