THREE AMBIENT GARDENS is a collaborative installation piece that explores longing, landscapes, lost personas, ecstatic singing, courtship, mixed messages, cultivation, and the pleasures and foibles of looking for a path lined with horticultural diversions. It is a work that projects the possibilities of the public performance of private stories, while positing that these awkward stories are told via frayed synapses of attempted communication through objects, songs, biomechanical circuits, and the people who invent and inhabit them.

Three distinct rooms and viewpoints serve as stage sets for an unfolding drama that include members of the material and cyber audience who take the karoake challenge along with Slumberbot and Sophie Volland; confused artist avatars. This book is a fanciful script whose triptych structure is intended to mirror and play off of the structure of the installation's three spaces. We intend to set three scenes that can be traversed at will from a multitude of corporeal, cyber, and fantastic viewpoints.

Gaming in the Garden.

AMBIENT GARDEN ROOM 1
A natural or imagined landscape, interfered with, and altered... neither unmediated nor natural.Sophie's frame.

SCENE: A SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA PATIO (DAYLIGHT VERGING ON DUSK), POTENTIAL FOR URBAN DISTURBANCES KEPT AT BAY BEHIND CHIN-HIGH WALL, NEIGHBORS, DOGS, MESQUITE GRILLING FUMES, PROBABLY THE SOUND OF TRAFFIC AND SOME FAINT COMPLAINTS OVERHEARD ABOUT POTATO SALAD AND INFIDELITY.

This a carefully controlled, regulated and pampered Southern California patio where nature is defined by a timed regulated drip system, assorted Weber grills, fake brick walls and an uncontained Western landscape with its promise of frontier, development, endless horizons, and disaster. There are no weeds.

AMBIENT GARDEN ROOM 2
The narrativized singing of the song of longing, the interjection of characters, the site of performance, the adoption of a personality not necessarily your own. The Visitor's frame.

DUSKY, SMOKY SPOTLIGHT, LANDSCAPE EVOKED VIA SONG IN A LATE NIGHT KAROAKE BAR WITH A STEWARDESS FROM DELTA ON A LAYOVER FROM CLEVELAND.

Your spotlight, your microphone, your musical memories. Longing through the curl of a lip; songs of loss and redemption, lust and regret. We make a space for all these songs to be sung. It is an empty stage, a platform at someone else's soggy lawn wedding reception or... a sweaty microphone in a Holiday Inn fern bar.

AMBIENT GARDEN ROOM 3
The hybridization of garden, photograph and machine, a singing tree and a machine synthesis, a dialectical rave dialogue box between machine and backdrop. Slumberbott's frame.

A THIRD GRADE PAGEANT WHERE YOUR MOTHER SEWS YOU A PEA POD COSTUME THAT YOU TRADE IN FOR THE EAR OF CORN WORN BY YOUR GOOD FRIEND ANDY. YOU GET REALLY SICK ON CHERRY COKES AT THE PARTY AFTERWARDS AND YOU KISS A GIRL. SHE KISSES YOU BACK.

Sophie and Slumberbot have searched high and low and are united in song. Their stage set awaits. The natural they find is fabricated by a clever scene designer but it all ends with a rousing closing number.

(Re-printed from Ed Leffingwell. Joseph Santarromana and Erika Suderburg, Three Ambient Gardens, Santa Monica: Smart Art Press, 1998)