•  the whisper garden  • 

So we watched as the moons, the winters, 

and the fleeting sparks of human lives came and went. 

We watched as the weeds grew in the cracks between the stones, 

as the winds whipped wildly, as the Roses withered…

Waiting for you, the gentlest of flowers, to bloom.

• • •

“The Whisper Garden” is a sound and video installation by Adowyn Ernste about a flower garden blooming in a graveyard and a human child who listens to their stories. Adapted from her short story, titled “The Boy Who Listened to the Flowers,” the flowers whisper on one hand of the transcendence of the natural world—which exists on a timescale greater than human lifetimes—but also reveal an attitude of indifference to human lives and affairs, resulting in a dark escapism that manifests as selfishness and apathy. 

“The Whisper Garden” was designed to create correspondences between the blooming and fading of flowers and the blooming and fading of sounds, resulting in a garden of both sounds and flowers. Running in Max MSP, the sound envelopes of randomized ambient tones trigger video clips of flowers blooming, which are in turn projected onto flower pots. In the installation, time is cyclical and neverending, creating a sense of seasons and lifetimes passing—on both the micro level of flowers blooming, and on the macro level of the cyclical structure of the piece as a whole. The cycle of flowers’ layered whispering and songs—which combines fixed as well as randomized and looping elements—may be experienced as a sonic and musical texture as well as a narrative. Listeners of the installation, who take on the role of the child in the story, may choose to lean in close to the flower pots in order to hear the soft whispers. In doing so, they risk being lured away from the real world into a dark yet fantastical garden, where flowers bloom in a courtyard of the sun and rain and wind.