First day of the EER workshop: we are greeted before the morning session in the generously proportioned kitchen of Olafur’s former house. Danish delicacies and coffee open the day, along with a large serving of light-hearted chatter. People meet again who haven’t seen each other for a long time. On-boarding members shake new hands and meet new eyes, the atmosphere is friendly and almost familial.

The emptiness of the gorgeous house brings with it a feeling of new beginnings, a moment away from the everyday – the kind of fuzzy feeling you get as a child, when visiting empty properties with mom and dad to prepare a move to another city, the mixed emotion of moving into a new place.

Members of EER were assembled to remember and place themselves again as a limb of the EER tendre body. More important than the goal or process is the company, Olafur tells us. The workshop aims at finding orientation after the pandemic, in order to steer the project toward new areas of discovery and figure out a clear message to the public. A first round of introductions reveals the varied (yet predominantly white) group of artists and academics . Indeed, the company seems to have sparked off new directions in each other's work. What can we bring to the world together?

Joe Dumit conducts the morning workshop. The week before, he asked ChatGPT to generate a list of places based on the aforementioned “carte de tendre.” That morning, the affective geographical features are already waiting for us in the shape of green cardboard plots, prepared by Sophie and the team. In the garden, we are invited to place different experiences, events, and outputs of the project, cropping out that cartography of moments that loosely define the common endeavor. Cropping out the EER carte de tendre, we are hitching a ride on the process of Helene Nymann.

The discussions generated by the playful locations are very rich. The fun word-work of the AI provides us with plenty of food for imagination: pleasure plateau, frustration flats, enlightenment expanse. Some of the participants are busy documenting the action in photo, video, text, drawing, it’s a little crew inside the crew: Runa Maja Huber, Yanina Isla, Geoffrey Garrison, and myself. We communicate to each other our lucid and gentle presence. Eliciting it now, it felt like a tender envelopment of the collective action by eyes and hands.

The house stood there, hospitable and old-fashion smart, witnessing our attempts with a silent wink. That architect knew about space and experience, his ghost making discrete bows as we were here and again gently stunned by its solid making. Two wild weed plants grew in front of the house, an entangled autogenerative work, was given a title by the garden’s owner: “Liebespaar.” The members further reflected in small groups on the constellations of events and experiences of the last four years, discussing memories and other seeds planted by EER in their careers and existences.

“Can we borrow you for a minute?” Andreas Roepstorff and Peter Dalsgaard take me on a journey through the map. Thinking with the arrangements, they have figured out areas and a meaning for the ensemble and the distribution. Masters of sensemaking, the anthropologist and the designer tell me about the cues through which they defined four places or groups of places. Very much impressed, I take visual notes and sketch along the survey. The whole series of mediations, through early modern poetry, AI, a garden party and the soft understanding of trained experiencers, operates as a tarot reading of the situation.

They first walk me to an “abyss of abandoned alliterations”: some of the AI generated wording associations were “dumped” by the participants. These were corrected to create new affective places: from pleasure plateau to pleasure river; empowerment plaza becomes the empowerment gut; inclusivity island derives into inclusivity mangrove, path or rhizome.

Close by, under a tree, Andreas and Peter have discovered an “incredibly” well-formed island of well-formed terms: the land of experimentation, the qualitative spring, the quantitative quarry, the memory meadow, and the experience cove. They seem to match practically the project description of EER.

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South of these two places on the growing map that is slowly taking shape, we find the joyful continent of “where people are.” Around the mystery march, at the eureka estuary, down by the reflection pond, and the curiosity bay, “a spandrel” (triangle) that is hosting it all.”

Close by, we take a stroll through the thick transmission forest, yet also we step into the frustration flats. At the edge of this space, Sophie and her peers are “sitting on the ethics bridge”, a vibrant area of ongoing conversations. It is the workspace which is driving the EER project.

On the side, like outcasts, close to the scenic campfire marked by a circle of majestic stones, the usual “expected outcomes” and “findings” seem to have been ditched away. There is the potential for our project, points Andreas, where the qualitative delivery usually happens. The publishable research and the implications: we shouldn’t forget these items.

Presenting live with Andreas, I felt like the magician’s assistant on stage, zooming in and out of the picture symbiotically with the improvised speech following the lines traced by collaborative activities, present, past, and future. Together we produce a weather forecast report of the conceptual garden still moving outside in the now scorching sun.