6. Streams of Consciousness

Does the garden need the sophisticated guidance mechanisms described in the last chapter? Surely, part of the pleasure of a visit would be that of wandering through a forest and, spying various Echoing Trees from a distance, select one's own destination; a tree which commands a place and a view selected by the Keyholder, rather than allocated by the garden? The position of the Keyholder in the garden can still be tracked, and the seat under seat under an Echoing Tree might simply be fitted with a sensor to detect someone sitting down. Combine this `knowledge' with a rule or principle such as `if a Keyholder is under an Echoing Tree, relay and replay their message after a 30 second pause' and a visitor could clearly go to any Echoing Tree of their choice to hear a message. One of the aims of the Living Garden is to imagine ways of providing the functionality of machines without recourse to buttons, switches or elaborate instruction. Certainly, this simpler way of moving through the garden, this transparency of controlling the replay of a message, is enormously appealing. But what happens if an author's message is something other than a sound recording? What if someone wants to create a Living Book based upon a photograph, picture, some image or a medium other than a sound?

Since one of the principles behind the Living Garden is to provide a context for content, rather than a definition of content, this question needs to be explored. What if instead of creating a spoken love poem as a Living Book an author decides to describe their thoughts, memories, or capture some artefact in a series of simple still images? One solution lies in the functionality of the garden's Viewers. In addition to the Echoing Tree (which replays sound recordings only) various kinds of Viewer - each optimised for the re-play of a certain medium - may be found in different parts of the garden. Some examples of these different Viewers might include:

• the Pool of Reflection - a lake, pond or body of water where a single image would be projected onto the water's surface

• the Stone Circle - a series of flat-faced, broken stones set into the ground. As a visitor walked past each stone, the Key could trigger the recall of an image on the surface of each stone for as long as the visitor stands there

• the Time Sail - an Obsidian monolith able to display both moving images and sound

• the Censer - an area of the garden planted with a mixture of herbs and perfumed plants, which includes a Viewer mechanism which could synthesise and `replay' any fragrance which had been recorded as a Living Book

This richer world of possibilities poses a number of problems, given that the Keyholder is unlikely to know the contents of their Living Book prior to visiting a garden: they have no way of knowing which type of Viewer to head for - "should I go to the Echoing Tree, or the Pool of Reflection (is it a sound or image recording I've come to see?)". An assumption is also being made that not only would all visitors be able to recognise the different types of Viewers, but that they would also be familiar enough with a landscape to know where the various types were located in the garden and how one might reach them. Clearly, the navigational system outlined in the last chapter, whilst not strictly necessary if we were to constrain the environment to the replay of sound-only messages, does actually provide the solution to guiding the Keyholder to the relevant Viewer for any message recorded in a particular medium.