The Entropy Gardens is a unique artistic VR experience that explores the question: What could be the 'nature' of a post-digital reality and how can we construct a garden from it?
Drawing on and investigating humanity's maybe most archetypical art (garden- making), the project challenges its myths, aesthetics, and modes of perception by combining poetry and generative coding to construct a spellbinding and surreal utopian place. In the form of an open-ended simulation it constructs a hermetic, virtual garden as a poetic ecosystem--a psychic landscape that is foremost a complex audiovisual experience. It admits the visitors into a place that is equally challenging and contemplative (and at times a little weird).
Formally The Entropy Gardens consists of an audiovisual 3D environment that combines "realistic" natural elements with abstract, computational forms. It is populated by data-organisms that resemble plants, animals, or organic matter and evolve through interactions with their environment. It sacrifices faithful realism in order to embrace the digital condition with its glitches, malleability, and potential uncanniness. The whole environment is in a constant flux, ceaselessly negotiating its rules and generating narrative structures. There is also a strong poetic element in the form of haiku-style poems and other poetry, which are integrated both via voice and graphic elements. When a visitor enters the garden (puts on the VR-Headset), the garden starts to react to her/him and as such presents a frame for potential dramaturgy.

Links: http://www.depart.at/portfolio/the-entropy-gardens/

DEPART (AT) is an artist duo, consisting of Leonhard Lass and Gregor Ladenhauf. Their core endeavor is the construction of audiovisual immersions. Deeply rooted in the digital domain they explore the ritualistic character of algorithms and venture deliberately into the uncanny--creating unique moments using kinetic syntactics and synthetic aesthetics. DEPART work in a poetic tradition: They strive to subvert languages--not just literal, word-based languages but languages as symbolic systems in general (involving sounds, images, algorithms, gestures, objects, etc.). Through subtle manipulation of their specific grammars, intentional short-circuiting of their reference networks, and slight shifts of perspective, they aim to trigger internal landslides of consciousness. DEPART employ generative processes and real-time simulation as their modus operandi to construct hermetically "believable worlds" and transitory sandboxes of synchronicity, bordering on the surreal to evoke some sort of virtual immanence. They love surprises.