Pictures composed of thousands of images, a tiny zeppelin that delivers messages, enigmatic sculptures, a mysterious woman in a sedan, vistas of sublime landscapes, and a meditative score combine to form the dreamlike Pienza.

Conceived as a fantastic vision of images and symbols, Pienza leads the viewer through virtual gardens and buildings on a tour of Scott Bodenheimer's woven color plate works. Designed after the first virtual worlds: the ideal villas, cities, and gardens of the Italian Renaissance, Pienza pays tribute to two artists of these virtual worlds: Francesco Colonna and Bernardo Gambarelli. In 1499, Colonna wrote the "Dream of Poliphilus", which expanded on the ancient Greek concept of the memory palace, and used the garden metaphor to organize ideas, and to search for wisdom and harmony between the worlds of man and reason, and that of nature and the senses. Gambarelli, known as "il Rossellino," designed the first idealized urban space and the buildings forming it in the 1460s, in the Italian city of Pienza. It survives today as a serene expression of humanism and graceful design. In the film Pienza, Scott Bodenheimer takes the neo-platonist ideas of Colonna and Gamberelli, and mingles them with present day explorations into cyber reality and information architecture, and constructs a new world from pure mathematics, color, and light.—Scott Bodenheimer