8. Messages page 3

The Wasteland?

The Living Garden can also be a psychological landscape of dark forests - a psychological wasteland. Living Books might act as a kind of ark of identity, a psychological totem which an author fashions of himself and reveals only to himself. Alternatively, a garden might be the place of revelation, recrimination or even intellectual violence. As with any architectural system, foul deeds may take place within the most beautiful of surroundings.

Voices from the past?

It should be apparent by now that the Living Garden serves a range of functions very much beyond just acting as some multimedia necropolis, a version of the `talking tombstones' which may be found within some cemeteries within the United States. This may be an interesting moment for anyone who has doubts about the choice of a garden within the scheme to reflect that in the West we take it for granted that a (cemetery) landscape fulfils social functions of memorial and pilgrimage. The choice of garden as centre for a memory bank is, perhaps, no less odd than its use as a place to venerate the dead? As Simon Schama says "Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock." (Schama, Landscape & Memory)

Although another of the reasons for describing the Garden as `living' scheme was to emphasize that one of its primary functions would be to provide a channel of communication for the living. Implicit within the scheme, however, is the possibility that a Key might very well be used to summon up a voice from the past. An author might, for example, create a Living Book as a message to be heard only after his death (the Key being entrusted until this time). A Key which delivered a Living Book during both author and recipient's lifetime might also become a memento after one individual has died. Living Garden messages are stored in perpetuity, and the remaining partner may decide to visit a garden to recall a message. Others may wish to treat the Key as artefact - its shape and form may be all that is required to recall the first experience of the Living Book. Since the memory of visiting a garden as a place - in its own right - forms part of the experience of reading Living Books, a particular garden may be revisited after someone's death, but without a Key. A visit to remember, rather than - literally - to recall.

Another of the reasons why I describe the Garden as a `living' system is because its messages (Living Books) are not treated as dead, isolated events, cold artifacts or commodities: their function is to act as a trigger to set off a series of psychological processes. The multimedia event as integrated into a place (the garden) which forms part of a dynamic social world, rather than being a product in its own right. In a sense, these mental associations could be described as a kind of intellectual hypertext - a web of personal memories elicited and recalled through the messages delivered within a garden. The purpose of the Living Books is not to define content but to act as a vehicle which may carry meaning. A message is the seed from which meaning grows within the (metaphorical) garden of the self.

Chapter and verse

Living Books are likely to be simple, discrete, largely monomedia `events', but there is nothing to stop a more complex message being created. A range of simple authoring tools - or one sophisticated one - may be used to build up a message over time. Perhaps a Living Book might consist of a sound message followed by a few images. On visiting a garden, they Keyholder would be directed first to the Echoing Tree, then the Pool of Reflection (the order of replay in the garden determined by the order in which each component of the message was recorded). The visit to the garden then becomes, literally, a journey of discovery, as different parts of a message slowly unfold by visiting (and being directed to) different places. At its most sophisticated, the form of a Key may actually - itself - be made to resemble a book, perhaps a scrapbook. The Key-as-book could also provide a means for accessing only parts of a message within a garden - perhaps through something as simple as by opening a particular page (which would transmit a signal to recall information represented in words or pictures on the open page).

The relationship between Key and message is also another open architecture aspect of the Living Garden. Keys might, of course be duplicated and made available to a group of individuals. Or if any message has an immediate currency this could be signalled by using a Key based on a material which might decay or fade away over time. Once the Key decays, the message is lost. Keys could even be turned into a prosthetic - a memorial tattoo - which would mean that a message would always, literally, be carried with you.