History: data itself. Specifically, defined historical data. Signs, convey particular meaning. What roles would different cultural systems and different geographies and botany play?

The work of art "is what it is", it exists because of itself.
Maybe being what it is opens up other spaces of interpretations which challenge the barriers of language that try to map a different reality. Maybe being what it is is evidence of a philosophical temperament which investigates and analyses the structure of our common-sense beliefs. Perhaps being what it is is trying to reconcile the paradoxes of existence.

Through my own being - my psycho-geography - through my journey, I have found that we inhabit many different spaces - there are shared spaces and universal images which we share; there are spaces created by cultures and societies whose images speak closely to only some of us; we all walk through the space somewhere between our experience and the stories told to us of experience, between reality and illusion. We understand our perception and experience through the stories told to us by cultural histories, socio-politico-economic propaganda and advertising. We are tourists in our own environment.

We are tourists in the sense that we visit our reality just to check things out, register our presence, compare our perceptions with the stories and images that we have anticipated finding in our environment and then we return to our private boxes. We are at a stage when at the flick of a switch and the press of a button we can access any part of our planet, in images and words and sound and smell on the internet, via cable or satellite television. What next? Genetic engineering? We no longer need to experience our own reality, the constructed landscape, both "natural" and "artificial" has been processed and packaged for us, and we are passively caught, suspended as if by magic, somewhere between illusion and reality.

Being what it is somehow puts a stick in the crack between reality and illusion and pulls them apart.

Yet we do interpret our realities. Dowewedo!