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Poem.garden

Self-hosted digital garden website by Harriet Horobin-Worley

A child sits at a desk using a laptop in a room with large windows and potted plants.

How do we share small acts of love outside of the gated communities of Facebook’s metaverse?

Harriet Horobin-Worley’s Poem.garden explores personal offerings on local web servers through simple acts of tending a courtyard garden. The act of self-hosting a hand-tilled digital garden is both separate from and connected to a wider network, it exists in a tangible space and time. Just as growing a garden might make a very small difference to our ecosystem, taking part in a decentralised, anti-capitalist, queer web might make some small differences to how we connect in the internet.

Poem.garden was displated at St Anne’s House during the Feeling Machines Weekender in 2023, following Harriet’s residency with Container Magazine and Control Shift between October-November 2022.

Explore Poem.garden online here.

This work was co-commissioned with Container Magazine.

Image credit:
Ibi Feher

About the artist

Harriet Horobin-Worley

Harriet is a creative software engineer interested in the material reality of how tech is made, and making tech better for humans. They make interactive art, tools and apps that aim to delight and inspire people. They are currently working on interactive poems, and the surprising results of small acts of cultivation, which will be grown on a personal web server. They co-run Queer Tech Bristol Meet-up a monthly meetup for queers who work with technology, to make space for radical, empowering and nurturing conversation (and also just chilling out and chatting).

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