By Lisa Dieterle

We live in a digitised world — a construction of the desires and fears of our time. Social media is often a parallel world in which everything seems flawless. Instagram enchants the user and presents life in the perfect way. The interactive moving image work, Garden of Love, shows the contrast of these two worlds by focussing on online love and how it is represented. In this visually layered work by Lisa Dieterle, photometric environmental scans of a garden portray the real world and stand in contrast to the high artifice of image-scraped data from the online world.

Garden of Love’s installation allows for human touch and clumsiness with a virtual garden transposed on a soothing carpet as a parallel for Instagram’s constructs of control and desire — attracting us with a perfect, loving world: beautiful and exciting.

Social media has often a one sided perspective. The garden is a representation of love and stands for coexistence: a planned space with ideal setting for social or solitary human life. The installation is a meeting place and a hiding place in which to be both social and anti-social — a place where you can connect with others or hide from the crowd. The work critically questions social media and its constant overload of imagery as with Instagram’s paradigms. But what do we mean by paradigms? In short: meta current moods. They are not about truth they are about feelings. When a new paradigm emerges, it reframes the present, but does not replace the facts. How does social media feel and what's love got to do with it? How can we equalise the consequences of disruption in social media? The focus of this research is on the experience of watching the work and the creation of a conscious experience where materiality and construction are highlighted.

[1] Steyerl Hito (2012) The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation. The Wretched of the Screen 160.

[2] Steyerl Hito (2017) Digital Debris. Available from https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3501-digital-debris (accessed 20 Feb 2021).

[3] The New York Times Company (2021) Framing Britney Spears.

[4] VPRO Tegenlicht (2021) Alleen verbonden.

[5] Cornel Maarten (2021) Talk with on gardens etc.

[6] Gropius Bau (2019) Garden of Earthly Delights.

[7] Randall Frederika (2002), A Secret Garden. Available from https://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/16/travel/day-trip-a-secret-garden.html (accessed 25 Mar 2021).

3d environment scan; point cloud to set the environment where the viewer walks through

The Garden of Ninfa in Italy is representing Love. The garden has been called the world's most romantic garden, also because of its location: it is "a romantic oasis of fertility in the midst of the heavily-industrialised Pontine Plain to the South East of Rome" [1]. Its name is inspired by ancient legends that nymphs dwelled in the trees and water, and there are ruins of an ancient temple dedicated to the same creatures.

Camera is sight of human ad navigates through the garden. A combination of scraped images of garden elements and couples. A covered disturbing version of the love song I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston narrates through the video.

Cover of the Song I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston

Agapanthus Africanus as a symbol of love. It can also symbolise fertility, purity and beauty. The genus name was derived from the Greek words “agape” (“love”) and “anthos” (“flower”), translating as the “flower of love” or “lovely flower”.