Magnetic Garden installation

MAGNETIC GARDEN is both a musical earthwork by a selected groups of artists and a public theater-garden wherein the images, plantings, sounds and movements may suggest to the visitor that she or he are creating their own story, script and score as they move through it. Unlike a typical botanical garden, this work will avoid the encyclopedic and didactic and will concentrate on the metaphysical, the fantastic and the everyday. An unique underground sound system will sonically unite the plots designed by each of the individual artists. Here one can imagine areas designed in sand, stone, wood, water, viscous fluids, enterred videos, found objects as well as plantings of every kind from common herbs, to thickets of fruit-bearing vines, mounds of ornamental grasses, stands of bamboo, beds of pumpkins, tunneled- bowered pathways and plants suspended in the air, mazes, tree-houses and designer outhouses. - Whatever the local climate, terrain and native flora suggest.

A computer system for multi-channel random access (digital) audio playback, processing and routing will be the entire musical production center. And the music, primarily heard from underground loudspeakers, may be additionally diffused from speakers placed above-ground in trees, shrubs or in other natural locations such as rock piles, hay-stacks, wells, or mounds of earth etc. Sounds appearing at any speaker location in the garden may be moved to any other in whatever direction and at any audible speed.

The music - a constantly evolving soundscape of the world - while simple in concept is compositionally complex: layered strata of fixed and indeterminate structures in constantly shifting relationships which take place over short and very long periods of time. Governing each layer's fundamental elements of duration, speed, density , timbre loudness, and spacial configurations, there will be two main groups of algorhythms: one which acts on the micro time structures (events measured in seconds to a few minutes) and one which governs the macro time dimension of hours, days, months and years. The latter is to be, in effect, a sonic analogue of biological time.