The Garden of Internet Delights

The Garden of Internet Delights is ZXEROKOOL’s reinterpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490 and 1510) by Hieronymus Bosch.

What does it matter whether or not you're in front a keyboard (or a touchscreen graphic of one) when more and more of the things we interact with daily are themselves online? In a reality where our reality can be modified in a day - the boundary between the offline and online, or the physical and the digital, blurs into irrelevance. 

Which makes it rather appropriate that ZXEROKOOL's The Garden of Internet Delights, as the title suggests, reworks Hieronymous Bosch's eminent painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights. While Bosch's work could be taken for simple didacticism, warning its viewers against the perilous temptations of earthly delights, the sheer density of intricate and inscrutable symbolism has invited centuries of varied speculation, including adamite heresy, political commentary, and the farcical tragicomedy of human existence.

Perhaps it's not wholly coincidental that the internet's architecture (of files being endlessly copied, edited, and redistributed, occasionally spawning memetic attractors) seems rather similar to histories of reinterpretation and reworking if we could take Bosch's  chimerical creatures and fantastical structures as some premonition of what we now understand as remix culture.

Where Bosch's creatures and structures exhibit a fleshly, organic character – evoking the sense that they might have been somehow grown and cultivated, or fused and grafted together – ZXEROKOOL's garden is instead populated through a process more akin to assemblage and quotation, bringing together the iconography (rendered in his signature style) of present-day consumer technology and popular internet memes, and composing them within the framework of Bosch's garden.

And while the references and associations are nearer at hand (at least to those of us who profess some familiarity with net culture and its associated consumer technologies), to have them arrayed in an approximation of Bosch's composition nevertheless invites speculation, forming narratives from links between figures in ZXEROKOOL's garden, with the additional layer of its links to Bosch's – some kind of God/Terminator duality, for instance, a hint at the topic of singularity or the spectre of mass surveillance as an aspect of damnation. Or, perversely, in the face of such visual density and potential for an informational association, you might also dismiss the notion of deeper meanings and hidden truths, and just let the day-glo effusion of The Garden of Internet Delights wash over you.