5.
Guiding Principles page 3
Everyman's guide
Another way of finding a `location' is to be taken somewhere by a guide. The map and path information known to the computer might just as easily be referred to robot which - like Danté's Virgil - leads the visitor to their ultimate destination. The image of a clanking R2D2 or clumsy Robbie the Robot - not to mention the dismal prospect of encountering Marvin the Paranoid Android - will no doubt sound a discordant note amidst the bird song of our bucolic setting. Even so, new materials like carbon fibre which can form the skeleton of light, strong walking machines, mean that today's robots already sit in some transitional place between organic and inorganic entities. The B-movie aesthetics of robots - as (paradoxically) prehistoric, ammonite-like creatures - are evolving too. The mad-scientist dream of artificially creating living, organic materials is already becoming a reality; our garden's robots might bare closer resemblance to a Unicorn (albeit with an antenna for horn), than a Tin-man. A life-like form which might, literally, guide you by the hand.Between these extremes lay several other possibilities for pointing visitors in the right direction. Holographic projection might summon up a nebulous human-like figure or a disturbingly wraith-like guide. Alternatively, voices in the air - summoned from various hidden loudspeakers along the garden's paths - might simply whisper directions towards the visitor's ultimate destination.
This extravagant world of guiding principles would also be married to some more mundane, practical cues and clues. Echoing Trees are - obviously - located within woods and forests. They are off the beaten track, but not too far removed - tactfully positioned out of earshot of each other, sited so that the casual walker could not accidentally stumble on some private moment. The identity of an Echoing Tree as such would also be marked out by design - perhaps through something as simple as the presence or shape of a seat under the tree.
We have seen how the design of the garden clearly confers upon it enough
`intelligence' to direct an individual or - like some pastoral air-traffic
control system - any number of individuals to their respective arboreal
destinations. Even so, by also visualising marking out the visitor's ultimate
destination (through 
location
and the shape and form of the Echoing Tree), the Keyholder is prepared
for the end of their navigational path through the garden, and the beginning
of a psychological journey, as their message starts to unfold amongst
the falling leaves.
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