A Garden Gates

A good friend of mine, musing, mostly baked, definitely lying on the floor decades ago, said, “Why do we call it insecurity? Surely we want to be as open as possible, not with shabby locks.” We all dry mouth spattered laughter at him. Teenage taxonomies placing it with that time stoned, we came up with the concept of chords, convinced we had just revolutionised music. Twenty or so years later, I still find it rising to the surface of my mind, and now living in LA, where people create religions around lesser fragments, it reads differently. What good is a locked gate if you want to let people in, and what good is a gate if you want to keep people out?

It is somewhat like the separation of the map from the territory or the realisation that most borders are arbitrary and sinusoidal, snaking through time as they bend with language, culture, and politics. A gate is a gate only if you want to use it. How a gate functions is a tentative agreement about states of reality (and, of course, states) between people, nations, and cartographers. What power they enact is decided mainly by the authorities that drew it. However, underneath the agreed-upon divisions are older inklings, maps kept only in people’s heads, and names for places used in tongues we might not recognise. In building Illust, we want to enable all, a superposition of boundaries and paths, shadow Venn states coalescing, in bright water colour bleeds. The hobo’s alphabet nestles in plain sight. We are in the process of creating many “Reality Layers”, working with creators, groups, and developers we are excited to bring onto the map. Still, we also want you to build these onion-skinned diagrams of meaning, make your maps, mark your memories and manage all the reality you wish to. To this end, we produce various ways to token-gate, geofence, or draw your layer and mint your kingdoms.