The Garden: Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation

by Ed Steck

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Composed in part from technical military intelligence text, Ed Steck's THE GARDEN: SYNTHETIC ENVIRONMENT FOR ANALYSIS AND SIMULATION is a formally complex representation of cultural brain damage, the damage left by war in language and thought.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2013

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spotted on a shelf at Pioneer Works and for some reason immediately compelled to start reading it, this opens as a programmatic dialogue between the components of a highly specialized military computer system as it interrogates its own terms, identity, and burgeoning state of self-awareness. Later, we find ourselves within the simulated military environment that the computer system was designed to operate, a strange and perfect garden. Two interlopers on a motorcycle have appeared, but are they actual insurgents inducing the computer into a self-reflective loop, or just an expression of an internal anomaly in the otherwise aridly empty programming. Or perhaps an intrusion of reality into a simulated space superimposed over a an actual and physical landscape. In any event, this is a military system, so violence is latent in all its operations.
And then there's a gorgeous lapse into machine code and pixel-blasted photography in the middle. Which isn't the only totally opaque part, but event when impossibly dense there's something strangely elegant and compelling about this.

[Qonita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite stimulating tho this doesn't get as personal as An Interface of a Fractal Landscape. But I love this exploration of the poetic side of hmm idk, synthetic sensory experiences? Who knows there's something beautiful in a technical and speculative depiction of strawberry hologram. This might only work because I read the book with a nice nice bgm (Mogwai's Music for a Forgotten Future), and I tried to immerse in the POV of Eden who's learning to feel things for the first time. But anyways, experimental works are always fun, and this will not be the last of Steck's on my list.

[Mirror · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too human an extra-mundane, but it's an intriguing read regardless.