dub3 card · www.usc.edu/dept/garden
Telegarden (1995)
A real garden, a robot arm, and anyone online can plant a seed or water it.
- Cost
- 5 RAM
- Power
- 10
- Rarity
- Common
- Family
- Tech
- Era
- Boom (1995 to 1998)
- Collection
- Net Art
What it does
No ability.
No ability, just Power. Sometimes that's all a homepage needs.
It costs 5 RAM to play and brings 10 Power to its lane. You get 1 RAM in round 1, 2 in round 2, and so on.
Tech cards bend the rules: more RAM, cheaper cards and patches that weaken the other side.
The site, in 1995
A real garden tended by an industrial robot arm that web visitors steered to look around, water plants and sow seeds.
Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana put it online at USC in June 1995; it had over 9,000 members in its first year. Moved to the Ars Electronica Center in Austria in September 1996, it ran until August 2004.
In 1995: Online from June at the University of Southern California; Wired counted over 500 registered gardeners by October.
Boom era, 1995 to 1998. Netscape, frames, hit counters and animated envelopes. Everyone had a homepage, and every homepage was under construction.
Net Art: Websites that are artworks, by people who saw the browser as a canvas.
Pixel tribute by dub3, after the 1995 page.
Put it on your site
Run Telegarden, or just remember it fondly? Here's its button, 88 by 31 like it's 1995. Paste this into your page:
In the game, this pixel page loads the way it did in 1995, then plays a short scene. Want Telegarden in your deck? Make a free account and open some packs, or try a match first. No sign-up needed for that.
