interview : https://blog.middelheimmuseum.be/nl/artikelen/pleasure-garden
video documentation : see below this page
The Pleasure Garden is a digital artwork in the framework of the Middelheim Museum’s Artistic Research Project ‘Reading the landscape’. The Pleasure Garden is a research project that explores the Middelheim Museum as a platform for encounters between different human and more-than-human agents. Powerful stories about interweaving exuding pleasure, but equally turbulence emerged. The Pleasure Garden challenges the dominant voices in the park and creates spaces for those agents that are mostly unheard, picturing their vast intertwinings.
The Pleasure Garden is an AR application that guides you through 5 locations in the Middelheim park. AR, Reality Augmented by things we do not see or hear, feel or sense in the first place, at first glance, when we are blinded by the dominant stories in the park. It enables you to see and sense things we do not perceive if we do not pay special attention. Ar technology is used as an attention device. It is a tool that scans the borders between reality and fiction and helps to write and read complex stories and release erotic energies. The app can be triggered in the park and on a map/poster.
The content of The Pleasure Garden was inspired by a reading group on queer ecology. For this reading group, a Pleasure Garden Reader assembled texts on queer ecology.
The Launch of the Pleasure Garden
Next to the app which could be downloaded in the park, The Pleasure Garden was also a publication. Through this publication, The Pleasure Garden could be experienced at home.
About the publication, accompanying The Pleasure Garden
The map – The Pleasure Garden is an Augmented Reality application that can be downloaded at the Middelheim Museum. After a tour in the park with the app, the public can take a map with them, to experience The Pleasure Garden at home. At the back of the publication you find a print of The Horror Garden. By scanning the qr-codes you can hear The Horror Garden audio-files.
The bookmarks and letter to the reader – During The Pleasure Garden presentation, the public could buy 5 books in the bookshop of Middelheim, that were a huge inspiration for The Pleasure Garden. When you bought one of these books, you received a letter to the reader and a bookmark that revealed a score to read the book you just bought at the bookshop.
The map
The Bookmarks
Video documentation
Credits :
- Concept – Gosie Vervloessem
- Drawings – Gosie Vervloessem
- Poster Design – Joud Toamah
- Print and Print Advice – Gerard Leysen/Affreux
- AR design and Development : Oscar Tulkens
- AR tech supervisor : Laurent Delom
- Sound Recording, Composition and Editing – David Elchardus
- Photography – Navid Fayez
- Outside eye – Einat Tuchman, Helga Duchamps, Sille Belloul
- Curator – Pieter Boons
Format : AR guided tour on site and publication, Support : Middelheim Museum, Production : Middelheim Museum and WpZimmer
