Type of project
Landscape
Year
2011
Tag
Technology Landscape Light Stone
Status
Contest
Location
Bolzano, Italy
The concept behind this project overturns the idea of the hortus conclusus (walled garden) and tackles, from a formal and substantive point of view, some of the paradoxes we encounter in our daily lives: real vs virtual.
The entire communication and data transfer system belongs to a virtual category, while the work proposed to the inhabitants of the Casanova apartment complex will be anything but nominal.
The main purpose is to take a “potential community” and create an actual community of citizens who share their ethical and social choices in the context of a few significant aesthetic and practical developments.
The inclusion of the word “park” in the competition’s title inspired us to think about living and changing plant matter that is easy to manage and transport: bulbs.
The action kicks off with the delivery of the biodegradable boxes containing dormant bulbs, with instructions “requiring” that the bulbs are planted in the public space set up for this purpose. This space serves as a theatre for the real transformation of the bulbs into plants, monitored by humidity and temperature sensors that generate personalised alerts for the individual planters.
It’s possible to follow the progress of the bulbs throughout the year by means of a graph on the Internet, based on a statistical model of their life cycle.
This virtual state is reintroduced into the real world by lighting a strip of LEDs on the artificial micro-hill with the identical hues and values that can be seen in the web browser.
The reorganisation we mentioned takes place in this interplay between the virtual and the real world, between what is represented and what is perceived, between first-hand and shared experience.
The website will feature a private section for bulb owners; here, they will be able to monitor their plants (temperature, light, soil acidity) and be able to compare them to optimal growth parameters. They will also have access to a bulletin board for notices and announcements: car sharing, home-based daycare, community buying groups, etc.
The public section will show administrative, cultural, social feeds, etc.
The WPtouch plugin will be used to convert the website to make it viewable on mobile devices.
The decision to randomise the distribution of the bulbs among more than 900 homes, allocating non-homogeneous groups of inhabitants to each type of bulb, means that people will be brought together to work in the same place and at the same time, forging micro-communities.
The real accomplishment of the project does not lie in caring for the plants, nor the new urban decoration, but rather in the fact that more than a thousand residents will be kept informed of what is happening in their neighbourhood (informed but not observed), and that this sharing of experiences in the Cloud may, one day, inspire an act of kindness, a gesture of civility in this community, in a unique and unrepeatable way.
The project space is extremely flexible, suitable for a wide range of collective uses, including flea markets, summer yoga sessions, and any temporary installations for other contemporary works of art.
