'On the Aesthetics of Gravel'

A critical review of The Living Garden Project,
as constructed and as a concept

In September 1995 a physical landscape was built within the Royal College of Art (RCA) as part of my MA course in multimedia. The aim was to demonstrate the ideas behind my MA project the Living Garden - a multimedia memory bank set in a natural, physical landscape which aimed to provide an interface simply enough for any one to use for certain types of personal communication.

The Living Garden was given a 'cool' reception from the RCA and I was asked to write a critical evaluation on the following basis:

"Describe the 'Living Garden' installation as it actually appeared in the MA IMM Degree Show, with a proposal concerning a developed version and how such a development might manifest itself as an installation in a future exhibition."

The following essay, written in 1995, was my response to this request. The formal definition of the Garden and the concepts behind it in book form can also be found within this site, by clicking here. Note, in this text 'Garden' (capitalised) generally refers to the idea, the scheme in its entirety, while 'garden' (initial lower case) refers to the physical landscape that was constructed at the RCA).

Project aims and backgrounds

"How is the value of a (multimedia) 'asset' defined?"; "what is an authoring tool?" and "who is an author?" These were some of the issues which lay at the heart of the Living Garden , an attempt to raise questions about the prevailing definition multimedia as a 'product-based' activity - an activity which is largely defined at present within a commercial consumer-based publishing framework.

To these ends, I proposed a scheme with a social (rather than market-led) purpose called the Living Garden. The Garden identified how a range of computer-based technologies, tools, interfaces and behaviours could combine to establish a cultural 'memory bank' to provide the means through which individuals could communicate in a variety of ways. In highlighting a different way of using multimedia technology, the aim was to open a debate about current and future directions in what - disturbingly for such a new field - is already becoming a conservative area in which to work.

Although elements of polemic, parody and metaphor within the Garden as a scheme were central to the project I felt that the 'reality' of the Garden - in terms of researching and understanding the relevant technology to see if this alternative place could be built - was a critical and vital point if the questions it raised about applications and uses of technology were going to be truly pertinent and not mere speculation and guesswork. General points about the uses and abuses of technology could otherwise have been made in the form of a science-fiction novel or a social diatribe.

So even though the Living Garden described an alternative model for using digital technology, the issues this raised related very much to the reality of the multimedia development today. However, rather than accept the current form and functionality of computers and software authoring packages (along with their implicit assumptions) the development of the Garden as a scheme involved outlining new forms of authoring tools and fresh ways of interacting with a 'computational' environment. In a sense, I had to define and build what I saw as a 'computer', rather than just use what was available off-the-shelf.

Clearly, this was a 'big' Garden, which operated on many different levels. In terms of developing the project this posed a number of problems. How could one communicate the richness, diversity and ramifications of the scheme in simple, easy to follow manner? The architecture that I devised and defined as the Garden (in the sense of the theoretical interplay of technology and behaviour that could realise the scheme) was ultimately in fact very simple, but the variety of ways that individuals could tailor the system also made it very powerful.

What follows is a description and critique of how the project was presented during the MA final exhibition period of 'Circuit' (the Royal College of Art - RCA - end of year multimedia course exhibition in October 1995) with an analysis and conclusion which focuses on the different intellectual, academic, practical and administrative factors which combined to form the shape of the Living Garden.