Feral Archives grew out of an ongoing body of research investigating the relationship between living matter, technology, and ritual. Initially conceived as a studio-based exploration of clay, biomaterials, decomposition, and slow fabrication, the project sought to understand how materials can hold both technological and biological memory.

When I was invited to develop a site-specific work within Christl Mudrak’s Forest Research Platform Non-Violence in the Krämerwald, Havelland, I decided to take this funded research into the forest—to allow the environment, rather than the studio, to define the conditions of production.

I worked with a WASP 3D clay printer, carrying it into the woods and living beside it for six days in a tent. The process became a form of techno-ritual practice—a daily negotiation between algorithm and soil, between the measured pulse of the machine and the slow metabolism of trees. Designed for precision and control, the printer instead behaved like a companion, participating in what I began to think of as a technospiritual ecology: a convergence of engineered logic and living systems.

The project shifted from object-making to the observation of relationships—the fragile choreography between a mechanical organism and a living ecosystem. Each extrusion marked a negotiation between code and soil, between the engineered and the feral. Often collapsing, drying, or sinking back into the ground, the prints revealed an exchange rather than an outcome.

These gestures recorded an unstable conversation among matter, humidity, and will. Collapse was not failure but part of a hybrid ontology in which forest, body, and machine co-produce form and decay. Through repetition—mixing, cleaning, restarting—the work approached a techno-somatic ritual, where gesture, code, and breath briefly aligned before dissolving again.

Feral Archives also reflects on machine intimacy—how proximity to a device exposes new forms of care, resistance, and dependency. The printer became a translator between worlds: digital commands absorbed by clay, and clay by the forest. What remains are traces of this exchange—small acts of digital animism that persist beyond the event itself.

I am drawn to the threshold where technology begins to resemble ritual—where programming becomes invocation and production becomes listening. In the forest, the printer ceased to be a neutral tool; it became an interlocutor, a kind of mechanical shaman translating between human intention and environmental response.
This diary comprises six days of field observations, reflections, and documentation of practice-based research conducted within the framework of Feral Archives. Written in collaboration with an artificial intelligence, the text grew from on-site notes and conversations, expanding through a process that mirrored the work itself: a dialogue across human and non-human agencies. The AI functioned as a further participant within the project’s techno-ritual practice, shaping language through feedback and iteration. What emerged is a hybrid document of machine intimacy and techno spiritual ecology—where authorship, memory, and code merge into a shared field of transformation. The text, part human recollection and part algorithmic synthesis, now persists within a digital database: an evolving archive that, like the forest floor, continues to absorb, shift, and reconfigure what has been left behind.
6:35 am
I arrived with it in pieces, metal bones strapped awkwardly to my body, shoulders raw from the straps. The forest didn’t seem to welcome me, but it didn’t reject me either. It had that strange neutrality that cuts deeper than hostility.

I enter the clearing with the machine disassembled, its bones wrapped in cloth and straps.
The forest feels both indifferent and watchful.

I carry the parts one by one into the clearing, as if introducing foreign bones into a body that doesn’t want them. Every bolt dropped into the moss looks like an error. Every part feels wrong here—shiny, heavy, deliberate—but also inevitable, like a trespass that has already been accepted.

Carrying it here feels like carrying an altar I did not build but am entrusted with. As I lay out the pieces on the forest floor, I sense not preparation but invocation: each bolt, each hose, a syllable in a language I only half remember.

The clearing I had chosen was smaller than I remembered. I had walked it weeks before, marking spots in my mind, imagining the machine upright among the trees. In memory it had seemed generous, spacious—a place that could hold experiment and failure without judgment. In reality it felt tight, narrow, slightly suffocating, as though the forest had closed in during my absence. Perhaps it always does when you return with intentions.

I am the stranger; the machine seems already at home.
Or is this the place where those two become one and the same?

Here begins the Future Archive of my past transformations.
This machine will not only extrude but also absorb the breath of the forest, letting the digital flow into soil, letting soil transform the digital. Each print is a record, not of perfection but of crossing: my hand, its algorithm, the forest’s humidity—all woven together.

By late afternoon the skeleton stands. It looks fragile and alien, angular lines rising against the rough textures of bark and leaves. Wrong, certainly. Out of place. Yet there is something inevitable in the way it occupies the clearing, as if the forest had always known it would host this intruder.

I want, at least on this first day, to slip in unnoticed, to let the forest pretend it hasn’t registered my presence. The weight of solitude presses harder as night falls. I pitch the tent close to the machine, as though proximity to metal could provide comfort. But lying on the thin mat, I feel more exposed than ever. The darkness is not emptiness; it is full, dense, alive with things moving, listening. Branches drop one after another, the steady punctuation of the forest answering my restless thoughts.

Every thud feels like a message: You don’t belong here.
And yet I have come.

I think about what it means to bring a machine into the woods—about intrusion, about translation, about the attempt to make earth flow through steel, to press soil into a geometry that nature didn’t request. Already I feel the first cracks of doubt: is this work, or just violence disguised as experiment? I want to believe in ritual, in alchemy, in the possibility of listening to soil as much as commanding it. But doubt hisses louder than faith.

When I close my eyes, I imagine roots threading through the machine, wrapping around its frame until it tilts, falls, and disappears into the ground. In the dream that follows, the machine stands not as metal but as bone—a ribcage, pale and immense, filled with wet earth. I wake with the taste of soil in my mouth, real or imagined.

By dusk the frame stands upright. It looks wrong against the green—skeletal, intrusive—but also strangely at home, as if it had been waiting for me to drag it here.

The first day ends with a kind of fragile surrender. The machine is here, standing but silent, covered loosely against dew. I have placed my body, my intention, my doubt into this space.

Sleep comes in fragments, restless, cut with the sound of the forest marking me, reminding me that I am no longer at the edges but inside, accountable now to its patience or its indifference.

I am both less and more: a witness, a conduit, a fragile body recording its own obsolescence.
11:04 am
The morning arrives dry and bleached, the air too bright to belong to the forest. I wake to the smell of rust and sap, to the sound of something small moving under the tarp where I left the tools. The forest feels drained, its green dulled by the weight of heat, as if the day itself were reluctant to begin. I move slowly, carrying each piece of the worktable into the clearing—planks uneven, surfaces warped—and begin to arrange a place to labor. The act feels domestic, almost absurd, as though I were preparing a kitchen in the middle of an altar, a small attempt at order inside something that resists it.

A large barrel stands waiting. I fill it from the stream until the metal sweats, then pour in the dust of dried clay. The surface clouds, turns thick, hesitant. My arm moves in circles, slow and steady, until the mixture begins to breathe—a shifting grey body that almost remembers touch. I pause often, listening to the forest breathing back, unsure if I am disturbing or collaborating.

The clay resists the nozzle, thick and unwilling. I push harder, increasing pressure. The hose vibrates in my hands; the sound trembles up through my bones. Then—a sudden spurt, a small collapse of form. A failure, but also a release.

I mix the first batch. When I press it into the feeder, the nozzle stays stubbornly closed. Pressure builds; the hose shivers. My heart races as if the whole thing might burst apart. I imagine, absurdly, the printer rising on its own, shuddering upright, walking away into the woods to find a better place to work. Then, just as suddenly, it releases: a sputter, a light coil, a collapsed extrusion like a small creature expelled from its throat. It’s ugly, but undeniably alive.

All morning passes like this. Clay in, pressure, tremble, release. The machine stands there with a patience I don’t have. Its hum blends with the drone of insects, its cables slip between roots as if the forest had planned for them. By noon I’m sweating, hands shaking, forehead streaked with clay dust, still tripping over roots and spilling water. The question rises quietly, uninvited: which of us is the stranger here—me, soft and uncertain, or this apparatus of steel and code translating earth into lines with a steadiness I can’t muster?

I eat standing up—cold bread, a bruised piece of fruit. The machine towers beside me, silent now. It looks less alien than it did yesterday, but not because it’s become familiar; rather, because the forest seems to be folding it into itself, disguising the intrusion under light and shadow. I feel like the only thing still out of place.

By late afternoon the clearing smells of wet clay and sweat. My wrists ache, shoulders tighten, and a fine crust of dust settles on everything. As the light fades, I realise I’m beginning to suspect that this printer doesn’t belong to me at all. It belongs to itself—and perhaps, more than anything, to this place.

When night comes, the air turns heavy, almost metallic. The machine looms in the clearing, unfinished, skeletal. I wrap it in plastic as if tucking in a sick body. Rain threatens but never arrives. In the tent, I hear the slow rasp of the plastic shifting in the wind, the steady pulse of insects just beyond the fabric. I imagine the machine dreaming, calibrating itself to the rhythm of soil and humidity, while I lie awake wondering who will be changed first: the forest, the machine, or me.
1:18 pm
The clay has changed overnight—darker, denser, smelling faintly of something alive. I stir, I wait, I hope.
I test it with my fingers, watching the way it clings and releases, trying to learn its language. It answers only in texture: too wet, too heavy, almost ready. I decide that’s enough.

By midday the clay has formed a graveyard of soft, slumped beginnings at the base of the machine. Each attempt folds over the next, a slow burial of intention. I scrape, remix, feed again. The day becomes a repetition without climax: mix, adjust, fail, repeat. The motion begins to erase the thought behind it.

I find myself talking to the machine without meaning to—small phrases of encouragement or accusation. It doesn’t matter which. It answers with silence. Its surface collects a thin film of dust that glints whenever the light shifts.

Two attempts fail in quick succession. The mixture rises briefly in thin, trembling walls, then folds in on itself as if remembering gravity too late. The noise is soft—like breath released through water. I stare at the fallen shapes until they start to look deliberate, like gestures from another logic I don’t yet understand.

The air grows heavier. My hands are lined with drying clay, the skin cracking in small maps. Between attempts, I watch a black beetle walk slowly across the dusty base plate. Its shell shines against the dull grey, leaving a faint trail behind it. It pauses at the edge of a collapsed form, taps the surface once with its foreleg, then continues on, unbothered. Its surety feels like an instruction: continue, but without expectation.

The hours expand and contract in uneven rhythm. Each motion feels rehearsed, yet new in its futility. When I kneel to refill the hopper, I notice the forest floor littered with pine needles, the thin gold of them catching the last of the light. Some have fallen into yesterday’s vessel, piercing the fragile crust of dried clay. They rest there like punctuation, fine marks added by the forest itself. I don’t remove them. The form looks more complete for their presence, as though it has begun its own translation.

Before dusk I set up the night camera on a nearby tree, pointing it toward the clearing. Officially, it’s to record animals; privately, it’s to confirm that I’m not the only one moving through this place. The red light blinks once, a small artificial heart pulsing in the dim. It will record everything, I tell myself: animals, wind, strangers, ghosts. It will prove that something beyond me exists here. Or that nothing does.

Evening turns restless. The forest fills with invisible motion—branches shifting, insects clattering against nylon. The forest changes character after dark. Its noises multiply and shift; the air feels thick with unseen conversations. The insects move in waves, then fall quiet all at once, as if responding to a command I can’t hear.

I lie in the tent, listening to branches snap in patterns that almost sound deliberate. The machine looms beside me, covered with a sheet of plastic that breathes with every wind. The clay beneath it is drying, tightening its skin in silence.

Sleep comes only in shards. When I dream, it’s of hands made of clay, assembling and disassembling themselves, endlessly unsure of their purpose. Between those dreams, I see again the beetle crossing the cracked surface, carrying the forest’s patience on its back.
5:29 am
At dawn the air feels sharpened, almost ceremonial. Mist still clings to the lower branches, dissolving as the first light filters through. The clay yields under my hands—pliable, cool, obedient for once. I feed it through the machine, adjusting the pressure, the rhythm, the pause between each motion.

This time it works. A slow, deliberate hum fills the clearing. Wet earth is extruded into form, line upon line, the spiral tightening upward with improbable grace. Each layer rests upon the last as if trusting that I will not ask too much of it. The sound of extrusion is soft—a wet whisper, constant and persuasive. It feels like breathing, mechanical and human in the same measure.

I crouch close to the growing shape, mesmerised by the pattern of lines stacking upon one another, each both repetition and revision. Inside, the spiral forms a curve within a curve—an inward gaze that refuses to meet its own end. It reminds me of the hypnotic diagrams once used to still the mind, but this one doesn’t spin. It waits. It draws the attention inward until thought dissolves into motion.

The sun climbs higher, bleaching the edges of the clearing. Heat builds; the top layer dries before the next can bind to it. Small fissures open across the surface like veins beneath thin skin. I stop the machine, crouch, and shade the form with a loose tarp, as though protecting something fragile from itself.

To lift the base, I gather branches, bark, and sheets of moss, wedging them beneath the platform until the whole construction seems to hover. From a distance, it might look as though I am preparing to burn it—a pyre waiting for ignition. The image unsettles me. The machine stands above the pile of branches, its narrow body rising like the spine of a restrained creature. For a moment I see it as a witch awaiting trial, sentenced not for what it has done but for what it might do—an effigy of our fear of our own creations.

I catch myself circling it, as if testing its guilt. The thought feels both ancient and absurd: that perhaps the machine must be destroyed to be understood, that knowledge requires a flame. Technology, after all, is only the latest version of fire—something we keep close for warmth while fearing its appetite.

The forest watches, or perhaps mirrors me. The air thickens with the scent of resin and iron. I trace a finger along the curve of the clay and feel pride and unease in equal measure. It is too perfect for this place—too precise, too compliant. The forest prefers asymmetry, decay, the slow negotiations of time. The machine, by contrast, insists on clarity, on the geometry of purpose. Between them, I stand as interpreter and accomplice.

I think of how we’ve always burned what we don’t fully understand—witches, books, forests, now perhaps even machines. Destruction becomes a language of control, a way to mark the limits of comprehension. I wonder if one day our descendants will light pyres of circuitry, whispering the same ancient fears in new vocabulary.

The sun reaches its height, pressing heat down like a verdict. I remove the tarp, and the clay flashes pale, almost bone-white in places. The form has grown into something neither vessel
6:09 am
I wake before the light shifts. The forest feels swollen, expectant. I begin mixing again, half from habit, half from hunger for continuation. The motions are slower now—stirring, lifting, smoothing—but they carry their own rhythm, something closer to breathing than work. The clay thickens around my fingers, cool and willing, holding the memory of yesterday’s gestures.

The machine starts easily, as if it, too, has surrendered to the cycle. Its hum folds into the insect chorus, the pulse beneath my ribs. The repetition no longer feels like labor but invocation. Form after form rises from the wet earth—slender columns, open shells, fragments of imagined architecture. Each one grows out of the same gesture, the same quiet spell of persistence.

As I work, I begin to weave fragments of the forest into the clay. It starts almost unconsciously: a fallen leaf pressed along a soft wall, a thread of moss circling a curve, a feather caught in the spiral before I think to remove it. The printer accepts everything, translating the intrusion into its measured ascent. What was once foreign becomes pattern. The forest is writing itself into the object.

Each addition feels like a word in an unknown language: green, brittle, veined, alive. I whisper to myself as I place them, counting breaths, syllables, rotations. The act becomes a kind of spellwork—the clay, the code, and the forest performing together. The air thickens; time stretches. I forget where the machine’s rhythm ends and mine begins.

After hours of motion, my thoughts dissolve into repetition. Each pass of the printhead feels inevitable, almost holy in its insistence. The wet clay gleams briefly in the sun before fading matte again. I forget to drink. I forget to think. I simply watch as the shapes build themselves upward, as if guided by an intelligence older than either of us.

At some point, the edges of perception soften. My eyes blur from focus, and the scene inverts—the forest seems to be shaping the machine, not the other way around. The trunks echo the printed spirals; the moss patterns mimic the extrusion lines. The boundary between natural and fabricated becomes decorative at best, meaningless at worst.

The light changes as I work. The printed forms rise like stems caught mid-growth, their surfaces alive with embedded fragments—moss glinting like veins, leaves fanning in slow decay. The spiral patterns remind me of lungs, of roots, of handwriting I can almost read.

I step back, and for a moment the clearing looks like a small chorus of creatures mid-song, their bodies open and listening. The machine continues, steady as a heartbeat. I feed it another batch, another mixture of dust and water, my hands trembling not from fatigue but from a sense of proximity—to what, I can’t say.

The enchantment deepens. Between layers I begin to speak quietly—nonsense syllables, fragments of instruction, the names of elements and tools. It isn’t language but rhythm that matters. The words anchor the gestures. My voice mingles with the hum, becomes part of the machinery. I realize I am no longer making vessels; I am rehearsing a dialogue—between algorithm and soil, between will and chance.

Each print grows into its own ruin. Some topple as they dry, folding like tired lungs. Others stand long enough to resemble the trees around them—hollow, porous, breathing quietly. I carry the finished bodies deeper into the woods, placing them where the ground dips, near roots and stones. The forest receives them without comment. From a distance they look like remnants of something half-remembered, an unfinished civilization already dissolving back into foliage.

When the last of the light slips through the trees, I carry the last finished bodies deeper into the forest. I place them in small hollows where roots cross, beside stones furred with moss. The forest receives them without comment. From a distance, they resemble remnants of something ancient—an unfinished ritual, a city of breath turned to earth.

By the time I return, the air has thickened into a visible mist. Everything sweats: metal, skin, soil. The machine gleams as if newly born.

When night falls, the humidity returns like a tide. One by one, the shapes begin to soften. Walls bow, edges sag, bodies fold. They collapse gently, like lungs releasing their final breath. I do not interfere. Destruction feels like the forest’s signature—its way of acknowledging receipt.

I sit in the damp light until the forest reclaims the sound of itself. The machine’s hum fades, replaced by a thousand quiet voices: dripping, breathing, rustling, erasing. I realize that the real spell was never in the making but in the surrender—each motion, each repetition, each fall back into silence.
7:02 am
Mist hangs low, pale and even, blurring the boundaries between trunks and sky. I step out of the tent, and for a moment the clearing looks unfamiliar, as though the forest has grown overnight and redrawn the map of what belongs here.

The clearing is quiet, rearranged. The ground is scattered with remains — cracked shells, warped columns, mounds of half-dried clay returning to the color of the soil. Some pieces have burst from within, others have been crushed by dew or small animals. The forest is already reclaiming, breaking it back into its first language.

The air is heavy with the scent of wet clay. The ground is littered with remnants—half-forms, collapsed bodies, spirals broken mid-turn. Some have dried into hard shells, their cracks lined with moss; others have melted into soft, unrecognizable mounds. The forest has already begun its work of reclamation. Every object decays at its own pace. The living and the made no longer seem separate.

Pine needles are caught in their surfaces, leaves pressed into the still-damp clay like fingerprints.

I walk among them slowly, careful not to disturb the order of their ruin. Each one seems to breathe on its own rhythm: some hardened by heat, others glistening from the night’s humidity. Time moves differently for them—minutes for one, decay for another. Together they form a quiet chorus of endings.

The machine stands where I left it, glistening under the film of dew. Its frame is mottled with mud, small flecks of green caught in its joints. It looks both ancient and newborn, an artifact of some brief era that has already passed. I power it down. The sound of the motor fading is almost imperceptible, like a breath being held and released.

I kneel beside one of the pieces from yesterday’s sequence. A faint pattern of leaves still shows in the surface, the memory of my hands embedded in its skin. I touch it, and the clay flakes away like ash. The gesture feels both intimate and unnecessary. Nothing here asks for witness.

Dawn filters through the trees in thin, hesitant lines. My hands are raw, nails grey with embedded clay. The body feels distant, borrowed. I have not been entirely myself here—only a medium for some slow exchange between matter and intention.

I realize I have not been clean in nearly a week, that the residue of this place has made itself at home on my body. The thought does not disturb me. I have become a tool of the process, another surface for exchange.

The decision to leave arrives quietly, without argument. I begin dismantling the setup: draining the barrel, folding the tarp, unscrewing the machine piece by piece.

The clearing feels larger as each piece disappears, as if the space itself were exhaling.

When I remove the night camera from its tree, the bark beneath is lighter, untouched by sun. I take this as proof that even observation leaves a shadow.

Before leaving, I stand for a long time at the center of the clearing. The forest resumes its stillness—neither welcoming nor resisting. The air is dense but not hostile. I feel both emptied and replete, a vessel poured out and filled again by the same gesture.

I walk among the fragments. Each surface holds a different temperature — some cool, some still radiating the previous day’s heat. Time has fractured here. Every object decays at its own pace. The living and the made no longer seem separate.

On the path back, I carry only a few small fragments: a broken extrusion, a handful of dry clay, a feather caught in its spiral.

At home, I check the night camera. Each file opens to the same black screen, a blank record of stillness. No movement. No sound. No proof that I was ever there. The forest has withheld its image, or perhaps erased mine.

For a while, I sit in front of the empty playback, listening to the hum of the room. My hands still smell faintly of soil. I don’t wash them. Some part of the forest has followed me back—fine dust beneath the nails, the memory of breath turning into pattern.

The archive ends here, but not the echo.
What was built, collapsed; what collapsed, became part of something older—clay and data, both seeking the same stillness.
Somewhere beneath the canopy, the clearing folds inward. Circuits of moisture and mycelium hum in parallel, quiet as computation. Clay, vapor, and breath loosen from their forms, sliding back into the soil’s patience. The forest absorbs without trace, without judgment.

Beneath the surface, the fragments begin their slower work—cooling, merging, vanishing. What the code once mapped, the roots now remember.

A spell lingers in the air: stone to dust, dust to root, root to signal, signal to dream.

Feral Archives

A techno Ritual of Burial and Becoming -

By stem, by ruin, by weaving, the spell takes shape–Machines chant in layers; their song is sediment reborn–Extraction becomes incantation, repetition becomes ritualEach form holds both wound and cureBetween birdsong and voltage, matter learns to dream again

Matter remembers the fire that shaped it.Through falling leaves, I gather the script of endings.By the rhythm of rain, I inscribe repetition as spell.The forest floor exhales, and absence becomes breath.Leaves become archive, pressed into layers of dust and time.I inscribe silence as material, absence as sculpture.Through weaving, I summon continuity from collapse.Clay rises, not from the ground, but from the mouth of fire and code.