Garden Gnomad documentation in development
With the help of staff here at BNMI, I am trying to develop an open-source interface that will enable me (or another GG user) to upload photos and quickly format them for documentation, random combination, and on-site printing.
I want the documentation to be open and accessible so that the machine can be responsive to how the gardeners construct or document the meaning of their work/creation. I would like the machine and its documentation to invite them to view others’ works. (This sounds like I am situating the gardens as works of art! Maybe that is a useful metaphor.)
One of the most interesting comments that I have had here was from a musician, Catherine Thompson: the computerized machine in the garden is very appropriate, because the garden is a machine already. Whereas this residency is considering the liminality between the self (also human community) and a hypertext-dependent/screen-based environment, Catherine is exploring the liminal space between genders, between species, between the nomadic and the rooted.
Much of the discussion in the BNMI residency suggests that the human body as already modified by this screen-dependent world. It asks, what about us is cyborg already? Documentary filmmaker Rob Spence gets to materialize these ideas in a robotic camera in the place of his missing eye, as he examines the ubiquity of camera surveilance in a new documentary: http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/featured/bionic-eyes-just-became-a-reality/5047
