✿ GARDEN MANIFEST ✿
There may be other ways to imagine cyberspace, not as a place born of greed, fear, and hunger, but instead a place of nourishment. A place where people can find their own dreams. Not just fantasies of abandon, but dreams of humanity and of ways to keep the land clean. ¹
In 1998, Mark Bernstein launched Hypertext Gardens², laying the groundwork for the concept of the “digital garden”: an online space where one can wander freely, like in a park or a garden—a place that invites metamorphosis, meandering, exploration, and reflection. ³
Today, in 2025, the Web—while playing a central role in the organization of the world—is increasingly shaped and distorted by capitalist, colonial, and extractivist forces. The underlying technological structures are both witnesses to and instruments of these forces, influencing how we communicate and how we consume.
And yet, the Web remains an unruly medium, a malleable terrain imbued with subversive potential. For researcher Linda Leung, this potential emerges from the convergence of production and consumption: the producer is also a consumer, and vice versa—even if these practices rely on unequal digital literacies ⁴. Each act of navigation is deeply situated: influenced by intention, mood, literacy, social class, cultural background, and more. According to Leung, using the Web is already an act of shaping it. It is a space of interaction and co-creation, where the real and the virtual become entangled.
Here, Galerie Galerie—a nonprofit online art platform based in Tio’tia:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal—invites you to wander through its own garden: the Jardin Manifesto Garden. This hypermedia project, designed as a manifesto-tool, unfolds as an editorial line, a critical space, a playground, and an invitation to explore. It is a micro-refuge where a quieter, more organic, and more experimental Web is cultivated—far from the speed, performance, attention-capture, and profit-driven imperatives of megaplatforms. Here, Galerie Galerie embraces a resolutely positive approach to technology, while acknowledging its violent roots. The Internet—born from military, colonial, and extractivist logics—still bears the traces of these roots: digital pollution, opaque supply chains, exploitation of bodies and resources (#Congo). In the face of these ongoing systems of domination, cultivating alternatives becomes an act of resistance.
Created in collaboration with artist Wawa Li, Galerie Galerie’s Jardin Manifesto Garden takes shape as a bilingual artistic website. It is composed of four distinct axes, weaving together existing sources and new creations produced upon request. It encourages the blending of ideas, practices, and sensibilities while offering an organic and playful space conducive to wandering and learning. It is a living, evolving place—meant to plant alternatives and nourish divergent thinking.
The “death” of the Web has been declared many times. In 2013, artist Hito Steyerl posed the question: Is the internet dead? ⁵. A question she insisted was literal, not metaphorical. What remains of the Web once its promise of emancipation fades?
We believe it still holds space for critical invention, poetic expression, and creation. And that is precisely where we are growing our garden.
Wander the garden and, pretty please, fall down the rabbit hole!
¹ Todd, Loretta. « Aboriginal Narratives in Cyberspace ». Dans Transference, Technology, Tradition: Native New Media, sous la direction de Claxton, Dana, Candice Hopkins, Steven Loft et Melanie Townsend, Banff, Alberta, Canada : Walter Phillips Gallery Editions, 2005, p.152–163.
² Bernstein, Mark. https://www.eastgate.com/garden/, 1998.
³ Pour en savoir plus sur les jardins numériques : Appleton, Maggie. A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history, 2020.
⁴ Leung, Linda. Virtual Ethnicity: Race, Resistance and the World Wide Web. Londres : Angleterre : Routhledge, 2017.
⁵ Steyerl, Hito. « Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead? ». e-flux, no 49, 2013.
⁶ Appleton, Maggie. A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history, 2020.
To select the sources shared here, Galerie Galerie has chosen to rely on its community and take into account the specific issues related to its geopolitical context. We are aware that this selection process may carry biases, shaped by the environment in which we operate.
As Maggie Appleton points out, “[…] knowledge and neologisms always live within communities” ⁶. This garden is a space for collective contribution, where everyone can nourish the conversation, in their own way.
If you wish to contribute to the flourishing of the Jardin Manifesto Garden, plant your ideas, exchange with other fertile minds, or simply let a thought sprout, you can do so here—or write to us at info@galeriegalerieweb.com.
This project was made possible with the support of the Conseil des arts de Montréal.