✿ jardin manifesto garden ✿
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
— Loretta Todd
In 1998, Mark Bernstein launched Hypertext Gardens², laying the foundations for the concept of the “digital garden”³: an online space where one may wander freely, much like through a park or garden — a place that invites transformation, wandering, exploration, and reflection.
In 2026, the Web, while occupying a central role in the organization of the world, is increasingly shaped by capitalist, colonial, and extractivist forces. Its structures are both witnesses to and instruments of these systems, influencing the ways we communicate, consume, and even think, while relying on dynamics of pollution, opaque supply chains, and the exploitation of human and natural resources (#Congo). In this context, recognizing these structural violences appears necessary in order to imagine digital tools guided by the common good rather than by profit.
Yet the Web remains an undisciplined medium, a malleable terrain where a subversive potential still resides. Researcher Linda Leung identifies this potential in the convergence between production and consumption: internet users are simultaneously producers and consumers, actively shaping the Web through their uses, navigations, and interactions. According to her, every act of navigation is deeply situated, influenced by intention, mood, literacy, social class, and cultural inheritance. To navigate the Web is already to intervene within it; to use it is to transform it. Leung thus proposes understanding the Web not as a simple tool, but as a space of interaction, co-creation, and negotiation between the real and the virtual.⁴
Galerie Galerie invites you to wander through its own jardin manifesto garden. Conceived as a manifesto-tool, this project of mediated hyperlinks unfolds simultaneously as an editorial line, a critical space, a playground, and an invitation to drift. It is a place where a more organic, communal, and experimental Web is cultivated, “far” from the imperatives of performance and profitability that govern megaplatforms.
Created in collaboration with artist Wawa Li, the jardin manifesto garden takes the form of a bilingual artistic website structured around four distinct axes that weave together existing sources and newly commissioned creations. The garden encourages the circulation of ideas, the crossing of practices, and the meeting of sensibilities within a space that is at once organic and playful, conducive to wandering and learning. It is intended as a living and evolving space, designed to sow alternatives and encourage divergent thinking.
The “death” of the Web has often been proclaimed. In 2013, artist Hito Steyerl asked the question: *“Is the internet dead?”⁵ A question she described as literal rather than metaphorical. What remains of the Web once its promise of emancipation fades away?
For our part, we believe that it remains a place of critical invention, poetic expression, and creation. And it is precisely there that we choose to make our garden grow.
Wander through the garden and fall down the rabbit hole! 🐇
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 by writing to us at info@galeriegalerieweb.com.
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This project was made possible with the support of the Conseil des arts de Montréal.
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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.