You stride your mouse and gallop off on a tour of two dozen of Kyoto's most famous gardens. If, that is, you have slipped this CD-ROM into a Macintosh Power PC, System 7.5 or later, Quick Time 2.1 or later. Windows users will find no portal here.
The Apple-Macintosh owner, however, may now proceed through one virtual garden after another. The icon turns into a Basho-like figure (round straw hat, stave) and leads as you click your way through temples, pausing at will at every corner, and out into the gardens, each turn of the path proving a place to stop, if you want, and appreciate the view.
Supporting this virtual tour are maps, slides, essays, histories and pieces on garden aesthetics, with pictures (no movies) of the gardens that show every corner. If you want to see beyond that next bend, just click on Basho.
The coverage is quite complete. The temples (and their surrounding gardens) viewed here are: Daikakuji, Daisen-in, Eikan-do, Enryakuji, Ginkakuji, Honen-in, Kinkakuji, Kiyomizu-dera, Kodaiji, Konchi-in, Koto-in, Myoshinji, Nanzenji, Nijo-jo, Ninnaji, Ryogen-in, Ryoanji, Shisen-do, Shoren-in, Taizo-in, Tenju-an, Tenryuji, Tofukuji and the Zuiho-in. A companion volume is being planned that will include another two dozen gardens, all of them residential.
As advertised, all of this is virtual. That is, says the dictionary, "existing or resulting in essence or effect though not in actual fact or form." You sit at your PC and conjure up and encounter what would take many kilometers and many days to actually experience.
You enjoy this vicariously. It is a given that there is no smell (virtual flowers are odorless), no feel (except for the plastic trim on your mouse) and no ambient sound, though there is a sound track: We are spared the presentational voice, but I could have done with a lot less New Age Japanesque in the music department.
Of what do such journeys (this one and many others featuring famous museums, famous cities, famous cities) remind us? Why, Disneyland, of course. The genius of Mickey Mouse's creator was to bring together a series of approximations and to shrink-wrap the entire globe. "It's a Small World" is the name of one of Disney's many attractions, but the whole thing might be named this as well.
Natural laws are changed in a Disneyesque environment. Spatial and temporal considerations no longer control you: You control them. Proximity becomes not merely desirable, but absolutely necessary. The depth of any given experience is sacrificed to its instant availability. Consequently, every tour becomes a guided tour; anything represented is turned into something presented.
This singular way of viewing our environment has always found a ready home in Japan, a land where it is said that the wrapping is more important than the gift, where "reality" is always being tailored into something else: Consider the Japanese garden, for example. And since classical gardening here is so singularly unmindful of the integrity of any natural setting, it is perhaps fitting that one may now take a virtual journey through a number of gardens.
The gain is enormous. One becomes familiar with each. At the highest level, one has intellectually understood; at the lowest level, one has seen that, done this. At no level, however, has one had the real experience of the garden. The spontaneous is canceled, human interaction is limited, and the serendipitous is not even possible.
Having said this, I must stress that CD-ROMs never promise anything but what you get, and this particular garden tour is replete with magical effects.
I was particularly taken with the 360-degree view of each garden given when you point and hold your mouse. You are there, turning in a circle and the garden enfolds under your gaze. This is possible through the new seamless technology afforded by QuickTime, which offers an experience that is probably otherwise impossible outside of going there.
This very well constructed and often quite beautiful virtual tour is ideal for the great number who will never themselves take the real one. It is carefully thought out, detailed, highly informative and quite representative.
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