• Entropic Garden at KRAMA festival: a mound of dry branches around two steel speaker columns Branches heaped around two steel speaker columns.
  • The plants move as Walden is read.
  • Steel speaker column with a round driver rising through bare branches and dry leaves
  • Two visitors silhouetted in a doorway, looking at the branch garden and steel speaker in pale light
  • Visitor seen through dense branches between two steel speaker columns in Entropic Garden
  • The mechanism: an Arduino driving a row of servos.

Entropic Garden

Info Start a project

A sound installation at KRAMA festival 2022 where plant waste moves to Thoreau's Walden.

Dry branches and leaves were heaped around steel speaker columns: wild growth against rigid machines, nature as something invasive rather than decorative.

We turned Chapter XVII, "Spring", into numbers for its rhythm, density and structure, and an Arduino turned the numbers into motion, so the plants sway with the cadence of the text. The speakers play the same passage, with field recordings by Chris Watson and Francisco López and music by Morton Feldman and BJ Nilsen.

Credits