pointcloud.garden began in 2019 as a way of looking at gardens through the format that underpins most machine vision. A photogrammetric scan does not produce a picture or a model. It produces a list of measured points, each with spatial coordinates and a colour sample, and nothing joining them.

I show them as points. Not meshed into surfaces, not smoothed, not filled. A point in a point cloud does the same double duty as a tessera in a mosaic, or a dot in a pointillist painting, or a single brushstroke. It is a discrete thing you can look at on its own, and it is also part of an image that only exists at a distance. Most of the work is calibration: finding the point size, the density and the camera speed at which both readings stay available at once.

The camera moves slowly and continuously through the garden and never repeats. This is deliberately the opposite of how screens usually behave. What the work is after is the sense of being in a garden rather than the depiction of one, and standing in a garden is mostly stillness with a great deal of small movement inside it.

Since 2024 the point clouds are also the seedbed for Conway's Game of Life, run with an expanded rule set, growing across the image of the garden.