The Garden of Error and Decay
- The Garden of Error and Decay
Click for larger view
View full resolution
The Garden of Error and Decay. © 2011 Michael Bielicky and Kamila B. Richter.
The Garden of Error and Decay is a poetic visualization of real-time world catastrophes. It reflects on the network media reality of the 21st century through a continuous story of current world disasters, expressed by animated pictograms. Every time a disaster-related topic is discussed on Twitter, a new animation appears. Stock exchange information also influences the storytelling. Users interacting with the Garden have the opportunity to either eliminate or multiply the disaster scenes with a shooting device. However, it is not the user who actually has the power to decide in which direction the story develops once an event is triggered. As in real life, everything is driven by stock exchange dynamics; these dictate whether disasters proliferate or die down. This innovative moving image format is not a film, not a game, and not a nonlinear interactive story, but instead a real-time, data-driven narrative [End Page 356]
Click for larger view
View full resolution
The Garden of Error and Decay. © 2011 Michael Bielicky and Kamila B. Richter.
[End Page 357]
Michael Bielicky HFG/ZKM Karlsruhe Karlsruhe, Germany mbielicky@hfg-karlsruhe.de
Michael Bielicky founded and was a professor in the New Media department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Since 2006 he has been a professor of digital media art at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe. Over the past 25 years, he has participated in many international exhibitions, festivals, and symposia. His work uses communication, navigation, video, and VR technologies and, most recently, real-time web-based information technologies. He has exhibited at ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica Linz, High Tech Center Berlin-Babelsberg, Centre Pompidou Paris, MoMA New York, the National Gallery in Prague, Kunsthaus Zürich, and many other venues around the world.
Kamila B. Richter HFG/ZKM Karlsruhe Karlsruhe, Germany Programmer: Dirk Reinbold Sound: Lorenz Schwarz www.gardenoferroranddecay.net
Born in Olomouc, Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Kamila B. Richter earned her MFA (2001) and PhD (2010) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. From 2000 to 2002, she lived in the Republic of South Africa (Durban, Johannesburg) and studied at Technikon Natal, Durban. Richter has participated in many national and international exhibitions since 1999. She now lives in Düsseldorf, Germany, and operates in public spaces through the media of print and interactive urban screenings.
