Ken Goldberg works within the realm of automated gardening to allow viewers of his website to help him maintain and take care of his garden. Telegarden used the Internet to plant, water, and feed a small garden by way of a robotic arm. It worked for nine years before the garden was retired, the entire time blossoming and providing real and artificial beauty.
The ability to make something that is both real and artificial is what amazed me. To those who had access to the arm and the exhibit that the plants grew in, the garden was real, but to the outside world and everyone taking care of it, for all intents and purposes it was just an image on a screen, albeit a changing one. It is an interesting link between real and unreal that becomes closer to being one every day as our world becomes more automated and less manual.
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