HAGEN is a work of electronic literature. The light carries words, and the order and timing of those words depend on the people in front of it.

HAGEN is about belonging when your roots are broken. Roots that have been cut off still find ways to reach each other through the soil. The garden notices whoever arrives, and anyone can belong there, even with broken roots.

Research on chosen family shows how queer and trans young adults build networks of care with friends and partners when the family they were born into is absent or unsafe. As the title of one study puts it, "We Just Take Care of Each Other" (Jackson Levin et al. 2020). HAGEN is built on that idea. In the garden, roots that are not related still feed each other, and everyone can exist there together. Sara Ahmed's work on orientation helps me see approaching, turning away and finding another path as meaningful movements (Ahmed 2006). The garden answers all of them: nobody is pushed out for walking away, and anyone can come back.

On the church, this line is the first thing the cloth can say, and it is not shown at a set time. In the proposed projection, quiet lets the sentence gather out of the roots and settle. A voice or a clap loosens its arrangement and changes how the words move. Sound and silence offer two different ways of meeting the same words, and both are part of reading it. The sentence also describes the system: the garden keeps how far it has grown from one evening to the next, while it keeps nothing about who was there.

Between the seven acts, voices from folklore speak: the Norwegian huldra, Mélusine, the Ukrainian mavka, the princess of Gunung Ledang and Aab-e-Jinn. These beings live on the edge between worlds, and they give a shape to the feeling of broken roots that only a myth can give.

The poems will also change with the work. For each site I will rewrite and add poems in the same tone, adjusted to the place, the space and the time of year: lines that fit a church wrapped in scaffolding in winter, and others that speak to the plants, paths and autumn evenings of Muséhagen.

The first outdoor test took place in October 2026 on the dark green wall of a student residence in Bergen. The Center for Digital Narrative at UiB provided the projector.

The wall was fitted in the mapping tool with every window masked, and the garden grew across it in real time. Seen from across the street, the roots and mushrooms held up well on a dark surface. Light from the windows cut into the image. The lessons for the church are a fixed projector position, a small crew, control over the light around the surface, and visuals tuned to the brightness of the projector used.

The garden is drawn live by a laptop and sent to two smaller projectors: one on the ground in front of the church, and one raised on a chair or stand. A mapping tool bends and blends the two images to fit the cloth, and an outdoor microphone lets the garden hear the street.

Everything runs locally on one machine, with no internet connection needed on site.

The visuals are programmed for the projectors that are actually installed. Brightness, contrast and line thickness are tuned to their light output, so the image on the cloth is as strong and clear as they allow. Later stages use several projectors. If and when the project is approved, the mapping will be programmed, optimised and tested on the actual church before the public evening. The renderings show the idea, not the final result.

The evening is free and needs no ticket, app or device. People take part with their voice, a clap or by waiting quietly. The microphone hears sound, not bodies, so silence is something the whole crowd makes together.

A small sign at the site explains, in Norwegian and English, that the garden listens and how to make it respond. Visitors can watch from the street or come closer. Step-free access to the viewing area will be checked with the site before the date is set.

On the evening I will talk with visitors and write down what they say about the experience by hand. These notes will shape the version for Muséhagen.

After the church, the garden moves a few minutes down the hill into Muséhagen, the botanical garden beside the University Museum. Here the light lands on real trees, paths and soil.

Visitors walk the garden paths after dark and meet the work at a few stops along the way: roots of light spreading over the ground, crowns of light growing up real tree trunks, and a quiet place where lines of text appear if people wait.

Here the work uses several projectors. Each stop has its own small projector, and the edges of neighbouring images are blended so the light reads as one garden. I would plan the installation with the museum gardeners, subject to their agreement, so light, cables and visitors do not harm the plants. It runs over several dark autumn evenings.

After the evenings in 2027, HAGEN could stay in Muséhagen for good. A permanent version would be written for the garden's own plants, so each species in the collection gets its own kind of root, light and text, and the work grows along with the real garden through the seasons.

The same system can be tuned to other botanical gardens, each with its own plants, paths, climate and history. Every garden would keep its local character while running the same living software.

The dream is to link these gardens into one shared network. Rain in Bergen, a dry afternoon in another country, the quiet of visitors on the other side of the world: each garden would send small signals of weather, season and presence to the others, and the roots would carry them across. Only anonymous signals travel, never sound, images or personal data.

Online, the garden would change with whoever opens it. Someone logging in from Nairobi would see Nairobi's weather and season, and the plants of a botanical garden nearby. Someone in Bergen would see Bergen's rain and the species of Muséhagen. From there, visitors could travel to each other's gardens, a shared meeting place where the gardens of the world are on display side by side.

Every visit leaves a trace. The garden keeps how far it has grown, so the roots continue from where earlier visitors left them, and the next person finds a garden that others have helped grow, without knowing who they were.

It would become one large immersive exhibition across many places, a garden society where species and people belong together even though their locations, weather and origins differ. That is HAGEN's question on a global scale: can we grow toward each other from different soil?

A long-term vision, beyond this application. It would need partner gardens, plant data from their collections, funding, and its own safety and privacy plan.