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• 1 2018-07-16T20:24:26+00:00 Petriverse Platforms (Intro 4) 35 plain 2019-03-08T19:28:59+00:00 branching_parent_page

  
   
  The Petriverse is designed to catch viewers' attention, to cultivate aesthetic appreciation for stone and the wonders of Earth. Pierre Jardin pursues this purpose by propagating the Petriverse in lithic, digital and print media. A large, square, flat mudstone serves as a plaque that bears the garden's name, with a rock in which a purple portrait of Pierre Jardin's Munch-like melting face may be made out. 
  
  A "Manifestone" broadcasts the garden's ethos: "Stones are vital signs/ of the earth's living spirit/ plus they're pretty cool." Jardin casts stones as the planet's pulse and breath, while obliquely echoing Emerson's Nature: "Words are signs of natural facts; Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts; Nature is the symbol of spirit."  
  
  Large stones spray-painted roadsign-yellow inform pedestrians that they are passing through a "SLOW TIME ZONE." Slow Time has two synergistic tenets: in psychological terms, slow time means a duration during which a single cognitive focus is sustained (i.e., not switching attention); in physical terms, slow time refers to geologic or cosmic timescales. The Petriverse invites strollers to pause and refresh, to contemplate stones and their aeonic timespans.
  
  An eponymous blog features photos and writings about Petriverse displays, while also providing a platform Pierre Jardin to disseminate his research and thoughts about stone more generally. A stone face with a speech balloon-shaped stone says "READ ME" and shows a QR code that allows garden visitors to use their phones to access the blog and read about the garden. Particularly interesting developments in the garden are chronicled in a newsletter called The Slow Times, made available in print (document box in garden) and on the Petriverse blog.
  
   

• 1 2018-08-12T22:47:10+00:00 Temporal Anomalies Detected 9 plain 2018-08-13T15:03:59+00:00 Myriad weird wonders warp space-time in the universe, including black holes, wormholes, and rabbit-holes. But the temporal anomalies observed of late in The Petriverse defy even the strangest laws of physics.  Apparently, the stone signs designating this rock garden a "slow time zone" may have a scientific meaning, referencing actual physical phenomena.
  
  The slow time zone, actually a 44-foot segment of sidewalk, seems to change the velocities and therefore relative time of pedestrians. Subjects have been observed moving in slow motion after reading the signs, and the probability that walkers slow their pace in this space, thus stretching time, increases exponentially in comparison to other parts of the same sidewalk on Olive Avenue.
  
  "Time really drags in this place," Loyola Marymount professor Paul Harris said. Harris, a past President of the International Society for the Study of Time, believes that carefully placed rocks are creating a gravitational field.  "Aesthetically pleasing stones exude an attractive force on bodies and brains, causing people to stop and stare. They forget that time is passing by at its usual hectic rate outside the garden," Harris said.  According to an inverse law, the longer one stops, the slower one's time passes.
  Temporal vortices also form around certain stone messages.  Harris says that knotty statements like 'NOTHING is written in stone...+ so is this' generate a "paradox vortex in the cerebral cortex" of puzzled observers. "Brains caught in circular reasoning cause a time loop to occur," Harris mysteriously explained. Residents are urged to keep watch and report any slow time sightings to Petriverse designer Pierre Jardin immediately.