The Garden by Jeremy

The Garden is an installation combining VR interactivity and real-time immersive projection.

The Garden will immerse you in a fantastical garden filled with unique plant species. The tranquil and psychedelic atmosphere surrounds you as you discover that these plants are beautiful and serve as the backbone of a mysterious technological production.

As the player, you’ve returned from holiday to take on the responsibility of caring for this production site. Your tasks include planting new vegetal units, nurturing the plants to ensure they flourish, and overall maintenance of the garden. 

This project evokes our relationship with nature and with living beings, which evolves with scientific innovations. It questions the ethical aspect of the artificialization of life, which is becoming an increasingly rationalized and productivist resource. What are we going to do with Nature at a time of advances in artificial intelligence, robotics and chemistry? 

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To walk through The Garden is to retain the gardener's spirit, to descend to the antipodes of reality and enter into the depths of Jérémy Griffaud's forms and what generates them. Imagination from the Hand by an Artistic Imagination, an original and hybrid artistic imagination, offers us access to the "off" of this young artist's drawings, outside their paper frame, so that we ourselves become their mnemonic supports.

The spirit of the Flipbook haunts the practice of this artist from Nice. It's because movement, life and fiction inhabit his drawings. Above all, he wants his line to accompany the viewer into an off-ground universe where his shapes detach themselves from the Velin paper and their two dimensions. For a drawing that is repeated generates a third dimension, as in those flipbooks that create the illusion of movement... by the finger and eye.

In this way, Griffaud sculpts our perception through pictorial immersion, summoning up a singular world; proposing a unique experience, where the visitor emerges with a temporal fragment of drawing, a fragment of experience.

He emerges from this unique experience as a gardener, with the memory of having participated in cultivating, organizing and engendering life. An impression, as the ultimate trace of the experience, of the journey in Griffaud's drawing(s). A sound, a smell, a fragrance of movement and/or form: the memory of having crossed a garden apart, discovered a new world, an invisible universe, that Griffaud constructs sheet after sheet. Just as Marco Polo, city after city, relates "invisible cities" to Genghis Khan (Italo Calvino), as Borgès loses himself in an organic "Book of Sand": image after illumination, we experience this Garden as the most extraordinary of designs.

Secondly, to approach the work of Jérémy Griffaud is above all to summon an archipelago of spectators (Christian Ruby). Actor, voyeur, observer, explorer... in Griffaud's work, the spectator is plural. First, there's the iconolater, who is attached to the original drawing. For him, the ink caresses the paper and the form comes to life. Then there's the thrill-seeker who will watch his animations develop original, interactive narratives. But most of all, there's the gleaner, the "practitioner" (Mahé) who will dare to perform this Garden as a game of experiments.

Fearless, this spectator-performer dons the custom VR headset and becomes the specter of "giving to see". He assembles and gathers our senses by immersing himself in Virtual Reality (VR) to offer us "his faceless eyes" and let us live the moment.

This "spect-actor" is at the heart of everything. Player, performer, Master of Ceremonies of our visit, he can pass the torch to us: entrusting us with helmets and controllers to replace him at the helm of this floating panorama of which we become the gardener.

A machine of vision, The Garden is a de-monstration that involves our very presence. A spectator walking through this garden, which, with its shadows, dialogues with image-objects, iconic bas-reliefs, a corpus of drawn, moving, interactive images, in the process of being born and dying. Drawings like so many elements of life, graphic and organic plants, of which this work is the setting, and which, like a futuristic phantasmagoria (Robertson), brings together drawing and digital, hand and digital, history and innovation... thanks to the curiosity of its Gardener.