Chia Amisola: There Are No Gardens on the Internet

Our experience of the internet is made up of metaphors. Technically, a computer is a stack of abstractions that turn a series of electrical circuits into the trash-bin and calendar icons that populate our screens. There are no actual “desks” on our “desktops,” and there is no great hall or archive where one can hold in their hands the “files” and “folders” that structure most computational functions. The internet is the web of activity and connectivity that turns a network-facing computer into a server from which files can be accessed as web “pages” without ever involving a single piece of paper or drop of ink.

Chia Amisola grounds the work of their digital commission in the negation produced by a language of pure metaphor. “There Are No Gardens on the Internet” takes aim at the transubstantiating maneuvers of phrases like “digital gardens.” Artists and technologists working at the intersection of art and technology are turning to these nature-based metaphors to soothe digital malaise with lo-fi images of trickling streams and enchanted gardens. Amisola looks to the history of not just the garden, but the very concept of “digital garden,” which is almost as old as the world wide web, to measure how metaphors like these shape our understanding of digital systems, histories, and collectivities.

The artist argues that such metaphors territorialize the internet in the same way a garden fence encloses a patch of wild land. Rather than treating the internet as an abstract or immaterial space, Amisola presents it as a living ecology inhabited by life, material, infrastructure, and labor. Amisola builds a hypertext world that glistens with the hope for more strangeness, more wilderness, and more potential. There are no gardens on the internet because there is so, so much more.

The commission makes expansive use of the hypertext as form, exhorting users to “click or tap to change the world.” It invites us to navigate the distinct scenes outlined in the Map to reveal the internet as a place to walk through, not retreat from. To play you must click on everything, turn every stone. Collect what you find into an Inventory that catalogs your unique path. Every item reveals a line or phrase taken from a vast library of historical gardening manuals, tech criticism, the Old Testament, contemporary research, blog posts, Rousseau, Verne, Longfellow, and more. You walk away with a reading list that accounts for the time spent clicking across the borders of the hypertext, a testament to its dissolving boundaries.