In order to set up Secret Garden project, first I looked for gardens all around Venice.
For an entire month I was monitoring all kind of people’s experiences inside the garden (the public ones) after while I was trying to get more feelings from that kind of secret gardens behind closed doors!
Since I found a nice rounded window on the wall of one abandoned garden.
For his peculiarity this last was one of the few windows I never saw and I am sure, not by chance, following his shape, someone painted it with an eye!
From that moment I started working with the idea to break the wall of secret through a simply glance!
How you can see from the picture below the final prototype was an optical box where one hole was inviting to look inside.
The prototype was also installed in one photography studio.
For this reason I menaged the atmophere just using a pair of lamps covered with a blue filter.
One lamp was ponting the back side of the box, the other one was useful to make more bright the viewer’s face.
The typical interaction
Almost the all project works with the idea of illusion.
What happens to the viewer has to be a way to catch a glipse of something. First of all a glimpse of the secret garden then…
A ghost? A monster? A fantastic object? The mirror of themselves? Let’s see…
What about the vision inside the box
What about the viewer’s behaviour
Through the window you can see the mirror of yoursef afterwhile, detecting your movements, the web cam gives to you the possibility to play with a “wind flower”, but…
if you are looking too much closer…
a garden monster appears…
Pepper’s ghost helped a lot in developing this project.
Pepper’s ghost is an optical effect which produces a shifting scene of real things, illusions, imaginary fancies and deceptions.
A simple way to build Pepper’s ghost is using simple materials like a wooden black box and a sheet of plexiglas (into the box at a 45-degree angle).
But, in setting up a Pepper’s illusion, I understood that the lighting requires experimentation and adjustment.
What about the Pepper’s ghost illusion
What about all components to manage an experience like this
The real installation could have some different applications:
obviously the all components are different in dimensions and rather than a garden image this last could be a real one.
For example the sheet of glass has to be bigger and the image has to come from a projector rather than from a screen.
The secret garden project is also quite flexible to be installed in one window shop or in a contex like a museum.