The Garden of Network Delights

The Garden of Network Delights is a WebGL virtual environment entirely composed of media assets freely obtained from online sources and inspired by the found footage and collage practices of earlier film and video artists. Drawing on the work of Joseph Cornell, Chick Strand, Dara Birnbaum, Emergency Broadcast Network, Arthur Lipsett, Abigail Child, and Bruce Conner, this project celebrates and re-applies the methods of earlier artists who found, borrowed, stole, appropriated, repurposed, recycled, and reused the cultural material available to them. This work is a garden, a junkyard, a garage sale, a thrift store, and an archive all at once. Since every aspect of the work is obtained from a freely available Internet source, it is an environment that borrows from those that borrow, a copy of a copy of a copy. A representation of a mass produced object, which itself represents something beyond itself. Through the proliferation of these media artifacts - 3D models, images, videos, sounds - the meaning is both somehow ever present, residing on the surface, and always one more step away, on a deeper level. Or perhaps it has calcified within the server rooms of some anonymous data center.