Final presentation: Ken Goldberg's The TeleGarden

Ken Goldberg, The TeleGarden, 1995

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Background:

•      The TeleGarden went online in June 1995 until August 2004.

•      In its first year, over 10000 members helped cultivate.

•      Anyone can view the garden as a guest.

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Description:

•      Telepresence installation art

•      Web users are allowed to view, interact with a remote garden filled with living plants. It has a live camera on it.

•      Members can plant, water, and monitor the progress of seedlings through the tender movements of an industrial robot arm.

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Interface of TeleGarden:

•      Users are prepared to wait, it takes awhile to plant a seed or water a flower. And it will certainly take time for the plant to grow.

•      Ken Goldberg: "You plant a seed and nothing happens. You have to come back, and over a period of weeks you get the reward of that activity.”

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The category of TeleGarden: Telepresence

•      Unique form of human-computer interaction

•      Allows the remote user to feel as if they were present, to give the appearance of being present other than their true location.

•      eg. Videoconferencing, The TeleGarden

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Quotes:

•      "Virtual Community in a Telepresence Environment,"

--Margaret L. McLaughlin, Kerry K. Osborne, and Nicole B. Ellison, in S. Jones (Ed.), Virtual Culture (pp. 146-168). London: Sage Publication, Inc. 1997.

 

•      ``For its engaging use of the Web, bringing together an international group of strangers to explore and nourish nature in sharing a common garden, the First Prize goes to the Telegarden as a powerful metaphor for virtual communities.''

-- Jury, Festival of Independent Visual Arts (FIVA), 1995.

 

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Own opinion:

•      TeleGarden hooked up with the Internet and individual.
-> Made impossible to possible. Users just simply click the buttons on Internet, then they grow a real plant in California.

•      The Telegarden was a fusion between old technology (agriculture) and new technology (the Internet).
-> An interaction between art, nature and technology .
Use technology to contribute in nature.

•      Chat room can gather thousands of users from all over the world.
-> Form online community, shorten the distance between users.