Timegarden 01, 2004
Timegardens use growth algorithms to create 3D-animated dynamic gardens stretching their life spans to fit significant “temporal” events in the real world. Using fractal geometry and 3D animation, such gardens literally “grow and decay” to any desired temporal specifications. Timegardens become virtual landscapes that grow from seed, reach their zeniths, and ultimately die, preferably in a public space in which an audience is defined by issues of time, scheduling and pace. The sounds emitted by Timegardens are gentle pulsations, like the rhythmic beat of a heart or a clock. These audio pulses will also utilize a consistent algorithm, equally tuned to fit a determined time span. Timegardens reverse the conditions of nature, so that it is now subjected to a cultural or personal time line rather than the reverse. Timegardens reflect the function of technology in contemporary life: humanity's attempt to dominate the natural world rather than adapt to it.
Exhibition View Timegarden: for The Exploratorium, San Francisco, February 2005
The Exploratorium Timegarden is forty minutes, geared to the average length of time it takes to view a group exhibition in a museum, so that viewers might return to it throughout their visit and see development. This Timegarden is based on my own personal, aging, sense of time: the garden grows very quickly, in the first 10 minutes, then decays slowly over the following half hour. It then loops back on itself, to endlessly repeat the process of growth and decay.
Sound: Alain Thibault