When does an interaction on the web become meaningful, beyond the pleasure of aesthetic fulfillment?  At what point does the web become a tool for personal growth and thoughtful reflection? 

Drawing on personal experience, we look at an old tradition, the contemplation of death.  We use four approaches to examine death: storytelling, memorial, contemplative spiritual practices, and economic planning.  To encourage interaction with the audience, we offer a trade.  We tell you something about us-our community and graveside story-but we'd like your memorial in return.

The gardenofeternaltime.com comes out of the notion of the web as an archive, a morgue for ideas, an off-site storage of consciousness, redundant and static, yet at the same time volatile and changing.  Personal homepages proliferate on the web, horizontally structured and temporal.  Identities are held in state, archived, ready for retrieval by the web-surfing generations to come. It is an uneasy relationship because existence on the web is fleeting; sites disappear as fast as they come on-line.

The garden also serves as a way to mourn privately, yet in the public sphere, in public view.  It is an attempt at creating community that can exist beyond its physical limitations.  We plan to continue building our site, it's not finished, it's just resting.

Medium:  website, photography, computer terminal

Date:  1998