The work of Ken Goldberg, most prevalent in the mid- to late-nineties, features an innovative focus upon the interactive potential within the blossoming internet. Namely, his work entitled “Telegarden” (begun in 1995) allowed everyday web users to log on and subscribe to the project, allowing them to participate in the cultivation of plants in a community garden with clicks of the mouse. The alterations of a user manipulated a mechanical arm over the garden, controlling light from a sunlamp and likely other elements that would alter the welfare of a garden, such as water levels. The user could see images of the flowers they were being cultivated in the lab setting of Austria, a location likely far removed from the setting of one’s home. Although Goldberg has allowed the public to know that the robotically-controlled garden does exist and is manipulated as advertised, the website is designed to lead a user to question the reality of his interaction.
Goldberg’s work, particularly Telegarden, is intimately relevant to my relationship to the internet. I’m perturbed and fascinated by the numb, human-free interaction he explores in the project, considering the relevance and actuality of any given press of a button when using certain web devices. In making a garden that lives or dies by the control of electrical impulses from around the globe, I think of the dozens of interactions we make in quotidian internet life that involve clicks and types for the user and relevant emotional or quasi-physical changes in another place. More specifically, I remembered the anxiety I felt when I first typed in my parents’ credit card number as I bought a CD or book off of amazon.com—how was I to know beyond any doubt that my entering numbers into this little box would get money out of their account, put it in another person’s account and eventually get me my purchase? How was I to know that they’d take the right amount, that they wouldn’t clean out the bank account and leave us high and dry? There was no way of knowing, and my first purchases were quietly and sheepishly anxious. If I was given a picture of the “bank account” (even though I knew it was technically digital in its raw form, which is also perturbing), I doubt I would believe it was the one that belonged to my parents for the first few goes. This sort of reality-anxiety faded with time, as it went unshared by other internet users and as I my efforts (typing in the numbers) were rewarded with the promised result (the package arriving in the mail). However, I think that anxiety about our separation from our internet-actions can really be embraced when we never receive that physical proof that we created the changes we “watched happen,” and especially when that interaction involves another living thing. We’re almost always more conscious of our actions on the internet when we’re interacting with another life: for this reason, I also thought about dating sites and AIM as related to this project. We can interact with living things with typed words or even recorded podcasts, and given the expectation of an eventual physicality of our internet interaction (a meeting of a member from a dating site, or even the reference to an internet conversation with a friend), we will treat it like a physical conversation. However, in the event that a human interaction stays on the internet, honesty is never promised. We are all familiar with times in which these interactions are either false or misleading. I can contact someone from match.com via email or Skype or AIM, establish a relationship and eventually meet him, but I can also get a message from a 80 year old man from Iceland who claims to be a 20 year old from Annapolis. Goldberg, I think, monopolized on this life-to-life interaction to test our acceptance of effectuality across the internet: we could make a farce of his project and overwater and under-light a plant to death, essentially laughing over watching it die, but I think a certain humanity makes us think twice about destroying even a remote life—and we debate if we can really have such an effect. Do we cultivate flowers when we talk to a stranger on the internet? Or do we just get verbal and pictorial responses as the only reciprocation to our one-sided interaction?
The work also makes the viewer ponder a great amount about the breadth of the internet’s capability, especially for the early age of its power. It, like much other contemporary art, causes the viewer to question its stance as “art” at all, but I satisfyingly, I think this project is more like ideal art than some others I’ve explored. The message and connection that comes from its intimate, engaging interactivity is tangible; it is a project for its own sake, since it does not require the monetary funds from users that some web-plant-tending business site might require. All in all, the work of art is satisfying and compelling. I’d love to see more of his work, given more time.
The work also makes the viewer ponder a great amount about the breadth of the internet’s capability, especially for the early age of its power. It, like much other contemporary art, causes the viewer to question its stance as “art” at all, but I satisfyingly, I think this project is more like ideal art than some others I’ve explored. The message and connection that comes from its intimate, engaging interactivity is tangible; it is a project for its own sake, since it does not require the monetary funds from users that some web-plant-tending business site might require. All in all, the work of art is satisfying and compelling. I’d love to see more of his work, given more time.
