"The Origins of the Glass Garden” features a web-based interactive artwork by Studio Residency artist Gloria Fan Duan. The website extends Duan’s ghostly physical sculptures into a digital landscape that invites immersive exploration. A sublime experience unfolds through navigation and proximity among glassy botanical forms, shifting light, and spatial sound. The landscape incorporates collective memory, where each visitor's attention accumulates traces that contribute to an ongoing transformation of the digital garden.
"Before there were gardens, there were places. A garden is an attempt to shape, arrange, and imagine the world."
— Gloria Fan Duan
Explore embedded game above or visit website: "The Origins of the Glass Garden"
A garden is an attempt to shape, arrange, and imagine the world. This project takes inspiration from Michel Foucault's 1967 lecture “Of Other Spaces,” in which he describes the garden as “the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world.” As a world in miniature, the garden becomes a space where nature is cultivated, organized, and cared for.
Gardens reflect particular cultural ideals, aesthetic values, and relationships to the natural world. They offer spaces for contemplation and cultivation, but also for classification, collection, and control. I am interested in the ways gardens establish systems of belonging and organization: deciding what is cultivated, what is preserved, what is allowed to grow, and how different things exist in relation to one another.
The Origins of the Glass Garden is an origin myth for the specimens and hybrids in the Glass Garden series. Drawing on the conventions of walking simulator games, players explore a series of fantastical environments inspired by botanical aesthetics, garden traditions, and approaches to landscape and architecture across different regions and historical periods.
The environments and plant forms draw from places I have encountered through research and artist residencies. These include the cenotes of the Yucatán Peninsula, the stromatolite-rich waters of Laguna Bacalar (FOU Gallery Residency), and the volcanic landscapes surrounding Mount St. Helens (Mount St. Helens Institute Residency). Pratt's Sculpture Garden and the landscape of An and And Foundation have also become important sites in my ongoing practice and have supported the development of this work.
Within these constructed worlds, players gather and cultivate specimens, eventually combining them to create hybrid forms of their own. Through exploration and collection, the game invites players to participate in the creation of an evolving botanical world, discovering the origins of the organisms that populate the Glass Garden series.
The game is an ongoing project. Players who explore through to the end will encounter a small surprise.
Gloria Fan Duan’s studio and laboratory based practice considers the aesthetic connections between nature and technology. Using various forms of technological augmentation including digital and biotechnology practices, she renders uncanny instances where beauty overrides naturalism. Trajectories that exist as pure speculation, like death or the future, remain elusive due to the inherent limitations of the human experience. She has exhibited internationally at Art Basel in Basel, Ars Electronica, Currents New Media Festival, and the Wrong Biennale, with projects featured in Architectural Digest, Vogue, and Vanity Fair.Her teaching at The New School, Parsons and Pratt Institute stems from the foundational aspects of her practice, emphasizing systemic design thinking and craftsmanship. Fan Duan's work has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation Interlace Grant, as well as residencies and collaborations with the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, La Prairie, Chicago Botanical Gardens, and Pratt Institute.
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