In Carolina Potions, this interactive app allows you to create a potion recipe.
Forage through a scrollable field of over a hundred objects scattered across your screen. Choose up to six ingredients, and then click the ‘Brew Potion’ button. The app will return a recipe for a potion that does anything from getting a murder of crows to rearrange your art collection to teaching bricks to sing. Each potion is uniquely generated from your selections.
Potion ingredients include numerous native plants and animals from the South as well as other objects from North Carolina art and culture. Some examples include: the prayer of a praying mantis, a pair of mating rosy maple moths, water from the Eno river, a shoelace from a college athlete, juniper berries for transcending bitterness, barred owl feathers for clear seeing at night, a hair from Beverly McIver’s paintbrush for boldness, and Cheerwine for finding your way home.
This witchy app asks: Is it possible to understand nature? Who should be harnessing nature’s powers, and to what end? In how many ways can one combine and recombine the ‘ingredients’ that surround communities today, and what effects and side-effects will they produce?
The app is also a loving portrait of Durham, North Carolina from our point of view. The potions teach one to recognize and appreciate local animals and plants. Recognition breeds tenderness.
