The Garden of Vision
The Garden of Vision is a video projection made up of images, sounds, videos and music, inspired by the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World[1] and assumed to have been constructed in the sixth century B.C. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were characterized as an extraordinary accomplishment of engineering, featuring outstanding constructions from the classical era involving a climbing series of tiered gardens, like a huge green mountain made of bricks. Among the Seven Wonders, only the location of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon has never been found; therefore, the existence of them is debated.
Despite the fact that some scholars think that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon might have been a poetic creation instead of an actual construction, according to some ancient writings, they were built by King Nebuchadnezzar II[2] for his wife, Queen Amytis, who had a passion for mountainous surroundings and missed the green foothills of her homeland (Finkel, 1988, p.41-43). Finkel notes that Philo of Byzantium’s description of Babylon’s celebrated gardens is a considerable transcript: “The Hanging Garden [is so-called because it] has plants cultivated at a height above ground level, and the roots of the trees are embedded in an upper terrace rather than in the earth. This is the technique of its construction. The whole mass is supported on stone columns, so that the entire underlying space is occupied by carved column bases” (p. 45). Nevertheless, Dalley (2013), who has been studying the Hanging Gardens and ancient manuscripts, believes that the Hanging Gardens were never built in Babylon and that is why there are no traces of them. Dalley (2013) asserts that King Nebuchadnezzar II did not construct the gardens and that the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, was the real builder of them. According to Dalley (2013), the Hanging Gardens were constructed in Nineveh[3], which was the capital of the Assyrian empire and was located 300 miles to the north of Babylon.
The Garden of Vision is a representation of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, illustrating a garden made many years ago whose location has never been discovered. Since the actual location of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon is uncertain, The Garden of Vision will be presented on a website to provide a verifiable URL which can be considered the real location of this garden. The objective of this work is to explore a paradox of the Internet, which has been considered a placeless space and yet has the capacity for location awareness. Richard Rogers studies web epistemology, the main claim of which is that the web is a knowledge culture distinct from another media, and he explains that web software identifies users’ geographical locations and functions based on this information. Although the web’s location awareness can connect net users with their native languages or local advertisements, Rogers (2013) indicates, “the search engine’s IP-to-geolocation handling also may be described as the software-enabled demise of cyberspace as placeless space” (p. 40). Rogers argues that the online realm has previously been portrayed as placeless; now, the feature of location awareness disrupts the notion of cyberspace. Therefore, because of the web’s location awareness, presenting The Garden of Vision online can provide an actual online [4] and offline location for this artwork.
The Garden of Vision is also inspired by Robert Lepage’s installation art project titled Image Mills. Lepage’s project is an architectural projection which tells the history of Quebec City in a forty-minute audiovisual montage, projected onto eighty-one grain silos of the old port to celebrate the city’s 400th anniversary. Lepage uses the massive concrete configuration — 30 meters high and 600 meters long, with 27 video projectors and 300 speakers — to perform an impressionistic representation of the city’s 400 years of history in images, light and sound. By projecting archival films and photographs onto a fresco-like structure, this technological masterpiece not only tells us the story of Quebec City but also masterfully revives part of the archival records and recreates a significant historical work of art. Because of the use of new technology, Lepage’s presentation may have more of an effect on a viewer in comparison to watching the same materials on television or reading about it. Approximately five thousand people could view this work in the port, which would not be possible in a movie theater or an art gallery.
The Garden of Vision is a video projection consisting of a combination of photographs that I took of Persian monuments and statues, images of ancient Persian miniatures, videos, sounds and music. I used software — including After Effects, Soundtrack Pro, Photoshop, and Final Cut Pro — to create multiple layers to make a video projection that depicts the story of an imaginary ancient garden which is available online to explore. By using digital technology to illustrate this story and employing new media to present it, The Garden of Vision attempts to engage audiences with the story using a digital platform, currently one of the most widely accessible and appealing modes of presentation available. In an era when the Internet has become the Internet of things, cell phones are now small computers designated as our digital personal assistants, and most of our activities are impossible without the Internet, an online garden is ironically both enticing and essential.
The existence of the Hanging Gardens has sometimes been doubted; consequently, this artwork attempts to create an illusion of primeval gardens to demonstrate the existence of doubt throughout the story. Merleau-Ponty (1962) indicates, “Doubt, even when generalized, is not the abolition of my thought, it is merely a pseudo-nothingness, for I cannot extricate myself from being; my act of doubting itself creates the possibility of certainty and is there for me, it occupies me, I am committed to it, and I cannot pretend to be nothing at the time I execute it” (p. 355). This artwork portrays the essence of a primeval garden based on the doubtful and mythical story of the Hanging Gardens to revive the story and to invite the audience to experience the artist’s perception and depiction of this story from a postmodern point of view. Furthermore, this work seeks to use visual objects that are individually known by the audience and juxtapose them in an unknown and surreal scene to highlight the doubtfulness of the story and to provoke viewers’ perceptions. According to Merleau-Ponty (1962), “Now there is indeed one human act which at one stroke cuts through all possible doubts to stand in the full light of truth: this act is perception, in the wide sense of knowledge of existences” (p.36). This way individuals can seek their own truth based on their perception.
The Garden of Vision can be considered art practice-based research since it attempts to visually reconstruct the existing narrative of the ancient gardens to remind individuals of the story and to create a visual description of the narrative. Sullivan (2005) claims that studio-based research re-constructs the existing information and its objective is to alter the way that we understand or decode things. Sullivan (2005) notes, “art practice is a creative and critical form of human engagement that can be conceptualized as research” (p. 19). In addition, Marshall (2007) believes that art as research alters our conception of research, and she indicates, “The notion that art practice is research provides a fresh take on artmaking. This approach modifies conventional notions of art practice as self-expression or object making to cast it primarily as an exercise in knowledge construction: a process of coming to know” (p. 24). Art as research establishes a new method by which to understand the art itself and increases learning.
References
Dalley, S. (2013). The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An elusive world wonder
traced. OUP Oxford.
Finkel, Irving (1988). "The Hanging Gardens of Babylon". In Clayton, Peter; Price, Martin. The
Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. New York: Routledge.
Mark, J.J. (2010). Ancient History Encyclopedia, Nebuchadnezzar II. Retrieved from
http://www.ancient.eu/Nebuchadnezzar_II/
Marshall, J. (2007). Image as insight: Visual images in practice-based research. Studies in Art
Education, 49(1), 23-41.
Mrleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge.
Sullivan, G. (2005). Art practice as research: Inquiry in the visual Arts. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage.
Rogers, R. (2013). Digital methods. MIT press.
[1] The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World are the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria.
[2] According to Mark (2010), King Nebuchadnezzar II was the king of primeval Babylon (634-562 BCE).
[3] Nineveh was an ancient Assyrian city located in northern Iraq.
[4] The URL link of the page that the artwork is presented on is the online address of the work.
The Garden of Vision is a video projection made up of images, sounds, videos and music, inspired by the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World[1] and assumed to have been constructed in the sixth century B.C. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were characterized as an extraordinary accomplishment of engineering, featuring outstanding constructions from the classical era involving a climbing series of tiered gardens, like a huge green mountain made of bricks. Among the Seven Wonders, only the location of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon has never been found; therefore, the existence of them is debated.
Despite the fact that some scholars think that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon might have been a poetic creation instead of an actual construction, according to some ancient writings, they were built by King Nebuchadnezzar II[2] for his wife, Queen Amytis, who had a passion for mountainous surroundings and missed the green foothills of her homeland (Finkel, 1988, p.41-43). Finkel notes that Philo of Byzantium’s description of Babylon’s celebrated gardens is a considerable transcript: “The Hanging Garden [is so-called because it] has plants cultivated at a height above ground level, and the roots of the trees are embedded in an upper terrace rather than in the earth. This is the technique of its construction. The whole mass is supported on stone columns, so that the entire underlying space is occupied by carved column bases” (p. 45). Nevertheless, Dalley (2013), who has been studying the Hanging Gardens and ancient manuscripts, believes that the Hanging Gardens were never built in Babylon and that is why there are no traces of them. Dalley (2013) asserts that King Nebuchadnezzar II did not construct the gardens and that the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, was the real builder of them. According to Dalley (2013), the Hanging Gardens were constructed in Nineveh[3], which was the capital of the Assyrian empire and was located 300 miles to the north of Babylon.
The Garden of Vision is a representation of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, illustrating a garden made many years ago whose location has never been discovered. Since the actual location of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon is uncertain, The Garden of Vision will be presented on a website to provide a verifiable URL which can be considered the real location of this garden. The objective of this work is to explore a paradox of the Internet, which has been considered a placeless space and yet has the capacity for location awareness. Richard Rogers studies web epistemology, the main claim of which is that the web is a knowledge culture distinct from another media, and he explains that web software identifies users’ geographical locations and functions based on this information. Although the web’s location awareness can connect net users with their native languages or local advertisements, Rogers (2013) indicates, “the search engine’s IP-to-geolocation handling also may be described as the software-enabled demise of cyberspace as placeless space” (p. 40). Rogers argues that the online realm has previously been portrayed as placeless; now, the feature of location awareness disrupts the notion of cyberspace. Therefore, because of the web’s location awareness, presenting The Garden of Vision online can provide an actual online [4] and offline location for this artwork.
The Garden of Vision is also inspired by Robert Lepage’s installation art project titled Image Mills. Lepage’s project is an architectural projection which tells the history of Quebec City in a forty-minute audiovisual montage, projected onto eighty-one grain silos of the old port to celebrate the city’s 400th anniversary. Lepage uses the massive concrete configuration — 30 meters high and 600 meters long, with 27 video projectors and 300 speakers — to perform an impressionistic representation of the city’s 400 years of history in images, light and sound. By projecting archival films and photographs onto a fresco-like structure, this technological masterpiece not only tells us the story of Quebec City but also masterfully revives part of the archival records and recreates a significant historical work of art. Because of the use of new technology, Lepage’s presentation may have more of an effect on a viewer in comparison to watching the same materials on television or reading about it. Approximately five thousand people could view this work in the port, which would not be possible in a movie theater or an art gallery.
The Garden of Vision is a video projection consisting of a combination of photographs that I took of Persian monuments and statues, images of ancient Persian miniatures, videos, sounds and music. I used software — including After Effects, Soundtrack Pro, Photoshop, and Final Cut Pro — to create multiple layers to make a video projection that depicts the story of an imaginary ancient garden which is available online to explore. By using digital technology to illustrate this story and employing new media to present it, The Garden of Vision attempts to engage audiences with the story using a digital platform, currently one of the most widely accessible and appealing modes of presentation available. In an era when the Internet has become the Internet of things, cell phones are now small computers designated as our digital personal assistants, and most of our activities are impossible without the Internet, an online garden is ironically both enticing and essential.
The existence of the Hanging Gardens has sometimes been doubted; consequently, this artwork attempts to create an illusion of primeval gardens to demonstrate the existence of doubt throughout the story. Merleau-Ponty (1962) indicates, “Doubt, even when generalized, is not the abolition of my thought, it is merely a pseudo-nothingness, for I cannot extricate myself from being; my act of doubting itself creates the possibility of certainty and is there for me, it occupies me, I am committed to it, and I cannot pretend to be nothing at the time I execute it” (p. 355). This artwork portrays the essence of a primeval garden based on the doubtful and mythical story of the Hanging Gardens to revive the story and to invite the audience to experience the artist’s perception and depiction of this story from a postmodern point of view. Furthermore, this work seeks to use visual objects that are individually known by the audience and juxtapose them in an unknown and surreal scene to highlight the doubtfulness of the story and to provoke viewers’ perceptions. According to Merleau-Ponty (1962), “Now there is indeed one human act which at one stroke cuts through all possible doubts to stand in the full light of truth: this act is perception, in the wide sense of knowledge of existences” (p.36). This way individuals can seek their own truth based on their perception.
The Garden of Vision can be considered art practice-based research since it attempts to visually reconstruct the existing narrative of the ancient gardens to remind individuals of the story and to create a visual description of the narrative. Sullivan (2005) claims that studio-based research re-constructs the existing information and its objective is to alter the way that we understand or decode things. Sullivan (2005) notes, “art practice is a creative and critical form of human engagement that can be conceptualized as research” (p. 19). In addition, Marshall (2007) believes that art as research alters our conception of research, and she indicates, “The notion that art practice is research provides a fresh take on artmaking. This approach modifies conventional notions of art practice as self-expression or object making to cast it primarily as an exercise in knowledge construction: a process of coming to know” (p. 24). Art as research establishes a new method by which to understand the art itself and increases learning.
References
Dalley, S. (2013). The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An elusive world wonder
traced. OUP Oxford.
Finkel, Irving (1988). "The Hanging Gardens of Babylon". In Clayton, Peter; Price, Martin. The
Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. New York: Routledge.
Mark, J.J. (2010). Ancient History Encyclopedia, Nebuchadnezzar II. Retrieved from
http://www.ancient.eu/Nebuchadnezzar_II/
Marshall, J. (2007). Image as insight: Visual images in practice-based research. Studies in Art
Education, 49(1), 23-41.
Mrleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge.
Sullivan, G. (2005). Art practice as research: Inquiry in the visual Arts. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage.
Rogers, R. (2013). Digital methods. MIT press.
[1] The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World are the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria.
[2] According to Mark (2010), King Nebuchadnezzar II was the king of primeval Babylon (634-562 BCE).
[3] Nineveh was an ancient Assyrian city located in northern Iraq.
[4] The URL link of the page that the artwork is presented on is the online address of the work.