Cyborg Corner
Starting renovations with the plant-animal-automation corner of the apartment.
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.
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
For the tank:
Establish a quarantine aquarium to house the betta while we renovate. Get a stand with a cabinet that can store tank supplies
Get a drinking water hose with sink adapter
Find a better gravel vacuum
Get the special plant gravel and new plants
Add snails and shrimp
For the window:
Add Hue lights with grow timers
Add water tank with wicks
Bonsai Research
One of our favorite recent projects has been learning about how bonsai trees are grown and shaped over long periods of time. We have been helping a friend develop his growing pre-bonsai tree farm.
Pretzels
The pretzel represents a convivial hug.
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
A specimen of Peridot
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