Eden.Garden Joins SFMOMA and ZKM
Eden.Garden 1.0 by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn — the duo behind Tale of Tales, working back then under the name Entropy8Zuper! — has been jointly acquired by SFMOMA and ZKM | Center for Art and Media. Heft made the public congratulations yesterday.
The work is early net art in the fullest sense. Point it at any website and it reads the page’s HTML, then grows a three-dimensional garden out of the markup. Every tag becomes something: <BODY> is the lawn, <BLINK> a flickering thing, <APPLET> a creature, <FRAMESET>, <STYLE>, <META>, <OBJECT> — each one has a plant, an animal, or a feature assigned to it. Adam and Eve wander the result. The structure of the page you feed it becomes the landscape you walk through.
It premiered in 010101: Art in Technological Times, SFMOMA’s first major exhibition of 2001 — the online component launched at one minute past midnight on January 1, with five commissions from Erik Adigard/M.A.D., Entropy8Zuper!, Mark Napier, Matthew Ritchie, and Thomson & Craighead. Eden.Garden lived at eden.garden1.1.projects.sfmoma.org.
What it took to bring it back
Eden.Garden was never just HTML. It renders its garden through the Pulse 3D browser plugin, driven by period JavaScript and Flash, inside the Internet Explorer of its day. The artists already knew how fragile that was: the 1.1 update in June 2002 existed only to repair animals and textures that a Pulse 3D plugin update had broken. The work was breaking from underneath while it was still new.
So restoring it is mostly an act of holding the whole 2001 stack still. Eden.Garden runs on a Windows XP image in a VM, with the exact browser and plugin it expects. The original piece fetched the HTML of whatever site you typed through a small Perl script; I rewrote that fetcher as a modern Express service so it keeps working against today’s web, sitting behind nginx on the local eden.garden domain the work always addressed. A layer of watchdog automation keeps it exhibitable — catching the browser when it dies, dismissing stray dialogs, resetting the piece — and a physical “big bang” button lets a visitor drop in a URL and grow a fresh garden. It ran that way in Choose Your Filter at ZKM in 2025, and again at Rhizome World 2025.
That is also why a joint acquisition makes sense. Collecting a piece like this is not the same as collecting a canvas; it is a commitment to keep it executable, and that commitment is better carried by two institutions than one.
Most net art from that moment has quietly gone the other way. I keep a running timeline of how these works break when the APIs, plugins, and browsers they depended on disappear — and the great majority of them stay broken. Eden.Garden going into two collections instead is the rarer outcome, and the one worth the effort.
More on the conservation side of this as it takes shape.