Through a collaborative, co-creative approach, we will collect audio stories from MIT community members about the personal “gardens” they are entangled with. Participants are invited to contribute “digital twins” of these, captured through a simple process by themselves or by our team. These Humble Monuments will then be curated into clusters of plants, archival materials and audio stories, and digitally “planted” in AR across current and former public park and garden sites on the MIT campus. This co-creation process will begin in the months prior to the festival, and continue through public workshops during the festival. Visitors to one of the sites augmented by the project will use their phones as “portals” to explore the virtual garden cluster overlaid on it on a human scale. They’ll be able to wander within the virtual plants, listen to intimate stories and encounter within them echoes of birds, insects and other endangered species introduced from MIT’s archives. These virtual gardens invite visitors on a journey between real and imagined landscapes, encountering Humble Monuments.
