_ garden of phygitality
tag: [work] [phygital] [digi]
date: 20221031
classification: autostereoscopic 3D LED display
location: Harajuku Tokyo Japan
team: Ellwood Chen & Austin Lightle
Autostereoscopic 3D LED displays use optical illusion to produce stereoscopic depth without auxiliary viewing devices. Such displays often pursue seamless immersion, attempting to make the screen disappear into its surroundings so that the image appears physically present. Garden of Phygitality takes a different approach. Rather than concealing the boundary between physical and digital space, the project treats the screen itself as an active threshold between them—an open site of phygital interaction, contingency, and change.
The project takes the garden as both a spatial model and a design methodology. A garden is composed through deliberate acts of selection, arrangement, and maintenance, yet it is never entirely determined by its designer. Growth, weather, time, and other environmental forces continually modify what has been constructed. Garden of Phygitality translates this tension between control and contingency into an autostereoscopic environment: a constructed world designed to remain receptive to conditions beyond itself.
A digital asset pool was developed through VR-based modeling and 3D scanning, then organized through curatorial procedures and real-time simulation. The plants within the garden do not follow predetermined animations. Their growth is driven by data collected from living plants, whose biological patterns are computationally translated and reassigned to different virtual species. The simulation therefore preserves the temporal behavior of real growth while allowing its visual and taxonomic identity to mutate.
The garden’s behavior is further coupled to its immediate urban environment. Real-time traffic data controls the speed of growth and movement within the simulated landscape, allowing fluctuations in the surrounding city to continuously alter its development. Harajuku is therefore not simply the physical context in which the work is displayed; it becomes an active input into the garden itself.
Rather than sealing the virtual volume of the display, the phygital garden remains deliberately open to its surroundings. Cars, buildings, streetlights, pedestrians, biological data, and traffic patterns occupy different degrees of participation in the work. The screen operates less as a window onto a self-contained virtual world than as an interface through which physical and digital processes continually affect one another.
In this sense, the garden is not a simulation of nature in the conventional sense. Its plants may be synthetic and its species deliberately transformed, but the conditions governing their behavior remain connected to living and urban systems outside the screen. Its reality lies not in visual resemblance, but in consequence: changes in the world produce changes in the garden.
Rather than relying on spectacle or a single privileged viewpoint, Garden of Phygitality rewards attentive observation. Its spatial relationships shift with the viewer’s speed, distance, and angle of approach, while its internal landscape evolves in response to conditions beyond the viewer’s control. What emerges is an evolving three-dimensional synthetic garden—designed, cultivated, and maintained as a computational environment, yet never entirely predetermined by its designers.
