Linda Dounia Rebeiz for Gradient Canvas
Who is Linda Dounia?
Linda Dounia is a Senegalese Lebanese artist, designer, and writer whose work examines the philosophical and environmental consequences of technocapitalism.
She builds alternative realities through her art, offering glimpses of experiences and ways of being that are often overlooked or excluded.
Dounia is an outspoken advocate for greater public power over algorithmic systems, both in how we understand them and in how they understand us.
The Garden Eternal by Linda Dounia Rebeiz by Henrik Kam 2025
How do we imagine flowers we can no longer see
The flowers depicted in The Garden Eternal: California were once common in Northern California but many haven’t been seen in the wild in decades.
This piece is part of Linda Dounia’s ongoing series, Once Upon a Garden, which uses AI to imagine what critically endangered or extinct flowers may have looked like.
The Garden Eternal by Linda Dounia Rebeiz by Henrik Kam 2025
What does it take to teach a machine about nature
To build the dataset, Dounia trained a generative model on preserved archival samples, botanists’ notes, botanical drawings, and scientific papers.
The Garden Eternal by Linda Dounia Rebeiz
She then prompted the system to create new renderings of the plants. When an image felt too closely tied to reality, she deliberately added yellow dots to soften or obscure details.
The Garden Eternal by Linda Dounia Rebeiz by Henrik Kam 2025
Why do lost flowers spark questions about the future
For Dounia, the project began as a personal effort to recall her late grandmother’s garden in Senegal. Over time, it expanded into a reflection on global biodiversity and the plants we risk losing.
The Garden Eternal by Linda Dounia Rebeiz by Henrik Kam 2025
“What plants did my grandmother see that I'm not seeing,” she asks, “and in turn, what plants am I seeing that my daughter might not see when she's growing up?”
Learn more about Gradient Canopy here.
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