During my undergraduate data visualization class, I stumbled upon this quote. It stayed with me because it reminds me of Giorgia Lupi’s work. Initially, cultivation meant feeding minds with data and seeing our world as a form of data. Actually it’s just accumulation of data rather than cultivation. Previously, I had accumulated such data and learned p5.js, but by now I had forgotten most of the things I learned.
How is cultivation different from accumulation? Both start with learning knowledge. We may accumulate data, but only certain parameters transform it into cultivation. I think immersion, or immersing deeply into a subject matter, will help us not only learn but also formulate our own opinions and ideas. But immersion is not enough, and there is still a chance that this cultivation fades over time. For we should practice it on a regular basis, which the philosophers have termed ‘praxis.’ My praxis with coding is mostly about solving errors by using the known functions. This was the most interesting and troublesome part I enjoyed in working with code. So the idea of praxis feels like an act of taking the cultivated mind and putting it into the world, line by line, and perfecting or improving it with each practice.
Still, it remains stuck in our safe atmosphere. Cultivation does not echo in silence; it reverberates. Ambedkar’s quote on cultivation resonates across generations because it was not isolated; it was shared and debated by others. Resonance is the alignment of frequencies, frequencies of questions, errors, codes, insights, etc., forming something larger than any single mind could produce.
If cultivation is the aim, then the human mind is an endless loop of immersion, praxis, and resonance. Forever iterating, forever debugging itself, it compiles new meaning with each cycle, cultivating not just the present self but resonating across ages to come.