livelovecalculate
livelovecalculate
Vita Eva Weisseisen
In Slovenia it’s quite common, or at least it was for my parent’s generation, for people to build their home next to, or in lots of cases “on top” of their parents’ home. So like many others, our house when I was a child was a home of two separate households. This was lucky for me, as my grandparents were and are still both dedicated gardeners.
My first memories from my childhood include endless hours spent in the garden. I was hiding regularly in the apple trees, pretending to be catching birds, or lying low in the tall grass, sometimes drawing, other times observing mice holes, hoping that one would pop out soon. In the spring when trees were usually trimmed and pruned I would pick the little twigs and branches and pile them up to be burned in the evening. In the summer I would help my grandma cook red beets in front of our garden house. Later we would stick slices of the beets into glass jars and pickle them. Currants, raspberries, apples, blueberries, grapes, cannabis, elderflower, mint, lemon balm, tarragon, spruce tips: each one of them picked at their time and prepared in their own way. I remember long summer afternoons, spent collectively in the shade of the grapevine and the kiwi plant, big platters of long stacked twigs of mint and lemon balm resting in front of us, their soft little green leaves waiting to be picked and harvested. The big piles of little leaves were then spread on the same platters and left to dry in the summer heat, the smell surrounding the whole house. We did the same with basil and parsley. Growing up, a lot of my summer afternoons and evenings were spent picking fruits or herbs.
Both of my grandparents are still deeply in love with their garden, taking care of it proudly every day. Like most of their generation, they were able to buy land and build a house on it. They secured a future that for many young people today isn’t possible and might never be. The price of land and rent skyrocketed throughout the years, making it quite difficult for most Slovenians to afford a house. That’s one aspect of it. Another one is that most of the younger generation isn’t interested in maintaining a garden at all, because having one and taking care of it isn’t as convenient as some would wish it to be as the world becomes much more fast paced. I think through time, while a lot of things became less affordable, other things also became more affordable, or rather easier to get to. I think a garden used to be a way of survival for a lot of older generations, maybe even a way to cope, a way to do something, whereas now a garden isn't as necessary as it used to be and other activities have become priorities for most people. Nonetheless, gardening is deeply rooted in Slovenian culture, and loads of young people have the privilege of a family garden waiting in their hometowns, greeting them on the weekends, holidays, birthdays, and any other possible reasons for returning to your first home.
Perhaps it’s also the fact that we’re a land of farmers, and a lot of people come from rural areas, that made gardening so popular. I think it was just logical to achieve that level of self sufficiency that growing, harvesting and preparing your own food can bring. Farming and gardening is deeply entwined with us through culinary traditions. I grew up on hand-picked herbal teas, home made elderberry, currant, raspberry syrups, blueberry, apple, peach compote, strawberry jam, freshly picked dandelion salad, pickled cucumbers, peppers, onions, apple, and pear, just to name a few. I was quite literally raised in a warm embrace of the garden that endlessly provided for us.
However, the garden isn’t just a beautiful sight, but also a form of rebellion—as it is one of the few things left that connects to tradition, nature, meditation, roots. In a world that is heading towards complete digitalization and is, step by step, with endless possibilities of instant things being provided for us, with machines making decisions for us, and of spoiling us with effortless acquiring of simplified living, we are being disconnected and pulled apart from our natural space and doing, e.g. growing and harvesting our own food. The garden essentially provides us with freedom and safe space, a place where you can be with your loved ones, in connection with nature again. We were never meant to be as disconnected from nature, or from others as we are now, nor were we ever meant to live life fast without ever slowing down, disregarding our most crucial needs. We return to the traditions of our grandparents and further to our ancestors, that may seem today unnecessary for our modern lifestyle, but are actually an important part of our life on this Earth. The garden does not provide us with food only, but also tells us about our space, about nature, the living beings around us that are part of our ecosystem. We learn about our needs as people and about our culture. The garden offers us a sense of community, or a chance to deepen our inner relationship with ourselves, given the meditative state of work it provides. And, of course, the garden helps us appreciate and understand the importance of our food—produce.
livelovecalculate.com celebrates gardening in a deeper and wider sense. It sheds light on the importance of nature and our caring for it in our lives. It's a gate to a dreamscape of something that may await us all in our future—a perfect, peaceful, bright garden that is always welcoming.
The garden gives you answers, holds and saves secrets, and tells you how to care for it if you ask it. i.e. as you explore the garden, clicking around reveals different secrets and paths—the work is an ongoing project and will never be completely finished (just like all gardens it is ever-changing), as we continue to add different elements with time. You can find out if the person you love is the right candidate to grow a garden with, and later on the garden lets you create love letters for them.The site acts as a shelter from the outside world, offering hope in times of deep uncertainty and chaos—perhaps false hope. At the same time, this online garden highlights an underlying irony: the viewer dreams of gardens and nature, yet retreats into the safe comfort of the computer, the web, the illusion. But can we really blame them, when the garden is so kind to us, always ready with a gentle answer?
Ironically enough, most of the visual material has been gathered from sources that usually serve us as a distraction, as an escape from reality. Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, Google, Gardens Illustrated magazine… are all places or mediums we often chose to distract ourselves. Some of the visuals are gardens and landscapes I photographed myself, some are taken from Google Earth—like the screenshot of a house in Zandvoort, with a beautiful front garden, that I went past one day while visiting, which has been embedded in my memory ever since. Same goes for a few of my drawings that are included on the site, that I vividly remember making, and dreaming of a green escape while at it. They depict big red brick houses, similar to those in the UK or the Netherlands, with big green overgrown gardens in the back. These symbols, if I can call them that, are quite dear to me for no particular reason, and are another reminder of dreams and (mental) escape for me.
livelovecalculate.com started as a love calculator site, always feeding your delusions by calculating 100% of love. It later developed into a big garden, inviting you to take a walk and ask it different questions.
Scrolling down the site, the first interactive feature we reach is the love calculator, that after inserting both names in the two little windows, calculates a love percentage between those two people. The catch? It always calculates 100%. No, it’s not that we don’t know how to set up a code for a calculator. This is the garden feeding your delusions, as it always is with its wonderful, peaceful presence. The garden is often portrayed as a symbol of romance: flowers, roses, are gifts we send to our lovers. It’s a place where we might find refuge in our minds, after a saucy one night stand that left us clueless about what we want. We ask the garden questions we don’t even dare ask ourselves.
Further down is another interactive segment that will generate you a love letter for that special person; after all, the garden is a place of inspiration and beauty. These two diversions turn our attention away from the always functional, providing garden, and ask us to question its symbolism. The garden is a paradise, it’s nurturing, representing a controlled space that mirrors the human soul, divine beauty, and the life cycle, patience, growth, and fertility, love and eternal life. This mythical representation might be far away from real life, but we do sometimes catch imagining it.
For years I have been fascinated with overgrown gardens, using this motif in my drawings and further in my texts. The garden has become a very important theme for me, and I am still discovering it through various techniques, some of them used also on/for this work.
Some gardens have an intentionally overgrown look that's actually carefully cultivated, or at least planned, whereas in other cases overgrowth signals that the garden has been neglected, or even abandoned. But even if the garden is abandoned and overgrown it still has a purpose; in fact, it may even be a better home to various animals and ecosystems. What we perceive as overgrown is actually the natural state of nature itself. And same is with websites, the internet bugs that get to it after a long time of a lack of maintenance are there like they are in an unmaintained garden. The links and images stop working as if a tiny worm would eat its way through them, like it would through a salad leaf. And soon the website can feel like a big compost pile, waiting to disappear in the vastness of the internet forever, like the wet grass and dead plants under the fallen tree leaves eventually merge with the soil underneath.
Through clicking around on livelovecalculate.com you can find out how to grow different vegetables, how to get a house and a garden, you can take a look in my diary (I can be your devilangelmachoman, zine, 2025), you can ask the garden to write you a letter, and finally you can generate a garden of your own. This interactive, web-based generative artwork works as an open-source web application implemented in JavaScript, it runs locally in a standard web browser, no external APIs required, and lets users interact via mouse and keyboard. The web interface consists of two interactive pages, an input-based interactive component that is the Love Calculator, and Garden Generator—a generative system that produces unique garden compositions through a randomized sequence and layering of pre-existing garden images. The garden generator operates as a live generative system, producing a unique visual output with each interaction. The project is conceived as a growing system: its internal logic, image sets, and interactions can expand over time, reflecting the metaphor of a garden as an evolving environment.