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by Steve Meloan

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Tired of nagging your Significant Other to get away from that computer screen, to spend some time out in the garden? Now he/she can do both. USC's "Tele-Garden" offers an Internet-based robotic gardening experience for those computer junkies who just can't seem to make it past the front door. The art-and-technology installation, located in a laboratory in the Engineering Building, allows World Wide Web users to "remotely view and tend a living garden."

The university's official press release attempts to place the project in proper philosophical/historical perspective, explaining that "the Tele-Garden explores a post-Nomadic motif where planting and agriculture require spacial and temporal continuity. Its objective is to explore what Neil Postman calls the 'ecological effects of media.'" This is the second in a series of such endeavors for the university, the first being The Mercury Project. In that, remote users were able to direct a robotic arm in the excavation of an active archaeological site.

Any saavy World Wide Web user can view the Tele-Garden. A robotic arm with digital camera attached points down at the garden site, providing a close-up of that particular area. With a click of the mouse, you direct it's new location, complete with an overviewing - "you-are-here" - diagram of the entire bed. Those who sign up on-line and become members are additionally granted water-can and seeding privileges.

Project activity is automatically recorded in an on-line log that permits others to note the garden's progress and share ideas - and presumably to provide someone to blame in the event of over-watering! The Tele-Garden project officially opens this summer. Put on those virtual gloves! http://www.usc.edu/dept/garden