Ed Steck - Somewhere over the rainbow and far from Oz there is a Garden whose flora and fauna are encrypted in a landscape that few can enter but in which we all now live. Our guide into this mirage of technological beauty and terror is Ed Steck, master of a vision that hovers like a hologram of a strawberry or of a motorcycle that crashes into our imaginations to forever change our perception of the real

Ed Steck, The Garden: Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013.

Composed in part from technical military intelligence text, Ed Steck's The Garden: Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation is a formally complex representation of cultural brain damage, the damage left by war in language and thought.

Gore is universal. Culture’s fate is anonymity. Ed Steck’s Garden is an insane composition, a landscape of buzzed authoritative ventilation. It’s an old friend. It reminds me of nothing written and everything I’m told. We made its materials: a weaponized surveillance society. A friend is sitting on the back porch. One is terms. Unseen, lived, miniscule. Statements are true, statements are insane, statements are games. Ed Steck is the last sane being in America. The Garden is not a safe place. —Anselm Berrigan

Somewhere over the rainbow and far from Oz there is a Garden whose flora and fauna are encrypted in a landscape that few can enter but in which we all now live. Our guide into this mirage of technological beauty and terror is Ed Steck, master of a vision that hovers like a hologram of a strawberry or of a motorcycle that crashes into our imaginations to forever change our perception of the real. 'The garden is a fictionalized setting for actual event in a synthetic environment for analysis and simulation.' Smell the roses, and weep. —Ann Lauterbach 

Most recently I felt the familiar urge to decipher something like the error ream while reading The Garden, by Ed Steck. The book’s subtitle says a lot about it: Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation, as does the fact the publisher refers to it as a dossier, as well as poetry, and as fiction. The Garden consists of six total parts, which shift from reading like a set of logical arguments from a computer coding manual written by Wittgenstein (“A dynamically generated virtual perimeter enables a mirage sequence in a state of confusion.”); to cumbrously described recurring images of two men sitting in a garden, changing tense and perspective from sentence to sentence (“The courtyard is an open space. Entries into the courtyard’s open spaces’ taxonomic history are dual linear.”); to truncated bits of verse about surveillance and damage (“Conjuring catastrophe. / A conversation with oneself envelops. / Font.”); to fragmentary still-frames of what appears to be an accident caught on film alongside the blocks of code that form the image, not unlike the printer-error message.

Over the course of the book, among the oblique references and fragmented damage-talk, a sense or feeling, more so than any sort of argument or narrative, erupts, tendering the feeling that what has been captured here is something more like a map of death than any story. It is a texture that exists between states, and appears only here because someone took the time to cull it out, and bear down on the gross cavity between layers of people and Earth, on which the basis of existence is formed. It becomes, in the end, not a mirror or a toy, but a document of something transient, beyond mirage. It opens and encrypts the world at the same time, leaving more space behind it than was there before. In this way, language can break the fundamental laws of science, and why the hell else would anybody want to talk? - Blake Butler

[excerpt]

The garden is a figment simultaneously in chorus as synthetic, marketable and utopist; materialist, naturalist, and public; melancholic, solid, and minimal; baroque, isolated, and somnambulant; one-dimensional, inaccessible, and stationary; architectural, serial, and regulatory. The garden is an entrance. The garden is a complicated hinge.  

Ed Steck is a writer from Southwestern Pennsylvania, currently living in Pittsburgh. Recent publications include: The Rose (with artist Adam Marnie, Hassla Books, 2013), A Time Stream in Spaces: The Cultic Parody of Time-Induced Capital (West, 2012), and Public Access with artist David Horvitz. His work has most recently appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, LIT, and Omer Fast: 5,000 Feet Is Best (Sternberg Press, 2012). He has collaborated with visual artists such as Wintergarten LTD and Marc Handelman. He is a co-editor of American Books. He graduated from Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.