A Seed of an Idea (2011)

It didn’t start with technology. It started with a rejection of plastic.

*Playing a live show of improvised electronic music.*

In 2010, I had released an album on a small boutique CD label. It was a modest success with a few hundred copies sold out. The label reached out to ask if I wanted to print more, but something about that request stopped me. I thought about the medium of the CD, which already felt like it was on its way out, and I thought about all the plastic involved in manufacturing more of them. I couldn’t bring myself to put my music on a medium that could outlive our species sitting in a landfill somewhere, so I decided to figure out a new way to release music myself.

I wanted to start a record label, but I wanted it to be zero-waste.

The Plantable Album

This desire led to the founding of Data Garden with my friend Alex Tyson. Alex was an incredible musician and designer—an intuitive, genius artist—and the first person I thought of when I decided to launch this.

Our original concept was simple but radical for the time: we replaced record shelves with plant shelves. Instead of a plastic disc, you would buy an album from our website and receive a beautiful, handmade card embedded with seeds. The cards were hand-screen printed with natural inks and featured a download code on the back. Once you got your music, you could put that piece of paper into the soil, and your album would grow into flowers.

My first album, Field Notes, was the test case; I actually handmade all the paper for that release myself.

The Scene and the Synthesis

Data Garden Website

The original Data Garden website was designed by Alex Tyson to echo themes of early synthesizers and computing interfaces, with a twist. A little hummingbird followed you around the site. It can still be accessed via the Internet Archive.

Research and interviews - Richard Lowenberg

Early blog posts featured interviews and features with bio-interactive artists. Like this one with Richard Lowenberg.

Joe’s interview with Barthalamous Traubeck was highly influential for Data Garden’s work.

A backyard ambient set played by Joe on toy instruments at a fall equinox party.

Back yard summer lounging happened. It seemed everyone was either in a band, a photographer, a filmmaker or all of the above.

Lots of noise and experimental jams in art galleries. Here, Jeff Zeigler makes some drone zones. We also had a DJ night going for 5 years.

Alex and I would often go on what we called “photo safaris” where we’d take nature photographs and make field recordings. These led to the creation of my record, Field Notes, which initiated Data Garden.

Data Garden wasn't just a business plan; it was born out of a specific time and place—a "scenius" of talented friends in Philadelphia. I had friends making amazing music, and people like Zeke Templin, who drove 400 miles to my record release show at Johnny Brenda’s in Philadelphia and immediately offered to help build my music project a website.

In those early days, Data Garden was also a blog where we explored the things that inspired us: the history of digital media, primitive digital art, and bio-art. We were fascinated by the intersection of nature and art, featuring artists who were doing things like tying pens to tree limbs to let the wind create drawings. We didn’t realize it at the time, but that blog was serving as a thesis we were synthesizing over time, laying the groundwork for the technology we would later build.

The Switched-On Garden

We officially launched the label in 2011, and, while there were amazing venues in the city, we knew we couldn't do it in a bar. If we were going to release music inspired by nature, the party had to be in nature.

Our friend, Ian Cross connected us with Bartram’s Garden, the oldest botanical garden in North America, located in Southwest Philadelphia. They offered the use of their grounds to put on an arts and music festival we called The Switched-On Garden. We had never done anything like it. We ran two miles of electrical cable over 56 acres of land and commissioned installation artists to create site-specific works that highlighted the natural spaces.

plant-biosonification-history-joe-patitucci-alex-tyson.jpg

We thought maybe 150 people would show up, which was the normal upper limit for events there, but we ended up with 800 people. It was a massive undertaking that took almost a year of planning, but it put us on the map. Cultural institutions in Philadelphia immediately took notice, wondering how we got so many people out to a garden in Southwest Philly.

That launch proved that there was a hunger for experiences that merged the natural world with the artistic world. While we hadn't yet built the technology to let plants sing, the philosophy was already there. We were building a community rooted in the idea that nature and art could be one, and that seed was about to grow into something much larger.

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