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***News " Wilderness" will be featured for six months during the 2026 Venice Biennale from 9th May until 29th November in the European Cultural Centre at the Palazzo Mora on Strada Nova in Cannaregio, Venice, Italy. 8 UMA Artists are involved: Tamiko Thiel, Nataša Prosenc Stearns, John Sanborn, James Bloom, Will Pappenheimer, Fernanda D'Agostino, Nina Sobell, Terry Flaxton,
So far there have been a series of 5 and more iterations of this work as we get nearer to exhibition - for UMA artists this has been an extraordinary procedure as every one of us in the past has been the sole creator of a piece - so we move forwards in a spirit of collaboration. → go to project history - see below: A Deeper Dive into "Wilderness" and the technologies of video installations
WildernessTo the top right this early iteration of the layout of frames is one of four possibilities: I looped at the centre and worked outwards, making sure that things local to each other had little or no repetition. In working outwards from a centre then that is difficult but a lot easier than making loops where you’re dealing with a random scenario. It struck me that If you organise a set of concentric circles that work, then at least if you start from there and attach loops to particular screens there’s more chance that the initial relationships can hold before breaking apart, were you to then move the frames with the loops attached. So when we next construct a layout we can track the layouts of the loops. Plus later by having made 27 loops to cope with 24 frames (we were responding to an initial ask from John of more frames which personally I agree with because there’s more delight in my thinking in small things than Large - so 8 artists making portrait and landscape versions of 2 artworks - so effectively 32 variations laid out across 24 possibilities (plus 3 for safety) - then, when we come to Venice and look at what actually is happening - because theory and reality are entirely different things and there’s bound to be unforeseen consequences that require rectifying - then we have a chance of correcting those. You said you like planning beforehand and so do I - belt and braces every time! You’re right that a full scale moving image would help a lot - because looking at a mock-up and then Making a judgement about a real situation must fail it seems to me. So we felt that what we initially did and Wills now done is a good mid-point to keep the relationship between the new construction and the original relationship to the loops. So the point I’m making is that stretching a method into a random scenario has its limits and of course all we can do is look at the charts and talk though imagined consequences and make best guesses. Does that make sense? And Will is right - at the moment there’s 96 gig of compressed loops…. Meaning if an audience member watches the installation for 10 minutes they’ll be exposed to 16 gigs of UMA data… I know that’s a crazy thing to calculate - but I got to wondering about the relationship between data and experience and the original proposition of an exogram as a carrier of ‘meaning’...
Correspondence between UMA artists about the constructions of the loops and the methods by which repetition was avoided between artworks (see farther below for the exact constructions of the loops and their placement.
"With regard constructing the loops and in relation to the video frames: I created a loop of 8 artists works in both landscape and portrait ration - then we all agreed to generate a second artwork in both portrait and Landscape ratio - all of which means there wre 32 iterations to distributed on a variety of timelines which were then looped. The the first loop was positioned at the centre frame and then 3 other loops were created with each quarter of the 16 on a timeline (there being 16 landscape and 16 portrait works) on the three nearest frames (either a portrait loop or a landscape loop) - then those loops were cut in half and placed with the 2nd half in front of the first half of artworks in both P and L ratio and which were distributed to the next 4 nearest frames you'll see here an extra amended or bespoke loop was create for later on. Follows on above right.... |
So working worked outwards, cutting loops up or reversing orders and placing thenm next to eatchother (see Beleow making sure that things local to each other had little or no repetition. In working outwards from a centre then that is difficult but a lot easier than making loops where you’re dealing with a random scenario. It struck me that If you organise a set of concentric circles that work, then at least if you start from there and attach loops to particular screens there’s more chance that the initial relationships can hold before breaking apart, were you to then move the frames with the loops attached.
So when we next construct a layout we can track the layouts of the loops. Plus later by having made 27 loops to cope with 24 frames (we were responding to an initial ask from John of more frames which personally I agree with because there’s more delight in my thinking in small things than Large - so 8 artists making portrait and landscape versions of 2 artworks - so effectively 32 variations laid out across 24 possibilities (plus 3 for safety) - eality are entirely different things and there’s bound to be unforeseen consequences that require rectifying - then we have a chance of correcting those. You said you like planning beforehand and so do I - belt and braces every time! You’re right that a full scale moving image would help a lot - because looking at a mock-up and then Making a judgement about a real situation must fail it seems to me. So we felt that what we initially did and Wills now done is a good mid-point to keep the relationship between the new construction and the original relationship to the loops. So the point I’m making is that stretching a method into a random scenario has its limits and of course all we can do is look at the charts and talk though imagined consequences and make best guesses. Does that make sense? And Will is right - at the moment there’s 96 gig of compressed loops…. Meaning if an audience member watches the installation for 10 minutes they’ll be exposed to 16 gigs of UMA data… I know that’s a crazy thing to calculate - but I got to wondering about the relationship between data and experience and the original proposition of an exogram as a carrier of ‘meaning’… |
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Technical Construction
Instructions First build the wooden structure - see the details to the right Further information will be added here shortly |
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Having constructed the wooden frame and painted it black, then download the 27 video files which contain the relevant loops for 24 frames on display which are:
7 x 5 inch frames, 6 x 7 inch frames, 5 x 10 inch frames, 3 x 15 inch frames, 1 x 24 inch frame 2 x 32 inch frames These are all with the correct resolutions for 12 landscape frames from 1920 x 1080 down to 960 x 540 and 12 portrait frames from 1080 x 1920 down to 540 x 960. All of these can be found on a google drive here at this URL https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LUCWmbqtcAvfmIx3iP-MOAe1ENzb7Gzu?usp=sharing All of the files have their codes written into their title, the screen size and the resolution of the loop You require permission to download so message [email protected]. The image to the right represents a snapshot of the code neames of files on Google Drive Having downloaded the loops then, using the loops and their codes in the document bottom right - inject them onto the frames. This table below right will tell you which loop to place in which frame - and then according to the diagram image beneath this table with colour coded to represent the screens. (like this image below but far larger). Look out for updates to this images as it is constantly evolving 
The image to the right represents a snapshot of the colour coding on the computer and the names of files which have been uploaded to google drive
TECHNICAL DETAILS
Having set ourselves the task of constructing a new artwork with the theme of Wilderdness - which lead on from our original theme of the English word 'Paradise' and all that is associated with it, originally derived from from the Aramaic word which meant 'an enclosed garden' - we found ourselves examining our own anthropomorphic tendencies of thinking that outside our safe space, the biblical garden of paradise from which we were expelled into was to be called 'the Wilderness' as if it were somehow alien to us. |
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MATHS & AESTHETICS
In constructing this installation (and given the prior history of Paradise Garden can also to be found under the overall menu item in projects: Wilderness) we had to also bear in mind that 8 artists were taking part and with their first work they were being asked to create both a landscape and a portrait version of their works (and in the labelling in both the document and the titling of the video files themselves) you'll see that L infers a landscape version and P infers a portrait version. But hidden in this simple request, there was the problem of generating cohesion that would somehow manifest if we all grasped a similar construction of the ideas. This in itself spiralled out past interpretative mind which can barely cognise what all of the above means, internalised as it is into simple concepts when larger ideas such as survival and care, dominion and stewardship were at stake. On one level we realised practically that 8 works were only half the running time we needed (if each piece were at between 3 and at most 5 minutes long) - but that material consideration gave rise to another chance at creating a complimentary work (a second chance which is what everyone needs in life) then we of ourselves as a group, required each artist to make two pieces - both in landscape and portrait ratio - as if somehow how a thing is looked it (what shape the window looking into a meaningful communication assigns levels opf meaning)? This would then allow 8 artists to generate 16 works in Landscape and a set of 15 variations in portrait aspect ratio - which meant that wider dreams could be dreamt. For the technically minded - bearing in mind the aesthetic intent of Wilderness - The table to the right takes the case of 24 screens where the intention in constructing the loop was that at no point should we show the same image of the 16 artworks. Having said that, throughout the running of the loops there will be overlaps. The maths here is that 8 artists made 16 works that create a 60 minute plus loop with each work being 4 seconds apart - making the duration 68 minutes 56 seconds and 5 frames. So each loop is exactly the same length and repeats 8 times per day. All the works are offset as each piece is a different length - plus at startup in the morning when the entire installation is turned on via one electrical switch - then the operating systems of each of the 6 different kinds of frames will drift - but not that far, so effectively the entire installation will maintain its basic integrity. The colour coded document to the right - besides being in and of itself an artful gesture of its own - describes the maths to create in total 27 * 1 hour plus loops with around 1.798 Terabytes of data in them. This was then compressed down to 27 loops compressed for different resolution screens which amounted to circa 96 gigabytes of data which will run day in day out for six months from 9th May to 29th November 2026. And then there is the deeper idea generated by artists wishing to make installations rather than paintings or other kinds of marks and we look back to Joseph Beuys 'sculptures' - or assemblies of artefacts that meant something to him - which the audience was to participate in his attributed meanings so that they too could share and take part in. Looking to Professor Merlin Donalds groundbreaking 1992 book on the basics of neuroscience that looked back into our far past to examine how we come to be where we are now, Donald came upon the idea that from time immemorial we have made marks that had meaning for the maker that others could derive meaning from. Originally Donald pointed to assemblies of sticks or plants in a forest, then the gathering of stones in a meaningful message - and then the manufacture of stone circles and then writing on clay tablets in cuneiform, then codex, scrolls, books, photographs, films computers social media messages - and on into a period where there will no longer be a form inhabited by meaning - just simple invisible, immaterial raw data, raw with meaning. Donald called these messages Exograms and our artworks are exograms situated within this cabinet as if the audience comes upon it as if it is a memorial from the far past - or as a manifestation of something from the far future Wilderness (to the right) is UMA’s encounter with our audience, Messages from the past and the future where artefacts of past exograms are interspersed with video screens - exograms that speak of how we may work out our place in the universe. Should an audience member engage with this work for ten minutes they will have been exposed to 6.6 gigabytes of information - and in wondering at the aesthetic or experiential meaning of such a thing this should be a research study in itself which when we've conquered the sheer physicality of the install, we'll set about considering this The profound relationship of the existence of life and the material existence of the World Scientists believe that, at the formation of the earth 4.5 billion years ago, that as soon as life developed after 500 million years, it introduced oxygen and then after another 1.8 billion years of no significant interchange, a chemical development in the oceans allowed oxygen to escape the oceans and then form an atmosphere - such that life itself escaped the oceans and became ‘us’. |
The image below represents the placements of artists works on a one hour loop - then extrapolating them through a series of iterations to then have up to 24 loops play back without duplicating any of the artists works at any one time from the audiences point of view. What this meant was for UMA to construct one loop of artworks in both landscape and portrait modes of two artists works each - then iterating these in both landscape and portrait modes. Which meant each of the 8 artists then had 4 different views of their two works - 16 new works across 32 possible playbacks (one artist made two works which were represented in both landscape and portrait mode) which in turn meant that 32 iterations were distributed in groups of 16 across 24 loops.
In the above 24 frames - 7 x 5 inch frames, 6 x 7 inch frames, 5 x 10 inch frames, 3 x 15 inch frames, 1 x 24 inch frame, 2 x 32 inch frames
Paradise Garden
Paradise Garden (above)
In approaching the first iteration of Paradise Garden, a square 3 metre box which the audience could wander around the perimeter looking on to a surface covered with plants in which a set of small 7 inch frames were positioned with digital artworks created by the associated UMA artists considering their place in this world and their impact upon it.... Wilderness, visualisation Will Pappenheimer
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In the current no-man’s land of our thinking around Deep ecology, an exogram is an artefact in the physical world, where from early times humans have exported knowledge into ‘carriers of meaning’, from arrangements of stone or wood, cuneiform tablets, scrolls, codices, books, and lately computers, where the end state of this revolution is data without form.
In his book Origins of the Modern Mind, Professor Merlin Donald argues that in creating exograms, humans have always grasped the meaning of these messages they’ve been compelled to create for eachother - from a neolithic handprint 50,000 years ago to ascending ‘Voyager’ into interstellar space - and so now, in discovering UMA’s messages, an audience member may dream of a future for a better world.
Wilderness is UMA’s encounter with our audience, messages from the past and the future where artefacts of past exograms are interspersed with video screens - exograms that speak of how we may work out our place in the universe.
United Media Artists
United Media Artists have bridged the analog-to-digital transition: we began our creative works in the analogue era and have carried on throughout the digital era, maintaining successful practices throughout these transitions. We have fought to retain our creative propositions in a new technology driven environment. As UMA evolves, we welcome new generations of digital-native artists into our ongoing dialogue. Like us, emerging artists will maintain a grasp of constructing their art through a series of transformations in our core media. Changes in techniques may come and go, but in learning the lessons of the past, our future creations will honour a unified way to create new messages that effect the development of art in the 21st century and beyond
In his book Origins of the Modern Mind, Professor Merlin Donald argues that in creating exograms, humans have always grasped the meaning of these messages they’ve been compelled to create for eachother - from a neolithic handprint 50,000 years ago to ascending ‘Voyager’ into interstellar space - and so now, in discovering UMA’s messages, an audience member may dream of a future for a better world.
Wilderness is UMA’s encounter with our audience, messages from the past and the future where artefacts of past exograms are interspersed with video screens - exograms that speak of how we may work out our place in the universe.
United Media Artists
United Media Artists have bridged the analog-to-digital transition: we began our creative works in the analogue era and have carried on throughout the digital era, maintaining successful practices throughout these transitions. We have fought to retain our creative propositions in a new technology driven environment. As UMA evolves, we welcome new generations of digital-native artists into our ongoing dialogue. Like us, emerging artists will maintain a grasp of constructing their art through a series of transformations in our core media. Changes in techniques may come and go, but in learning the lessons of the past, our future creations will honour a unified way to create new messages that effect the development of art in the 21st century and beyond
Wilderness, visualisation Will Pappenheimer
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HERSTORY or HISTORY
So far there have been a series of 4 iterations of this work as we get nearer to exhibition - for UMA artists this has been an extraordinary procedure as every one of us in the past has been the sole creator of a piece - so we move forwards in a spirit of collaboration. United Moving Image Artists initially proposed an installation called "Paradise Garden" which was a 3 metre square table-height area, full of plants interspersed with small digital acrylic frames upon which UMA artists had imagined new plant species to then interrogate propositions around ideas implicit in ecological thought (for instance the meaning of "Deep Ecology" where 'righteous living 'is part of the story) and what issues were most imperative in not only saving our world, but ourselves. This was accepted at the European Cultural Commission based in Amsterdam and their Italian section based in Venice, Italy will put this work on from 9th May 2026 to 22nd of November 2026 under the banner of the Venice Biennale. Significantly the curator of the Venice Biennale, Koyo Kouoh, has said of the inspiration for the Biennale: "“The exhibition In Minor Keys stands as a collective score composed together with artists who have built universes of imagination. Artists who work at the boundaries of form, and whose practices can be thought of as intricate melodies to be heard both collectively and on their own terms. These are artists whose practices seamlessly bleed into society. Artists who accommodate daily life as part of a logical and aesthetically consistent relation of parts. Artists who are exceedingly generous and hospitable to life.” Full text here. So with that in mind we have discovered whilst collaborating together exactly what Koyo has expressed as an imperative for the Biennale - and significant to UMA and our working process, arguably the metaphor of free jazz composition has been working for us in this process throughout. We now discover together that we are to create "A Cabinet of Curiosities": which, were you to come upon it some time in the future, (and this would already have become part of our own future), such that the visitor come upon something not stuck in time metaphorically is a philosophical imperative, both always in the past and always in the future. This is in fact something that has a relationship with Deep Ecology where we are all a party to eachother's world.
Early Cuneiform Tablet maybe 5500 years old
Early Cuneiform Calculations Tablet maybe 5500 years old
Examples of Leonora Carrington inspired Felt Plants and Vines
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Image: Will Pappenheimer
The Rationale for the 4th Iteration - Future Ecologies
The Rationale for the 3rd iteration of the Installation: The CABINET OF CURIOSITIES The 3rd iteration may change more probably into a cabinet of curiosities draped with vines viewed as if from our future…. where acrylic screens are interspersed with artefacts to represent exograms. An exogram is an artefact in the physical world where humans export knowledge into carriers, from arrangements of stone, to baked cuneiform tablets, to scrolls, to codices, to books, to computers where the end goal of this information evolution is data without form - which humans inherently grasp the meaning of) (Merlin Donald, The Origins of the Modern Mind) but from the audiences present it will be as if they’ve found this, still working, in an abandoned museum, the meaning of which is a window onto a past mentality before we humans worked out our place in the universe. 
Image, River Estuary concept Fernanda Agostino
Examples of artefacts UMA may interlace between screens
Sketch of a cabinet and an extra piece of staging: a tree and the moon
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The History of this work until the present
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The 1st Rational for the Installation: PARADISE GARDEN
The following images & text are included to show the evolution and development of the work until the 2nd Rationale "GARDEN" Paradise Garden
Paradise Garden Early Iteration
Nodding to ancient ideas concerning the garden, literally as part of paradise itself – the Garden of Eden in ancient Aramaic referring to a specific place within the desert in which there is shade from the sun, where water flows easily and the foods and fruits for sustaining life are readily available. In Aramaic both the ideas of ‘garden’ and ‘paradise’ are synonymous. The secret garden has long been a place where people can dream of freedom – and in this sense UMA’s artists, nodding to Nam June Paik’s twentieth century ‘TV Garden’ have freely allowed themselves to imagine new growth, itself symbolic of the need for new ideas, in a world where contemporary human behaviour not only threatens our biome, but also generates the possibility for a renewal of that same biome. We invite curators, festival & gallery directors to accompany UMA in asking the audience to reflect on what this installation might mean. (Image below not accurate, but included to suggest possibilities).
So this small garden of plants interspersed by 12 frames in portrait aspect ratio, with images of imaginary plants growing within the frames demonstrates an intention to enforce the idea that artists add to human culture, just as human culture can itself add to our biome in a sustainable as opposed to destructive way. 
Most of the frames will face to the front of the installation with some facing to the back and to the sides – so that as the audience circle’s the work they see it from all sides.* The frames are self-illuminated; the soundscape will be generated by the frames themselves each carrying a part of the overall soundtrack comprised of the sound of water and soothing background elements such as wind chimes (the exhibition location will be able to set the overall sound level so that it does not interfere with other artworks nearby). UMA would prefer this work to be exhibited in its own space – but we can see how it could be a centrepiece in larger gallery. What we offer below are current tests of UMA’s visual experiments to align our thinking such that curators may join in with our visual musings. (Video tests below, each with different temporary soundtracks).
Technical Details for the 2.75 meter square installation
The overall structure will have an ’inner tank’ the depth of which is 25cm deep – but the surrounding sides that the audience will see will be 120cm at the front, with each side rising to 150 cm at the back. The ‘Garden’ element will be filled with lightweight wood chips in the ‘upper tank’ for the frames and plants to sit in**. Underneath this at a depth of 5cm, 12v DC cables run from 3 x 5 outlet dc chargers). The overall structure will require power into the unit and 3 small spotlights (or similar) with gobos on them to cut-up the light, will be suspended above ‘the garden’ – and these will produce a dappled light. Light levels should be low nearby. * Nb there is an argument for one or two ten inch or 5 inch frames to vary the sizes ** UMA and the exhibition directors can debate whether we use plastic or real plants if the real plants were given the correct nutritious light were available at night – or if we use real plants then these can be rotated in use in the installation with some plants spending the day outside and swapped in to the installation to give other plants a break. |
The 2nd Rationale for the Installation: GARDEN
To the left an earlier video iteration to show the working process The Dimensions of Garden were 275cm wide x 275cm long x 120cm high at the front (think of that as basically a square area you look over) where the part of the installation furthest away from the initial viewing position will be 150cm high – such that the work has a slight incline down to the front. The audience will be able to move around the whole looking in from every side. (Video to the left not accurate, but suggests possibilities). 
United Media Artists, propose for the ECC in Palazzo Mora, an installation of video works presented on transparent acrylic screens called Garden (i). For this UMA’s artists have created a set of works with the common theme of not only new forms of growth - but also failing growth for a speculative herbarium of “uber-plants,” suggesting various processes of growth, degeneration, and transformation relating to future-past ecological and psychic conditions. The ‘Garden’ in this installation (the arabic word for Paradise) relates to the inextricable continuum of humans with our ”natural” environment where posthumanism critiques the anthropocentric worldview and redefines the concepts of agency, morality and ethics where ecological and technological concerns clash. The bed of charred black charcoal chips which the screens are embedded in suggests on the one hand a potential termination of life on earth but at the same time the potential cycle of regeneration: cycles that also permeate the human psyche. Garden, named to question what the installation actually is and what it represents, creates an agile new context for these issues, while at the same time embracing the artist’s complex and circuitous presence. We intend to provoke a thoughtful response.
Nature has served as a fundamental and enduring subject for artists throughout history, both as a source of inspiration, a challenge to technique and a source of symbolic meaning embodying themes like the cyclical stages of growth, decay, and rebirth. Referentially, UMA notes Nam June Paik’s TV Garden (1974), a seminal media installation that fused technology and organic nature, as well as recognizing previous artists such as Hilma af Klint who fused and evolved their professional studies of botany into annotations and abstractions of the human psyche via surreal gestures. We echo these contradictions here with an overgrowth of fabric vines - necessarily being hand made of a natural substance (in this case wool to add animals to our thesis) - to raise the attendant questions. In the age of fully digital and AI infused creation, UMA’s interpretations of the nature of “nature” will produce provocative metaphors for the human experience by simply incorporating technology into our ‘natural’ works in order to express the philosophy of posthumanism - which in itself questions humanity’s dominance of the earth. 
On approaching the exhibition space you hear a very quiet choral sound drifting towards you to lead you in (ii) which tells you something ‘special’ is happening within the next room. On entering you see a 2.75 x 2.75m sculptural vitrine, waist height (iii) with a solid base, appearing like a hybrid between a raised garden and a museum display box with a open canopy, reflecting the garden-display bed below in mylar reflective material . The entire object is covered by artificial woven vines - made of dark green, dark amber and dark maroon felt, like a web draped over by artificial woven vines. This growth indicates that perhaps in the future, when this vitrine may have been made, nature has already begun to overgrow it and, at the same time, suggesting that this installation was made in the past (iv). All of this initially glimpsed In reflection reflected in a mylar canopy (v as well as the audience as they approach and look into it.
As you arrive at the work and lean over to see on the surface of the vitrine a set of 5 inch, 7 inch and 12 inch acrylic screens, spaced in rows of 5 screens some in portrait aspect ratio some in landscape aspect ratio where the images depict “uber-plants” - imagined distortions of natural organic plants and systems, exhibited as if precious museum objects or botanical specimens - which refers to a time when many will be lost. Each frame plays a video of the artists participating in the project which itself is a kind of interpretation or notion of the garden and it's relationship to ecologies. Next to each frame are text tags with imaginary latin names with dates of appearance or extinction on earth. This is a cataloguing gesture which indicates the end of the Enlightenment project, itself giving birth to techno futurism, which not only catalogues but destroys what it lists. Individually each of the video frame works employ qualities of aesthetics, humour, irony, investigation and transformation. Collectively, the flickering collage of diverse perspectives presents a contemporaneous snapshot of digital artists’ responses to the elemental, addressing the innate state of thinking beings’ existence in a setting where they are both caretakers and destroyers. |
Notes
(i) The Arabic word for garden is حديقة (ḥadīqa). Other words for garden include janna (janna), which can refer to a paradise garden, and bustān (bustān), which is often used for an orchard or vegetable garden. I think we need keep the name simple Paradisus Paradsus is Latin for Paradise Garden so let’s cut it down - Paradise Garden (Paradise Herbarium – Phantom Flora?). could be mentioned but We need a name that works easily in all languages. This is Chinese: 天堂花園 - Pardusus - like an epiphany…
(ii) The audio components of the installation. will come from a 4-speaker sound system, with speakers being placed beneath the vitrine. The aural mix will be dynamic, ranging from the edge of perception, to a mix of the audio tracks of the videos below - and whispers from memories of both the past and the future.
(iii) 1meter high – rising to 1.5 meters high at the back with a 50cm gap from the wall. Dimensions might be slightly adjusted but with 2.75 x 2.75 x 1.5 m
(iv) These are to be specially commissioned from SEAM, a fibre art collective and each vine will be singularly created and have its own character - as if from nature itself - but due to it being fabricated ‘man’s hand’ can be seen to be everywhere - this is a surrealist gesture to alert the audience to the ideas being played with
(v) In consultation with ECC we are considering creating a reflective overhead mylar canopy where distortions of the screens are reflected, to further ask the audience to consider their part in what is taking place. We’d like to discuss with the ECC the construction of this as we believe this is not a difficult task to execute - its a lightweight frame clad in lightweight mylar which also affords the possibility of hanging artisanal vines from it.
(i) The Arabic word for garden is حديقة (ḥadīqa). Other words for garden include janna (janna), which can refer to a paradise garden, and bustān (bustān), which is often used for an orchard or vegetable garden. I think we need keep the name simple Paradisus Paradsus is Latin for Paradise Garden so let’s cut it down - Paradise Garden (Paradise Herbarium – Phantom Flora?). could be mentioned but We need a name that works easily in all languages. This is Chinese: 天堂花園 - Pardusus - like an epiphany…
(ii) The audio components of the installation. will come from a 4-speaker sound system, with speakers being placed beneath the vitrine. The aural mix will be dynamic, ranging from the edge of perception, to a mix of the audio tracks of the videos below - and whispers from memories of both the past and the future.
(iii) 1meter high – rising to 1.5 meters high at the back with a 50cm gap from the wall. Dimensions might be slightly adjusted but with 2.75 x 2.75 x 1.5 m
(iv) These are to be specially commissioned from SEAM, a fibre art collective and each vine will be singularly created and have its own character - as if from nature itself - but due to it being fabricated ‘man’s hand’ can be seen to be everywhere - this is a surrealist gesture to alert the audience to the ideas being played with
(v) In consultation with ECC we are considering creating a reflective overhead mylar canopy where distortions of the screens are reflected, to further ask the audience to consider their part in what is taking place. We’d like to discuss with the ECC the construction of this as we believe this is not a difficult task to execute - its a lightweight frame clad in lightweight mylar which also affords the possibility of hanging artisanal vines from it.
Examples of Potential Frame Works Below
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Barrier Reef by Terry Flaxton
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