active ingredients:
One Garden
Three TVs
Three robots
The Internet
Two webcams
One vat of magic
An eye in the sky
A shed
A bridge
Many trees

Description of the installation:
Chemical Garden is a magical garden where robots roam, live webcam images from around the world are transmitted, messages can be sent, and a beautiful forest of crystal trees grow whilst you wonder.

Chemical Garden is made from 118 wooden boxes stacked at different heights around a room with wooden tiles on the floor, a bench and a shed. On the top of each stack of boxes is a tray of trees grown from a magic crystal solution.

The robots move around the garden following a maze.

At the far end of the garden is a projected image, a mushroom cloud, a bright white burning light and then Mount Fuji appears - fading into view as the day goes past, getting brighter and more colourful, then dimming as the day ends. Each day starts afresh.

The robots beep their songs, the hermit watches. Above in the sky, an eye turns slowly round looking down on the garden, zooming in and out on the inhabitants and vistors.

If you visit the garden you can sit and watch, listen to the sounds and the quiet music of a day moving from dawn to dusk.

Chemical Garden has taken 3 years to develop, build and tour.

Web Links

Visit these websites for "bizarre stuff", web links, experiments, and ideas...
Amateur Chemist Sites and Magic Trees
Bizzare Stuff - experiments at home
Electric Wally - this one is dangerous do NOT try this at home!
Luminous pickled vegetables
Mrs Stewarts Bluing - the place to get the receipe for the crystal trees
Magic Tree - the place to get the original magic tree toys

Webcams
Fuji cam
http://www.earthcam.com/
Fuji Live - there is an English version if you don't speak Japanese so you don't need to download the Japanese text reader
The best world cam site we have ever seen - that we have used in the garden (thanks fat.co.uk!)
http://www.fat.co.uk/world/worldset20.html

Pictures of Mount Fuji
Shi-nemon Konishi had the most beautiful collectionof photographs of the Mount Fuji
Lego Mindstorms - if you can get hold of a lego robot then visit this site to find ways to program them to do great things, if you can't then visit this to see the robot geeks at work
Lego on my mind

Other lego robot webcams
http://sant.bradley.edu/~olekmali/projects/telebot/WebRBot/WebRBot.htm
http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/lego/index.html
Lego Gallery -art and lego

How the crystals work
The trees are grown from table salt (NaCl).

People who live near the ocean often transfer sea water to open pools where
evaporation can take place. As water evaporates, some of the salt cannot be
retained and crystals of salt form along the edges of the pools and finally
when all the water is gone there will be crystals on the bottom of the dried pool.
These need only purification to be used as table salt.

The recipe to grow the trees calls for proportionately large amounts
of salt in the presence of little liquid.
Thus crystallization takes place very quickly.

Then laundry bluing is added, made from extremely minute particles of
blue powder (FerricHexacyanoferrate).

As the water from the bluing and the clear water which is first added evaporate,
two things happen. The blue particles can no longer be supported and the excess salt
cannot stay in solution. The salt crystallization process will take place
around the blue particles as nuclei, in much the same way as silver iodide
cloud seeding accelerates the formation of rain drops.

Small amounts of ammonia are added chiefly to speed up the evaporation process.

The trees create a capillary action to carry the liquid up from the main
tray. This further speeds up evaporation and causes the crystals to
form over a larger area than just the rim of the tray.

Links to British National Curriculum:
Science: Chemical Garden explores the science of crystal growing

Art: Chemical Garden introduces contemporary art work to school groups

Chemical Garden Tour:

If you are interested in showing Chemical Garden at your venue, you can contact us for a project pack to get more information about Chemical Garden.
Contact: rachel@active-ingredient.co.uk or ring 0115 9526060 for more details.

Specifications:
The garden is built in a modular system, with each tray interconnecting and the paths easily dismantled. It is built so that it can fit into different spaces, and potentially on different levels.
Approx. maximum size of the garden is 7m x 7m

Specifications:
4 mains points
2 internet connections (modem or ISDN)
1 phone line
Capability for full black out
A fully accessible space for the audience
A lighting rig
To hang a robot from the ceiling

We are interested in taking Chemical Garden to different types of venues and accessing a diverse audience. Due to participatory elements of the project, (on-line and off-line) the project grows as more people view and take part, we are very interested in how this affects the work and builds the content of transmissions in the garden.