Liquid_Eden: The Discreet Paradise of Networks

Liquid_Eden: The Discreet Paradise of Networks
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Liquid_Eden: The Discreet Paradise of Networks
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Liquid_Eden: The Discreet Paradise of Networks
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450 × 358

Liquid Eden is a java-based Web project that visualizes the collective mark of networked communication.

Gardens have both a symbolic and personal relevance to the project. As a frequent subject of landscape painting, they have been used to convey a sense of tension between form and content, raw material and human intervention. Often the garden is a stage for human action, its contrived rhythms and regular lawns convey the will of someone no longer present. In this sense the garden is a system, artifice and theatrical space that always anticipates its user and betrays the actions of those who have come before.

In the same way that we can read the patterns of landscapes as the evidence of human intention, Liquid Eden seeks to visualize the collective mark of networked communication. It is conceived as a dynamic, living landscape that makes people and their online presence the vital material in creating its form.

The installation exists as two large-scale, networked projections of two single, white lilies onto a pair of Baroque panels. The lilies are entirely controlled by online users whose interaction with the lilies is immediately reflected in the physical installation. Over the course of the exhibition, the lilies are systematically destroyed by the cumulative actions of visitors to the project Web site, forming a luminous animation in perpetual erosion. If at any time there are no online users interacting with the images, the eroded lilies to slowly regenerate back to their original state.

As witnesses to this cycle of life and disintegration, viewers who stand in proximity to the installation see the remote interaction of anonymous others, typically invisible in everyday use of the Web, made visible. With the sense that someone is intentionally transforming their immediate surroundings, viewers of the installation experience the project as a kind of threshold architecture where the presence of others, layered in time, has an impact on the way they understand and interpret to their relationship to public space.

(Stephanie Owens)