Please Forget (Everything)

Charles Lindsay

Please Forget (Everything) presents two bright yellow Japanese parking meters selling time and space from their respective Zen gardens in Kyoto and San Francisco. Modified and networked, these devices are imagined as intelligent nodes in a vast global AI network, like mushrooms emerging from vast underground mycelium networks — conspiring to edify humanity. These provocations evolved from Charles Lindsay’s proposal for NASA to employ retired Mars Rovers to create Zen gardens on Mars. That vision became compounded when Charles posed his AI + Consciousness question to famous Zen Buddhist Monk, Toryo Ito, during the first days of the pandemic. Intrigued, Toryo invited Charles to study and exhibit in Kyoto at Ryõsoku-in Zen Temple.

Please Forget (Everything) references the ‘Beginner’s Mind’ concept from Zen Buddhism, encouraging a forgetting / forgiving process toward rapid transformation. Lindsay presents his new installation and assemblages as koans — paradoxical Zen Buddhist anecdotes used to elicit spiritual awakening. Intentionally nonsensical, koans are designed to befuddle logical reasoning, preparing practitioners for spontaneous enlightenment. Both the Ryosoku-in Temple and Heron Arts venues offer superb environments in which to share and contemplate this particular flavor of 21st century consciousness research.