The Luckless Garden

Where has Eden Gone?

Somewhere in Eden, after all this time the luckless garden? Somewhere in Eden, after all this time,
Does there still stand, like a city in ruins,
Forsaken, doomed to slow decay,
The failed garden?14

The Luckless Garden

FIG. 4: Museon. 2012. Plastiglomerate. Https://Www.Museon.Nl/Nl/Globeitem/Plastiglomeraat.

Stories from the pioneering age made it seem as if it was humanity’s destiny to endlessly plunder the natural environment, continually converting animals, plants, and rocks into extensions of ourselves. In retrospect, these stories, which center in the West on the previously addressed monotheistic conceit that humanity is the main benefactor off all of God’s creation, were a rallying cry for nomadic tribes. Said tribes have however become, for the most part, sedentary. No longer nomadic. Nonetheless, as often happens in cultural evolution, information continues to flow long after it is useful. This data lag has had a profound effect on the way humans have lived and cultivated their environments.

Today, as a global population, we produce approximately 1.3 billion tons of municipal solid waste per year, waste which English Literature professor Brian Thill claims,

‘lays thick blankets of our chemical age across the entire planet, into every rocky outcropping, to the bottom of every sea’s floor, nestling in the trees and bogs and pools of the world’14
The damage being done to our planet by the products, processes, and values generated by human design is increasingly visible and measurable. Plastiglomerate for example—a new rock conglomerate formed of natural debris mixed in with molten plastic—provides tangible proof of our poor past design decisions, the likes of which are literally preserved within the very strata of the planet.

FIG. 4: Patricia Corcoran, Kelly Jazvac, and Kelly Wood. 2012. Plastiglomerate Sample. Http://Www.Kellyjazvac.Com/Stones/Stones.Html. Ready Made, Collected by geologist Patricia Corcoran and sculptor Kelly Jazvac at Kamilo Beach, Hawai’i, 2012. Photo: Kelly Wood.

We have come so far from the original purity of the Garden. Could a place like Eden ever exist again?

Geologically and ecologically, humans have completely influenced the planet. The air that we breathe and every millimeter of terra have been influenced by us.

In almost ironic opposition however, the theme of Adam and Eve’s living in nature as living in an uncultivated forest recall of the myth of the ‘good savage’, of man’s innocent existence before civilization corrupted him through economy and politics. This is a recurring trope that seems to re-emerge regularly, upheld through the works of the philosophers, from Rousseau to Thoreau’s Walden, John Muir, on to the neo-primitivist and anarchist hypotheses of John Zerzan and into artistic movements such as the Romantic Movement and the ‘Plein Air’ movement of the impressionists, to name a few.

All seem to recall this long lost, better existence before society’s (wanted or not) rejection of a humble life in the natural world for the unnecessary extravagances of the capitalist system. The human drive for Culture supposedly emerged from Nature but these two constructs embody contradictory notions: nature equals chaos whereas culture equals order. Culture is both literally and metaphorically a step ahead of nature, and yet the human being—the romantic human being—seeks to return to it from time to time.

14      Rousseau, Ina. 2020. “Eden.” Poetry Magazine. 2020. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49319/eden-56d22b4995df2.
15      Twemlow, Dr. Alice. 2019. “Design and the Deep Future, 2019-2020 - Studiegids - Universiteit Leiden.” Universiteitleiden.Nl. 2019. https://studiegids.universiteitleiden.nl/courses/97011/design-and-the-deep-future.

‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish?’16’

Contemporary Edens

'Nature coud be a Garden'17

This yearning to return to Nature is present across all mediums, physical to virtual.

However, these are far from being sanctuaries of nature’s agency where the natural world reigns freely. These are human-tailored landscapes which have been designed to serve specific needs. In the following section, we will explore different examples of Gardens that have emerged in response to workplace anxieties.

Depictions of the Garden of Eden typically chose to represent the garden without walls. However, Eden, like most gardens, is actually an enclosed space, a protected space that separates Adam and Eve from the dangers of the wilderness.18 So, if taken from this perspective, it could be argued that there are many Eden-isms in the world today.

This encompasses the millions of private, public and botanical varieties of gardens around the world. As Mosser and Teyssot propose: ‘nostalgia for the Garden of Eden has provided garden designers throughout history with a model of perfection to aspire to’ and that garden enthusiasts seem ‘devoted to creating the impossible’19. These gardens have always been designed for the purpose of escaping reality, to emulate feelings of perfect harmony with nature.

The Public Park

Public parks serve as a perfect example of this. They became open to the public during the Industrial Revolution, providing a space for citizens to occasionally seek refuge from the bad conditions that the Industrial Revolution created.20

‘In the 19th-century, parks’ popularity pivoted on the concept of nature as a repository of purity, simplicity, harmony, and morality – rendering it an ideal foil for the perceived degradation, complexity, tension, and corruption of city life. Such a sentiment drew on Romantic sensibilities that bemoaned the loss of untamed land and viewed nature as a venue for aesthetic rapture and spiritual rejuvenation.’5

They served as paradises of sorts, emerging from the smog created by machinery.

But what then has become of Eden’s Garden/Work dyad?

Gardens have always been deemed places for relief and restoration—but would take centuries before they would become accessible to lower classes. Gardens became symbols of success and rewards for work—holiday destinations and displays of wealth—rather than a place where work takes place.

The VR Studio

In April of 2019, my classmate Clara Lezla and I approached Canadian musician, visual artist, and web designer Paul Marcano as part of our research for a project about a virtual reality social platform called VR chat. As a free and open source platform, users are able to build and upload their own worlds to VR chat’s servers for anyone to use. In a sense it is free, virtual real estate. Due to the fact that there is little to no content moderation on the platform, creative liberty is practically limitless.

The reason why Paul is relevant to this thesis is because he has built multiple studios for himself within VR chat. He has several locations where he can virtually sculpt, design and record music. One of the studio spaces that he showed us was an office built out of wood with large floor to ceiling windows, flooded with light.

Outside of the window lay a beautiful lake surrounded by a vibrant green pine forest. ‘I couldn’t afford waterfront property’, he told us. So he decided to 3-D scan a real lakeside and digitally build his office upon it. VR sets have cameras on them which can allow the user to see their real hands interacting with their physical keyboard and computer screens inside of the virtual space, thus serving as an element which grounds the user back into ‘reality’ through the means of their working tools. Therefore, these vibrant natural surroundings technically serve as complex and glorified computer desktop background.

It truly was a relaxing environment, guaranteed to stay sunny and green forever. You could walk around in the space and practically feel like you were really there, minus the corresponding senses of touch, smell and taste.

As we sat chatting on his patio, Paul admitted to spending a lot of his time working in this space.

This curious act is as much an act of revolt as it is an act of quiet desperation. Anyone with VR equipment can virtually build the natural spaces for themselves that have no longer have access to. The platform is full of them. You can technically take a real plot of land and make it your own in a virtual space. But this also neglects the real life issue of land’s deep entanglement with property management. It is essentially an act of confining oneself more in order to experience the freedom that nature grants.

It seems that as physical nature fades away, virtual nature grows better, more realistic and beautiful—stronger. Could we ever adapt to the exchange of real nature for a hyper-real substitute?

The truth is that today, only a fraction of inhabitants of cities have the privilege of physically interacting with nature. Proof of public desires to garden lie in the recent and immense boom in gardening games, trendy proliferation of Instagram interiors and the growth of the legally dubious practice of ‘Guerilla Gardening’.

There seems, for the most part, to be a general disconnect between physicality of the worker and their space.

16      Eliot, T.S. 1922. The Waste Land. Open Road Media 2018.
17      Maria Paula Diogo. 2019. Gardens and Human Agency in the Anthropocene. Routledge.
18      Johnson P, 2012, The Eden Project: gardens, utopia and heterotopia found on heterotopiastudies.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/4.2-The-Eden-Project-pdf.pdf
19      Wilson, Edward O. 2003. Biophilia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

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