'On the Aesthetics of Gravel' page 3

REALIZATION

There were two main parts to the installation; first, an 'information room' (dubbed the Conservatory), which lead through into a mock-up of the type of garden which might form part of the scheme.

The Conservatory

The role of the conservatory was:

1. to introduce visitors to the concepts of the Garden. This was attempted through:

  • the book of the Living Garden, which described the scheme in detail
  • text panels which briefly summarised the scheme
  • explanatory leaflets which could be taken away
  • printed postcards carrying the Living Garden image of a tree with contact names and address of the project team

2. outline the technical mechanisms which could make the garden operate (and so emphasise that this was not just a fantasy or a polemical piece of conceptual art) through:

  • schematic diagrams which illustrated the authoring and message retrieval processes in four panels
  • mock-ups which showed how a range of special-purpose, easy to use mono-medium authoring tools might look and be used
  • creating and displaying objects which demonstrated the range of different forms that the Key for any given message could take. These included a photograph, a locket, a ring, a book, a prosthetic (which could be inserted into a human body), and a piece of fruit (an apple in this case) - something which might be chosen if a message had a urgency; the recipient of the apple (the Key) would, in this example, have to visit a garden before the fruit rotted away in order to be able to retrieve a message

3. provide the opportunity for visitors to author a message by building a working example of an authoring tool for recording a sound message using a Key

4. to serve as a gateway into the garden area - an interface between an explanation of the Garden and a physical manifestation of a garden environment itself

The Garden

The garden - as a physical space - served the purpose of 'exploding' the multimedia interface, removing it from a 2D-based computer monitor, and re-representing it as a 3D-physical world in which one operated through time. At its simplest level, information is found within a garden simply by going to a certain place (or being taken or guided to a particular location).

The elements that were realised in this part of the exhibition were:

  • Working examples of Viewers - the Garden's mono- and multimedia replay devices - with the Echoing Tree (for the replay of sound-only messages), and the Pool of Reflection (a Viewer for replaying single or series-based images)
  • Examples of Living Books (the generic name for messages within the scheme) - in the form 'content' that was created for both the Echoing Tree and the Pool of Reflection
  • Guiding mechanisms - the Water Bug, the map, the idea of navigation by 'voices in the air' and a reminder about the 'organic' relationship between inanimate machines and living humans.
  • Physical pathways which represented general navigational issues (and metaphorically elements of 'choice')
  • The compost heap, a metaphor for the need to recognise the way in which digital technology develops, is superseded, decays but provides the basis for new growth

Physical landscapes within the theoretical Living Garden scheme would be made up of very many gardens spread throughout a country to ensure that local access was available to as many people as possible. Since each of these might also be developed differently in terms of ambience, character and 'meaning' this meant that the garden within the show needed to have a generic feel, rather than identifying a unique location.

Finally as a physical space marked by a border, the garden was clearly something other than a piece of computer hardware, highlighting our questions about the use, design and appropriateness of existing multimedia platforms for every possible end.