Digital Gardening is a visual and audio restoration project connecting community residents to their environment, and the memory of a once-flourishing but now bulldozed garden, Esperanza.
Interactive Media by YEE//DOR. More artist information at www.yee-dor.com.
This digital interface promotes interactive design as a medium to reinstall + commemorate twenty-two years of community labor, recognizing not I as the maker but residents and veteran gardeners as artists in Alphabet City where Esperanza currently lays at rest.
As an exploration in contemporary outdoor interfaces + screens, the project begins to discover how computer-generated systems build social systems, allowing for new perspectives on a given environment. Can deeper + alternative interactions amongst new and old community residents occur when the ghost of a garden virtually returns to the neighborhood?
Digital Gardening appears as a projection on the facades of the present buildings at the former Esperanza site during the evening. The visualization on the screen beholds life-like plants that stem, sprout and evolve. These forms are dynamically produced + provoked as users shine and gesture a light-emitting tool that is read as data in a flash application built by the artist.
Testing was most effective when discovering the barriers users faced in the act of Digital Gardening (prototypes). Design aspects were identified that caused them difficulty and/or misunderstanding.
Alife attempts to emulate the behavior of organize life systems. After analyzed, data simulates seeds that grow virtual plants from the ground on up. The aesthetic of the visualization mimics the presence and livelihood of the Esperanza garden in hopes to revitalize as well as enhance the idea of human spirit, activity, and presence within the space.
Digital Gardening amounts to the practice of synthetic biology and the attempt to recreate biological phenomena in interactive media resulting in not only better theoretical understanding of the phenomena under study, but also in practical applications of biological principles in the technology of computer hardware + software.
Artificial life has its roots in fertile landscapes of biology and computer science. It seeks to cultivate synthetic, life-like behaviors such as growth, adaptation, reproduction, socialization, learning, and even death. Digital Gardening utilizes technology and human activity to generate neomorphic behaviors + incarnations.
Underlying the design of digital gardening is a variety of transforms, which users have to understand and reflect upon in order to make these virtual greeneries come alive and show themselves in a variety of morphological and synaesthesic forms.
The artifact is due to change from common hardware (i.e. cell, lighter, flashlight) to infrared candles to better trigger various digital events to happen have the potential for providing innovative ways for users to play and learn through this novel form of interacting + discovering. This offers learning the scope for bringing playfulness back into gaining social awareness.
