The garden is a figment simultaneously in chorus as synthetic, marketable and utopist; materialist, naturalist, and public; melancholic, solid, and minimal; baroque, isolated, and somnambulant; one-dimensional, inaccessible, and stationary; architectural, serial, and regulatory. The garden is an entrance. The garden is a complicated hinge.
The Garden: Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation
Ed Steck
November 2013
Smell the roses, and weep.
Ann Lauterbach
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.
About the Author
Ed Steck is the author of An Interface for a Fractal Landscape (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Garden: Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Rose (with Adam Marnie, Hassla), sleep as information/the fountain is a water feature (COR&P), Far Rainbow (Make Now Books), DoorGraphicDataRecovery (orworse press), A Time Stream in Spaces: The Cultic Parody of Time-Induced Capital (West), and The Necro-Luminescence of Pink Mist (Skeleton Man Press). His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. He is a recipient of two Fund for Poetry Grants, the Artist Opportunity Grant from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, and an Investing in Professional Artists Grant from the Pittsburgh Foundation. He lives in Massachusetts.
Praise
Gore is universal. Culture’s fate is anonymity. Ed Steck’s Garden is an insane composition, a landscape of buzzed authoritative ventilation. It’s an old friend. It reminds me of nothing written and everything I’m told. We made its materials: a weaponized surveillance society. A friend is sitting on the back porch. One is terms. Unseen, lived, miniscule. Statements are true, statements are insane, statements are games. Ed Steck is the last sane being in America. The Garden is not a safe place.
Anselm Berrigan
Somewhere over the rainbow and far from Oz there is a Garden whose flora and fauna are encrypted in a landscape that few can enter but in which we all now live. Our guide into this mirage of technological beauty and terror is Ed Steck, master of a vision that hovers like a hologram of a strawberry or of a motorcycle that crashes into our imaginations to forever change our perception of the real. 'The garden is a fictionalized setting for actual event in a synthetic environment for analysis and simulation.' Smell the roses, and weep.
Ann Lauterbach
In the News
Links
Other UDP titles by Ed Steck here
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-937027-23-0
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 104 pp, 6.25 x 8.5 in
Publication Date: November 15 2013
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)
Series: Dossier