A digital object
Two weeks ago I achieved fame for about 3 seconds, when my mother and I featured in the BBC coverage of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. This is an incredibly British institution, in which gardeners and horticulturists come together for a spectacular display of show gardens and stalls at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. It is something which my mother and I unashamedly enjoy attending every year, especially on the final Saturday when plants and flowers from the stands are sold off so that you can take home your very own piece of Chelsea. At 5pm on that Saturday it looks as if the entire show gets up and walks off to the tube stop. It is wonderful.
But, bastion of tradition that it might be, this year Chelsea branched out with a new category for the small show gardens - 'Fresh Gardens' - for which the brief was to think outside of the box, to help bring Chelsea into the modern age. I have to say that, in general, I thought this category was fairly unsuccessful, partly because it was hard to distinguish these gardens from the surrounding trade stands. One did catch my eye, and that was the QR code garden, constructed almost entirely out of topiary box hedging over-layed with plastic frames to create a huge QR code. It both referenced traditional garden forms that use geometric shapes and controlled structures, and celebrated new technologies which are attracting increasing interest from cultural institutions.
QR codes have, indeed, come to Chelsea en masse this year, with all show gardens displaying codes on their display boards, through which you could access more information on each garden. Sadly, as I heard one iPhone user commenting to his companion, this was not entirely successful as large parts of the show grounds had no 3G access. It does show, however, how such spaces which exist to celebrate the material and the ephemeral - a cut flower is perhaps the epitome of both? - are starting to embrace the digital age.
What struck me about this garden, is how it made a beautiful, and indeed ephemeral, object out of a digital concept. For me, it embodied so many of the concerns about collection and preservation of digital resources and artefacts which scholars in this area discuss. Chelsea is, sadly, such a statement of Western European indulgence, creating spectacular gardens out of nothing for only 1 week, but also of the kinds of experiential material culture which are hardest for museums to capture. The QR code garden is an exciting experiment in how both concerns might be reformulated in the digital age.