Burning Garden – 2024

Burning Garden (2024)

Single-channel video, 7m 43s, sound and animation by Marcello Mercado

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Burning Garden is an expanded animation work that reconfigures the touchscreen of an iPhone 12 into a generative surface for immersive image construction. Shot entirely with a smartphone equipped with a LiDAR sensor, the project explores the unstable boundary between tactile interaction, photogrammetric capture, and animated composition.

Fragments of a garden, a dog, and the artist himself—scanned through applications such as Scaniverse and EM3D—become volatile 3D models, activated through the simple gesture of a finger sliding across the screen. Post-scanning, these volumetric captures were chaotically rotated and recorded in dynamic, 360-degree sequences, assembling a layered and fluctuating visual field composed of 14 overlapping videos.

In Burning Garden, the smartphone screen ceases to function merely as an interface and instead becomes an extension of the body’s perceptual agency, aligning with the expanded definitions of animation and embodiment proposed by theorists such as Amelia Jones and Jens Hauser. Here, animation is no longer a linear process but a live, procedural event, woven from gestures, screen captures, and algorithmic artifacts.

In dialogue with Nicolas Bourriaud’s ideas of postproduction and relational aesthetics, Burning Garden positions the artist’s tactile interventions as acts of real-time editing and spatial re-assemblage, generating a fluctuating, unstable environment where the act of animation is inseparable from the conditions of its technological mediation.

Projected at a large scale, the work intensifies its immersive character, situating viewers within a vibratory field of fragmentary color and movement. The installation format recalls Okwui Enwezor’s and Anselm Franke’s articulations of the artwork as a space of critical re-inscription, where the collapse of narrative coherence opens a field for alternative sensory and cognitive engagements.

Rather than constructing a cohesive visual world, Burning Garden embraces disjunction, instability, and the entanglement of human and machinic agencies, echoing Bruno Latour’s conception of distributed actants within hybrid networks. The garden burns not through literal combustion, but through processes of continuous fragmentation, compression, and perceptual overload.

Marcello Mercado

Burning Garden
2024
7m 43″

Soundtrack: Marcello Mercado

Edition: Marcello Mercado