Ken Goldberg’s Tele-Garden in Linz, Austria is a community flower bed bursting with Marigolds, Petunias and Phlox. It’s the shared project of thousands of tele-gardeners around the world who’ve never seen their handiwork except on the Tele-Garden web page. It’s a robot, in fact, that planted and watered the seeds in this particular garden; and it’s a souped-up web-cam that projects the results back to the gardeners, who dutifully check in to count their blossoms and squirt water on them with just the click of a mouse.
It’s not a virtual garden since the flowers are real; it’s a tele-present garden, physically remote but real by proxy. It’s a philosophical project that helps Ken Goldberg think about what is, or isn’t authentic in web world: what we know, and what we’re responsible for, how if at all we’re related to other tele-gardeners we choose to chat with about how our garden grow. Ken Goldberg and his “Robot in the Garden” are this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Ken Goldberg, Engineer, Artist, Philosopher, and Professor of Engineering at University of California Berkeley.