Hanging "Gardens" of Babylon
spatial ambient installation
2022
The ambient Hanging "Gardens" of Babylon takes on an immersive approach to exploring the correlation between virtual mythological and technological space. It deals with the concept of a digitally simulated landscape and the role of organic nature within the context of contemporary "screen-filled" everyday life. It searches for the characteristics necessary for a pictorial representation of an architectural or natural space to contain a virtual trait.
The motif of the Tower of Babel and its Hanging Gardens was chosen for several reasons. The first is the fact that the biblical story of the construction of the Tower is proof that man has always wanted to enter the immaterial layer of reality, and throughout history devises various ways to make it happen. As the original Bible story tells, it once represented that way building a tower heigh enough to reach Paradise, through which man could "touch" God, thus materializing the immaterial, and dematerializing himself. The today’s method for attempting to cure the same human fate is a digitized lifestyle in constant contact with technology, which is increasingly trying to separate us from one's own physicality; through Metaverse, cryonics, data trafficking, and finally speculatively uploading one's own identity to the Cloud, thus transporting oneself into complete immateriality and transcending mortality.
The second reason is the fact that the Hanging Gardens, conditionally speaking, are set by the slopes of the Tower, are on the globally accepted list of the Seven Wonders of the World. There's a certain absurdity to this, since modern human civilization on a collective level doesn’t really know what the Tower looked like and if it even existed. The reason for this is the great amount of completely different pictorial interpretations that have been generated through the historical art periods, and which together do not offer any consensus in proving such a motive existed in physical reality. This gives the Tower and its Hanging Gardens a virtual trait, and through a hundred different pictorial representations through the ages, they actually begin to exist as ephemeral, non-physical and virtual space - only as a mere illusion.
view of the installation at the Klub Kocka Gallery, Split, Croatia
photos by Glorija Lizde
