SFMOMA and ZKM jointly acquire Eden.Garden 1.0, 25 years after its debut

Here's a sentence I didn't expect to write in 2026: Eden.Garden 1.0 is now museum property. The 2001 net artwork by Entropy8Zuper!—Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, years before they became Tale of Tales—has entered the permanent collections of SFMOMA and ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, jointly, a gift of the artists. It was one line in a 90-plus-work acquisition announcement SFMOMA put out in July, and it's the line that matters most to me.

The work itself is still a startling idea. You type in a URL, and Eden.Garden 1.0 parses the site's HTML into a real-time 3D paradise—the internet itself becomes the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve are modeled on Harvey and Samyn, who met and fell in love online. SFMOMA commissioned it for 010101: Art in Technological Times, the museum's survey of art at the millennium, whose online wing launched one minute after midnight on January 1, 2001.

Then the browsers moved on and the work went dark—the fate of most net art. Marc Schütze at ZKM restored it, which is why ZKM is now co-steward rather than footnote. A museum collecting a browser work is really promising to keep a runtime alive after the web abandons it.

We've been following these two a long time. When Tale of Tales walked away from commercial games in 2015, it read like an ending. It wasn't—Harvey's sculptures have since entered major collections, and now the work that started it all has too. Their career began in a browser window. The museums finally caught up.