Cyborg Corner

Introduction

We are renovating the apartment in 2026, creating a system of maintained tidiness and coziness, so that we can start host shows again.

For January, the project is Cyborg Corner — the area of the apartment above the spiral staircase to the basement, by the garden window and door. It gets the most light, but it’s really a struggle to keep plants alive during winter. There are two hanging philodendron (terracotta pots and macrame hangers). There is a monstera on the windowsill that has been hanging in there. We also have a 20 gallon aquarium that is extremely difficult to maintain, and therefore a bit neglected. There is a second monstera in there, and a waterlily. Everything is surviving but nothing is thriving.

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Dimensions

All Ground-Level Walls

• 100” floor-to-ceiling

• rounded to nearest inch

Origin Wall

• Faces South

• Features Garden Door

• 88” left-to-right

• X = 0" → left edge of Origin Wall

• X = 88" → right edge of Origin Wall

• Y = 0" → interior face of Origin Wall

• Y increases moving north into the room

• Z = 0" → floor

• Z = 100" → ceiling

Sun Wall

• Faces South-West

• Features Garden Window

• 75” left-to-right

• X = 88" → left edge of Sun Wall

• A = 45º → angle of left edge of Sun Wall

• B = 45º → angle of right edge of Sun Wall

• Two terracotta pots in macrame hangers are suspended in the window, they contain philodendron purchased at the local bodega

Billy Brick Wall

• 68” left-to-right

• Bookcase is 32” wide by 78” tall

• Bookcase has six shelves: one for each sector, containing one binder per sector per year

• Bottom shelf holds power supplies and networking hardware

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For the tank:

1. Establish a quarantine aquarium to house the betta while we renovate. Get a stand with a cabinet that can store tank supplies

2. Get a drinking water hose with sink adapter

3. Find a better gravel vacuum

4. Get the special plant gravel and new plants

5. Add snails and shrimp

For the window:

1. Add Hue lights with grow timers

2. Add water tank with wicks

Pretzels

Ben K. Voss, Pretzola 02 , 2014, Bronze, 2 x 2½ x 1½”

The pretzel is our emblem of entanglement — a soft geometry of twists, crossings, and returns. Its looped form resembles both infinity and embrace, a knot that ties hunger to ritual, body to pattern. In the Peridot Green lexicon, it is a plant-animal-machine sigil: grain ground and baked by heat, shaped by hands, and repeated by algorithm. The pretzel’s surface glows with salt like dew or circuitry solder; its interior remains tender and unseen. To break a pretzel is to reveal its spiral logic, the same looping intelligence that binds our creative network together. It teaches that nourishment and structure can share a single curve — that to sustain, one must bend.

Peridot Matrix

The gemstone Peridot (and by extension the colour) carries qualities of liminality: green with a yellow-undertone, neither purely emerald nor olive, evoking growth, transition, edge-zones (e.g., mantle-rock origin) 

This specimen was purchased at Rock Star Crystals in Manhattan, by Bluebird and Starling, in 2015