Jardin stimulé
Stimulated Garden
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It is becoming increasingly clear that evolution takes place at the very core of nature, and not in its representation. Thus, the artifact tends to become a transformation of the receiver, rather than the emitter, of information. The subject matter of art is not the cause, but its effect. Information is transformed chemically on being received in the body, by modification of its physiological and psychological impact. With the rewriting of the genome, a defoliant or a disease becomes inoperative upon encountering a given plant. The unhappy circumstances of human life lose their force in a mind treated with antidepressants. Time and youth are extended in a body fortified with hormones, and endurance and performance improve. Thus, art takes the form of a stimulation or a physiological prosthetics acting directly on the organism and controlling the receipt of information. Through the hormonal system and the genes, metabolism becomes the subject of art, by stimulation, by doping, by chemical rewriting, by the emission of information about the body itself, determining physical or psychological reactions.
The stimulated garden proposed for the gardens of the Villa Medici develops the likely scenario of gardening as chemical stimulation emitted directly onto plants and human beings. Two approaches are used jointly, the one relating to plants and the other to humans. On the one hand, the problem of ageing of the plant population, which will require the hundred-year-old umbrella pines and evergreen oaks to be cut down in the near future, is dealt with by the injection of hormones, DHEA ( dehydroepiandrosterone ) and EPO ( erythropoietin ), based on a modern scenario associated with the new biological permeability among the vegetable, animal and human kingdoms. The method used is intended to extend the time that the garden remains in an ideal state, as a representation of the world, by chemical means having cultural effects on the landscape. Second, the visitor's psychological pleasure at being in the garden is increased by superdetermining the emitted information associated with the place. Redundantly, a musical transcription of the garden, to be taken as a sort of psychological quintessence of its nature, is played directly into the visitor's ears. Audio headsets mounted around the garden at ground level offer Bells through the leaves, the first piece in Book II of Claude Debussy's Images pour piano, which visitors can assimilate on the spot as a slightly more powerful dose of the psychological pleasure of living in the garden.
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Jardin stimulé
Installation
Villa Medicis - Académie de France in Rome, Italy, June 23 to
September 24, 2000
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Décosterd & Rahm, associés