I first came across the work of Simon Labalestier some months ago through a "concatenation of sublunary events" as the philosopher Pangloss was wont to say. This is the best metaphor I’ve come across for the process of acquaintanceship via Internet. Even before our being baptized in the electronic wash, the very names of the programs we prepare to use - the browsers - address our persistent desire for communication, exploration, and discovery. The voyage is often fraught with difficulties, as it was for the eighteenth-century Candide and his globe-trotting retinue of metaphysical companions. We are buffeted about like paper ships on an unbounded sea, endlessly chasing down a myriad of hyperlinks through the bottlenecked trade routes of the World Wide Web, the victims of an infinitude of deliciously dispersive interests. One can argue the cause and effect of direct versus vicarious experience via Internet, of the degree of interactivity necessary for true contact, but as my ongoing exchange with Simon suggests, the possibilities are there for those who choose to pursue them.

I mention the Internet not just as a valuable contemporary "analog" to material travel, to direct contact, but because it plays an important role in understanding and interpreting Simon’s project "Physik Garden: Attracting to Emptiness," created in collaboration with the artist Michael Eldridge. The project’s title refers to a particular seventeenth-century garden cultivated in Europe, where special herbs and other plants were grown in specific configurations to heal the minds and bodies of those who tended it. The artists’ garden leads a triple existence, being an actual plot of Tuscan land where the two spent a summer clearing away fifty years of negligence. It also lives on spiritually, metaphorically, universally in Simon’s photographs, and has now taken root as a website to be officially unveiled in January 2000. Like a stem-and-leaf garden, this website, which first sprouted some months ago, is both an extension and exegesis of the photographic prints. In wandering through its seven Gates, one discovers corners dedicated to a public exchange on themes like natural healing, contemporary poetry and art, spiritual experiences, and the historical/archeological secrets of central Italy.

It's no coincidence that these were the same concerns occupying the thoughts of Labalestier and Eldridge as they prepared the "Physik Garden" photographs: in the formal elegance and haunting asceticism of the subjects portrayed, these artists are clearly engaged in a spiritual journey. The ramshackle rooms we see depicted in several of the prints quake with the feet of the hundreds of those who inhabited them down through the centuries, generations of the same and then different families, of grandsons who became grandfathers, taking their meals at the same and then different tables. We feel their invisible presence in these rooms, as though the camera’s shutter had been left open for a millennial exposure in which the fretful inhabitants and their precarious furnishings vanish before the insistent permanence of floor, wall, and ceiling. These are the silent witnesses to family trees that have come and gone, to a static journey in time.

With our indoctrination into the brimming emptiness, we set off with the artists into the piercing light penetrating the crack in a shuttered door. In the world that awaits us, the forest, the desert, we are faced once again with the flowing stillness of an inner journey, one of deposited time, stretching from a seventeenth-century Tuscan garden to the earth-girding Internet.

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