Digital Visions: The Garden.

Abstract

The Garden has a distinct significance for each person, drawing on childhood memories of imagined worlds; a place to escape rooted in many cultures - in our stories, myths and legendsThis exhibition is reflexive and asks questions about the fidelity and permanence of the digital medium and the viewer’s spatiotemporal interactions with the digital visualisation of events. The installation incorporates a short reflective film, shot in the New Forest, complete with associated photographic prints and soundscape. The images explore the destructive processes on trees felled through catastrophic natural phenomena juxtaposed with images of organic decay and decomposition through environmental erosion, fungus and insect attack over time. Perception is challenged, repositioning the viewer to interrogate the different forms of media. The exhibition examines the cinematographic approach to filming in the forest, exploring form and materiality, provoking a dialogue regarding the limitations of a narrative enquiry fixed to a human time scale. How might we approach this anew, what digital filming techniques/processes could be synthesised to explore parallel timescales, synchronising immediate traumatic events with decomposition over a period of years or longer?