Arjan Guerrero，《花园之园》，2025年。实时模拟。Casa Lü展览现场。摄影：Rubén Garay
Arjan Guerrero, “Garden of Gardens”, 2025. Exhibition view at Casa Lü. Photography by Rubén Garay
Arjan Guerrero: Re-automating Nature
Writer: Amado Cabrales
Date: 24/03/2025
Keywords: simulation / repurposed machines
You first encountered Garden of Gardens from the wrong side. Not in the garden, but inside: a quiet room, wooden floor, white walls, a window that frames greenery like a held breath. On the sill, a small speaker stands on articulated legs, oddly animate, as if it had crawled there by itself. It emits sparse bubble bursts, and then subtle, granular, continuous sound. Only later does it become clear that what you are hearing does not originate here. The sound belongs to a simulation running outside, in the garden, on a screen embedded among trees. The inside listens to the outside. Or perhaps the outside speaks through the inside.
Arjan Guerrero，《花园之园》，2025年。Casa Lü展览现场。摄影：Rubén Garay
Arjan Guerrero, “Garden of Gardens”, 2025. Exhibition view at Casa Lü. Photography by Rubén Garay
这种错位很有意味。作品并非要求被进入，而是被不经意间听到。这个模拟系统不是一个你可以穿行其中的世界，而是一个在别处展开的。可以被无意间听见的演化过程。Arjan Guerrero将《花园之园》描述为“一个在其发展过程中被导航操作的模拟”。这里的导航操作并不等同于控制，而是构成了一个正在学习如何继续演化自身的系统。你不是园丁，也不是玩家。你是一个见证者，见证一个已经被授予了自身能动性的系统的生长过程。
屋外，屏幕上抽象的、粒子状的实体根据自身的经济生态规律繁殖、碰撞、漂移或消失。花园的生长过程没有叙事高潮，没有朝向目标的优化。在室内，声音渗入——没有视觉上的活动证据，没有可解读的变化数据。作品将自身分割到不同领域：视觉在外，声音在内；计算在彼处，共鸣在此处。Guerrero没有将这些元素同步为丝滑衔接的整体装置，而是允许它们略微错位，仿佛在测试一个系统能容忍多大程度的分离而不致失去其整体性。
This displacement matters. The work does not ask to be entered so much as overheard. The simulation is not a world you walk through, but a process you eavesdrop on as it unfolds elsewhere. Arjan Guerrero describes Garden of Gardens as “a simulation navigated in its development”. Navigation here does not imply control, but proximity to a system learning how to continue. You are not the gardener, nor the player. You are a witness to growth that has already delegated its agency.
Outside, on the screen, abstract, particle-like entities multiply, collide, drift, or disappear according to an internal economy. The garden grows without narrative climax, without optimization toward a goal. Inside, the sound leaks in – evidence of activity without image, of movement without legibility. The work splits itself across domains: visual outside, acoustic inside; computation there, resonance here. Rather than synchronizing these elements into a seamless installation, Guerrero allows them to misalign slightly, as if testing how much separation a system can tolerate before it stops being one.
Arjan Guerrero，《花园之园》，2025年。Casa Lü展览现场。摄影：Rubén Garay
Arjan Guerrero, “Garden of Gardens”, 2025. Exhibition view at Casa Lü. Photos by Rubén Garay
花园的隐喻是古老的，但Guerrero谨慎地处理它。它不是伊甸园，不是风景，也不是通过代码渲染的隐喻性“自然”。艺术家自信地断言，自然——用他的话说——是“自动化的顶峰”，这一陈述着眼于对长期存在的二元对立术语的重新校准。相比之下，对他而言，“人工”是“被设计的、被建造的、必须被一直维护的东西，否则它就会崩溃”。这里的自动化从这一工业威胁中解脱开，跳出窗外进入荒野，现在被渲染为一种决策前的状态，一种系统的过程，因为它们自身已经熟知如何运行。Guerrero感兴趣的不是作为效率的自动化，而是作为美学和诗学问题的重新自动化：如何拆解一个空间并让它以不同方式重组自身。按照这些术语，如果我们遵循Benjamin Bratton（对Guerrero有影响的写作者之一）我们可以称人类世为某种意外的对地球的二次耕耘。当自然不再与人工对立时，我们如何重新耕耘我们所居住的空间，如何重新“自动化”它们?
The metaphor of the garden is old, but Guerrero handles it with care. This is not Eden, nor landscape, nor metaphorical “nature” rendered through code. He confidently affirms that nature is – as he puts it – “the apex of automation,” a statement that lands as recalibration of terms in long-standing dichotomies. In contrast, for him, “artificial is what you design, what you build, what you have to give maintenance to all the time because otherwise it will break”.Automation here disentangles from an industrial threat, jumping out the window and into the wild, now rendered as a condition of pre-decision, of processes that run because they already know how. What interests Guerrero is not automation as efficiency, but re-automation as an aesthetic and poietic problem: how to take a space apart and let it reorganize itself differently. In these terms, and if we follow Benjamin Bratton – one of Guerrero’s influences – we can call the Anthropocene an accidental re-gardening of Earth. How to re-garden the spaces we inhabit, how to re-automate them, when the natural no longer opposes the artificial?
Arjan Guerrero，《居所律令》，2023年。实时增强现实装置。Goldsmiths展览现场。图片由艺术家提供
Arjan Guerrero, “Oikonomicor”, 2023. Live augmented reality installation. Exhibition view at Goldsmiths. Image courtesy of the artist
Arjan Guerrero, “Oikonomicor”, 2023. Live augmented reality installation. Exhibition view at Goldsmiths. Image courtesy of the artist
Guerrero对管理的关注——安静、分布式、几乎礼貌的——在《居所律令》Oikonomicor 中得到了有力的排演。如果《花园之园》是在聆听一个正在生长的系统, 《居所律令》则在此之上叠加了一个被重新管理的空间。装置在Goldsmiths的一座曾经是教堂的空间中，用他的话说，作品在建筑上叠加了“一个作为游戏的经济生态自我运行的、增强现实的用户界面”。教堂没有被亵渎，没有被批判，也没有被美化为某种废墟。相反，它被视为一个能够承载另一种逻辑的对象，这种逻辑与之共存，对其先前的象征意义漠不关心。
界面的声音很小；它时不时地嗡嗡作响和爆裂。在这样的圣所之上，发生了某种质变。 建筑转化为计算媒介。超越神圣或世俗的概念分野，它变得可操作，折叠进另一个系统。
《花园之园》和《居所律令》作为同一问题的两个向量共同发挥作用——环境，自然的、建筑的、象征的——如何能够在没有中央权威的情况下运行，以及这对我们提出了什么样的要求，去聆听或关注。在这两件作品中，屏幕和实体空间相互作用。有时屏幕上的作品延伸到屏幕外的世界（声音迁移到室内，界面叠加在石头上）。有时屏幕外的世界拒绝翻译，顽固地保持自身。作品中持续的探究的过程跨越了无需被融合的各个领域。
Guerrero’s attention to administration – quiet, distributed, almost polite – was rehearsed forcefully in Oikonomicor. If Garden of Gardens listened to a system growing, Oikonomicor overlaid a re-administered space. Installed in a former church at Goldsmiths, the work overlays the architecture with “an augmented reality GUI that runs itself as a game economy”, as he puts it. The church is not desecrated, nor critiqued, nor aestheticized into ruin. Instead, it is treated as an object capable of hosting another logic that cohabits it, indifferent to its prior symbolism.
The interface does not shout; it hums and pops every now and then. Over the sanctuary, a kind of transubstantiation takes place, turning architecture into computation. Beyond sacred or secular, it becomes operational, folded into another system.
Garden of Gardens and Oikonomicor work as two vectors of a common inquiry: how environments – natural, architectural, symbolic – can be made to run without central authority, and what kinds of listening or attention that demands from us. In both works, screens and spaces interact. Sometimes the on-screen work extends into the off-screen world (sound migrating indoors, interfaces overlaying stone). Sometimes the off-screen world resists translation, remaining stubbornly itself. The inquiry continues across domains without needing to unify them.
Arjan Guerrero，《居所律令》，2023年。实时增强现实装置。实时模拟的静止图像。图片由艺术家提供
Arjan Guerrero, “Oikonomicor”, 2023. Live augmented reality installation. Still image of the live simulation. Image courtesy of the artist
这就是Guerrero总体的实践目前的生长和运作模式。在模拟、被重新运用的机器、增强对象和认识论实验中，他一直并未将技术仅仅视为表现的媒介，而是存在的模式。他的作品探索“当系统放任并自行发展时，会呈现出怎样的行为？”。Guerrero将自己定位为——用他的话说——不是黑客，而是某种促成者。
在《花园之园》中，这一姿态几乎显出某种散养的状态。在《居所律令》中，它呈现出更具行政管理的样态。这两件作品都表明，现今世界中“权力”不在我们通常预期的地方——不在我们掌握的界面中，不在历史上神圣化的建筑中，而在决定事物如何继续进行的安静的用户协议中。
Guerrero的作品有意对于我们在这些环境中的角色定位有所保留。我们曾经是玩家、崇拜者、看护者。但现在，我们观察，我们聆听外部，并允许新兴的经济生态自发展开。Guerrero的作品所拥抱的是一种感觉，即世界正在我们周围不断地被组织，柔和地、高效地，并且不征求任何许可。
This is how Guerrero’s broader practice currently grows and inhabits. Across simulations, repurposed machines, augmented objects, and epistemic experiments, he has consistently approached technology not as a medium for representation but as a mode of existence. His works ask how systems behave when left to their own devices. Guerrero positions himself – as he has put it – not as a hacker, but as an enabler.
In Garden of Gardens, this gesture feels almost pastoral. In Oikonomicor, it reveals itself as administrative. Both works suggest that power today does not reside where we expect it – not in interfaces we master, nor in spaces we sanctify, but in the quiet protocols that decide how things continue.
Guerrero’s works leave our role within these environments intentionally unresolved. We have been players, worshippers, caretakers. But now, we observe, we listen to the outside, and allow emerging economies to unfold. What Guerrero’s works embrace is a sense that worlds are constantly being organised around us, softly, efficiently, and without asking for permission.
Amado Cabrales是一位常驻墨西哥城的独立策展人、评论家和作家。他的批评写作曾发表在Editorial Sentimental、Icónica、Hysteria!和La Escuela等备受尊敬的平台上。作为评论家，他曾入选Berlinale Talents瓜达拉哈拉项目，并获得墨西哥国立自治大学Fósforo电影批评奖荣誉提名。除写作外，Cabrales在墨西哥当代艺术界拥有强大的策展影响力。他曾为MUAC(墨西哥国立自治大学)、Centro de Cultura Digital、Casa Lü和Laboratorio Arte Alameda等机构策划展览和项目，为拉丁美洲实验性和数字实践中一些最具可见度和批判性参与的平台做出贡献。
Amado Cabrales is an independent curator, critic, and writer based in Mexico City. His critical writing has appeared in respected platforms such as Editorial Sentimental, Icónica, Hysteria!, and La Escuela. As a critic, he has been recognised by a selection for the Berlinale Talents Guadalajara programme and an Honorable Mention in UNAM’s Fósforo Prize for Film Criticism. Alongside his writing, Cabrales holds a strong curatorial presence in Mexico’s contemporary art scene. He has curated exhibitions and programmes for institutions including MUAC (UNAM), Centro de Cultura Digital, Casa Lü, and Laboratorio Arte Alameda, contributing to some of the most visible and critically engaged platforms for experimental and digital practices in Latin America.
Arjan Guerrero是一位常驻伦敦的艺术家，来自墨西哥城，通过自动化、增强和交互进行创作。他的作品重叠了计算媒介的诊断与设计，其中媒介成为环境，人工以与基础现实相悖但一致的方式折叠。Guerrero的作品曾获得流明奖（Lumen Prize）和Transitio_MX荣誉提名。他的作品得到了Arte Ciencia y Tecnologías和PAPIAM（墨西哥）等项目的支持，并在Somers Gallery（伦敦）和Casa Maauad（墨西哥城）等空间进行个展，以及在墨西哥和欧洲的集体展览。Guerrero拥有伦敦大学金匠学院计算艺术硕士学位，并担任温彻斯特艺术学院客座讲师。2021-22年，他为Centro ADM（墨西哥）共同编程了Materias Mediales：一个关于艺术研究与当代技术科学交叉的夏季课程和对话系列。
Arjan Guerrero is a London-based artist from Mexico City working through automation, augmentation, and interaction. His work overlaps diagnosis and design of computational media where the medium becomes the milieu and the artificial folds in ways counterintuitive yet consistent with base reality. Guerrero’s work has been recognized with the Lumen Prize and an Honorable Mention at Transitio_MX. It has been supported by programs such as Arte Ciencia y Tecnologías and PAPIAM (MX), and exhibited individually at spaces such as Somers Gallery (London) and Casa Maauad (Mexico City), as well as collectively in Mexico and Europe. Guerrero holds an MFA in Computational Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a Visiting Lecturer at Winchester School of Art. In 2021-22 he pair-programmed Materias Mediales: a summer course and conversations series on artistic research at its intersection with contemporary technosciences, for Centro ADM (MX).