The purpose of this site
The Living Garden is an experiment...
... an experiment in what if...
- what if we attempt to identify a social role for technology
in society?
- what if we explore how evolving computer technology and wireless 'active' environments can be made to trigger 'events' - not just in the sense of physical but also psychological changes of state?
- what if we critique new technologies as they are deployed and promoted today?
- what if such questions opened a debate - where would it lead? What new ideas and approaches might come from this?
The
Garden, as the idea described in the main section of this site - an HTML-'book'
in nine chapters - is intended to provide a means of bringing together
these questions outside of the normal e-speak and assumptions surrounding
new media. That is, the view that technology is intrinsically 'kewl',
important only when funded by an e-commerce venture capitalist or indeed
aesthetically valid only if incomprehensible to the majority.
The prospect of reading a text about an electronic medium will, perhaps, make some visitors to this site dismiss the Living Garden: "it's not multimedia", and leave for happier e-shores. In essence the purpose of the Living Garden is simply to ask some fundamental questions about the current uses and definitions of new media.
The Garden describes a way of exploiting multimedia - in order to create a social memory bank - which, when I first started this project five years ago, was as far removed as I could imagine from, the then, current uses of digital technology.
Today,
if anything, new technologies like mobile phones and WAP-type devices
- which are very much the stuff of the Living Garden in terms of enabling
systems - make the questions raised even more relevant. Not least since
these newer technologies are still largely deployed within a consumer-capital
publishing framework.
The fundamental point of the Garden is that whilst this is an environment that could be built, my real interest rests in posing this world as an alternative vision to what multimedia producers are currently offering us. I have always seen the Living Garden as a world like Gulliver's - Swift's tale of strange, fantastical lands which one soon discovers are really tales about our everyday world and lives.
The
origins of this site lie in an earlier effort to describe the idea of
the Garden in written form and also to build a physical wireless environment
for real. My original attempts to do this whilst studying for the Royal
College of Art MA in Interactive Multimedia, in 1995, was a painful process
(described separately in the - hopefully humorous - essay
On the Aesthetics of Gravel.).
It was also a reminder of the extent to which so-called 'creative' institutions can also be blinkered with regards to this new medium.
In essence, the raison d'être of the Garden is not to say "let us build this world" (although it might be fun to try) but to make us reflect on our current multimedia efforts and ask ourselves what are we achieving and why?
So - paradoxically - this literal garden, a 'real' garden, is in fact a metaphorical means of asking a simple question: "what is multimedia for?"
Nick Wray - nick@livinggarden.net
Garden layout
This site has been updated (February 2000) in order to incorporate more of the original source material and images which illustrate working tools and systems of the Garden.
The main part of this site is the Book of the Living Garden - an HTML text in nine chapters which describes an alternative vision of new media. The table of contents to the book can be accessed at any time from the 'The Book' (via the tree icon) on the navigation bar at the bottom of any page.
The following table provides a brief summary of the navbar links and main sections that make up this site, followed by some other useful links to video, contact information etc:
 |
The home page of the Living Garden Web site (that is www.livinggarden.net). This is the top level of the site - the place to go if you find yourself lost. |
 |
The book describing the Living Garden. Nine chapters (about 20,000 words) which describe an alternative use for new technologies built around a social, rather than commercial goal. (A summary version |
 |
A series of five figures which indicate how existing technology could support this scheme. These diagrammatically illustrate how the processes and stages described in the Book (above) work together. |
 |
A self-critique of the scheme and some background on the perils and pitfalls of actually building a garden inside the Royal College of Art... |
In addition, the reader may find the following links useful in their own right:
|
Glossary - quick guide to the tools and devices that make up the garden.
|
|
Summary of the Living Garden - a shorter-version of the full-text under 'The Book'.
|
|
Film of the Show - Three short digital movies which, respectively:, provide an overall impression of the installation; an example of a social message (in the Pool of Reflection); and an automated navigational device - the bug. |
|
Visitor's Book - tell me -
Nick Wray - what you think of the Garden. This is an e-mail form
for sending messages to me personally, combined with the option
of signing a visitor's book to leave your comments for others to
see as well. |
|
Bibliography - some references that shaped my thoughts back in 1995. |
I am conscious that there is much still missing in this site - the navigation bar could be supplemented with some of the above items; a site map and search function would be useful; perhaps a gallery of images from the installation, too. A downloadable text version of the book of the Living Garden is also on my to-do list.
However, I hope this site will suffice for a while and, in the meantime, if you have any comments for me - or indeed for other visitors to this site - you can leave them (via the link from my name) below.
Nick Wray - February 2000
