The latest in a series of interviews with artists who make work that responds to network culture and digital technologies.

Ryan Kuo: Let's rewind to 2017. You are presenting your digital work Sandy Speaks at Eyebeam, to a crowd of artists, technologists, and everyone that crosses that intersection. Sandy Speaks is an AI chat platform that “speaks” as Sandra Bland, a Black woman who was arrested at a traffic stop in 2015 and died in her jail cell soon afterward. Someone in the Eyebeam crowd asks you to share the design principles behind your Sandy Speaks user interface. His recourse to logical decision making, which presumes that everything exists for a reason, marks a retreat from a work about social death, on which the reasonable has no bearing. Sandy Speaks describes, as Frank B. Wilderson III writes in Afropessimism, “a situation that resists retelling, for the simple reason that narrative's causal principle, the ghost in the machine we call the causal logic (or ‘because principle’) of the story, is missing.” The work recites the facts of Sandra’s final days and of America’s prison industrial complex. It positions Sandra as a ghost in that machine, an AI that might somehow account for the reality of her death. How did you approach the writing of this complex persona?

American Artist: I think it’s important that Sandra Bland’s name is still spoken, despite the countless Black people who have been victims of police crime since then, the way we are presented with news of Black death with each news cycle is troubling. This work asks for a slower engagement, one that feels closer to mourning. Along the lines of Wilderson, I often cite Christina Sharpe and her concept of “the wake,” (or the social conditions that frame and inform Black diasporic life) as being of central importance. Sharpe describes “deathly repetition” as a conceptual frame for living in the aftermath of Atlantic chattel slavery. When death is always around you, because of poverty, lack of healthcare, police violence, you get used to it. Being in “the wake” means remaining with loved ones lost. I wanted to bring that feeling into a space of computation. I’m not interested in forgetting about Sandra Bland, even if remembering what happened to her makes me feel some type of way.

Many of the phrases used in the piece are Sandra’s own. Before she died she made several videos on social media where she spoke about many things, her daily life as well as social justice issues and what she envisioned as solutions to racial violence. I watched all of these videos and read many of her tweets, she was very active on twitter, to create a voice that reflected hers. She was optimistic and endearing, but also stood her ground. I think it’s important to distinguish that the bot is not meant as a proxy for her but rather as a dedication or a monument to what she spoke about actively. One of the questions I asked myself was “What would Sandra have said on social media if she hadn’t been entirely silenced in jail?”

RK: What's unsaid but apparent in Sandy Speaks is that Sandra is speaking from someplace beyond the logical frameworks of AI and user interfaces, where cause and effect hold no water. In what ways are the incongruities between a work's format and premise, its reality and ours, instrumental to you?

AA: I’m trying to do a bit of alchemy, or make more than what appears, become present. The art object is something to hold onto, but there’s an additional thing that goes on inside you when you encounter the work. Sometimes to create that feeling, or to arouse that concept, the thing in front of your face has to be mostly unfamiliar.

It’s interesting that you bring up causal relationships, because they are so central to computer programming. I often teach Wendy Chun’s essay On Software, Or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge which draws a connection between programming and ideology. Part of what she describes is the way computer users believe that when they click their cursor on a folder, the folder will open. There is a causal expectation that each time you do an action there will be a specific outcome. The pleasure attached to that expectation is what makes people invested in using digital devices. But there’s actually no reason for us to have such an expectation with our actions on a computer. She equates it to pure faith. 

I think there is a similar thing that goes on in society and politics. Many people believe if you follow the law, if you pray to God, if you do things in a particular way you will live a good life. But I think what comes out of Afropessimism is this particular contradiction, it reveals that that is not the case, you can do all those things and still be killed just because you’re Black. And for that reason I think many Black people don’t subscribe to that logical reasoning that you described. 

In the case of Sandy Speaks, which was built on a simple AI language called AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), the bot had a hard time responding in an expected way, or portraying the unique character of a Black woman. It started from a default set of scripts, a chatbot named Rosie, presumably a digitized white female office assistant, created by the chat platform.

In the sculptural works I created afterward for Black Gooey Universe, I used materials like asphalt which is black and sticky, dirt, or broken screen glass, to convey a version of computer technology that is the opposite of everything we associate it with.

RK: We spoke together at Bitforms in 2018, and we titled our conversation Black Stroke, White Fill, which now regrettably only exists as a Facebook event post. At the time, we noted that our critiques of whiteness were "complementary" to each other. In retrospect, I feel this downplayed the ways that your approach is intrinsically a characterization of Blackness. The critique in Black Gooey Universe is a turning away from whiteness, or perhaps a turning down of its brightness and a turning up of its contrast against slowness, thickness, wetness, and darkness. As with Sandy Speaks, your sculptures and images use a very concrete element—here, the black color of the Command-line terminal, a power cable, or asphalt—to speculate on Black ontology and its unboundedness. Given your training in graphic design and critical theory, how do you relate to the color black on the screen and in the gallery, and how does it continue to function as an element in your practice?

AA: I think there’s some validity in our earlier observation because our critiques are dialectical. I feel many of your works take the logic imposed by white office culture to its absurd conclusion. They ask, “What happens when that causal expectation doesn’t play out the way it’s supposed to, and this flawed system is all we have to work with?” You cited the myth of the model minority, which takes whiteness as a blueprint, that isn’t necessarily functional, and certainly isn’t universal, and tries to play it out. This feels important in comparison to what I was doing at the time. You were using the (computer) system, taking it to its logical extreme. I was undermining it in a different way, trying to flip it on its head, by speculating on what a Black space of computation would be. 

I’ve accepted the black screen as a default now for everything I do on a computer screen. As Fannie Sosa said in A White Insitutiton’s Guide,“This visual association between whiteness and ‘infinite potential’ is ideological, because it makes us think of white as default, as the quantum field, the ‘everything-nothing,’ as the place of creation. The artist of color knows the quantum field is Black and femme.” 

RK: You presented Looted, a part of the Whitney Museum's online Sunrise/Sunset series, amidst widespread protests against police brutality and carceral capitalism in 2020. During its 30 second duration, Looted visually "boards up" whitney.org, replacing every image of an artwork with a wooden plank texture, as well as blacking out the website's usual white background. I've struggled with the Sunrise/Sunset series, where the curatorial label (which is superimposed on Looted in stark white) assures the visitor that nothing wrong is happening and also foregrounds the institution. In a more technical sense, the Whitney's infrastructure enabled and now owns the digital boards and even the transformative blackness of the work, which resembles less a direct intervention than an ambiguous act of inhabiting the museum space. How did you formulate your own position against the Whitney's interest in presenting this work, especially at that time? Was it worth the collaboration?

AA: A lot of people ask me about this work because they have a hard time reconciling how the museum was ok with publishing it. I think it’s important to consider it in real terms, it didn’t financially devastate the museum. The statement of the work is an indictment of museums, but the Whitney didn’t risk anything by producing it. This piece illustrated a frustration that almost everyone was feeling, even people working there, towards abuses of institutional power, while wanting to see a dramatic shift take place. I think of this piece as one brief moment in a continual struggle for institutional accountability and abolition that I’m interested in. So I’m not concerned with the efficacy of this individual work to “destroy” the museum. If anything, this piece lit a fire under people for a moment, and showed them what the removal of a museum collection would look like. Visualization is an important part of abolition. In this case that might mean repatriating historical objects, or de-privatizing the museum collection. I’m convinced most people who know about the work didn’t wake up at sunrise to see it anyway, so we can forget the museum. People were motivated by what the artwork proposed. 

RK: You're often photographed next to pieces of hardware as though you have a knowing relationship with technology. This reflects a quality I appreciate about your work, which is that it doesn't lose you or the audience to technology. Your work signifies the technological while standing at a remove from technological processes, to say nothing of technological promises. Instead of being centered as the foundation or the critical object, technology enters the frame when you decide to turn your sights on it. In your past and present life, what interactions with or without technology have shaped your feelings about it? 

AA: I’ve always had an interest in technology from when I was a kid that loved robots and was good at drawing. I think that’s where it began. I considered becoming a mechanical engineer but when I got to high school my math skills dried up, and I was left with an obsessive creative energy. Because I’m not involved with technology in a traditional way, like someone who works for Tesla or Google for example, I’m inclined to be completely analytical and critical of its implications. I look at the question of progress from an interdisciplinary standpoint. It makes me ask, “What would my ancestors think about what people in silicon valley are doing?” or “What did Black artists like Octavia E. Butler tell us about the future that we’re failing to heed in the moment?” These are not questions that would be useful from a capitalistic perspective, but maybe from a philosophical or ethical one. What I love about art is that it sits outside all of these realms, I kind of think of art as anything that isn’t anything else.

Age: I’m in my Jesus year.

Location: New York

How/when did you begin working creatively with technology? Myspace.com

What did you study at school or elsewhere? 

I studied Graphic Design in undergrad and then got a Master’s degree in Fine Art.

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? I make art for a living and I educate for a living, those are the things that give me life. I worked as a graphic designer for many years.

What does your desktop or workspace look like? (Pics or screenshots please!)

This essay was originally published November 2022 as a chapter in the book Documentation as Art, edited by Annet Dekker and Gabriella Giannachi.

In the preservation of digital art documentation is filling the gaps in between manifestations of a piece. When an installation is set up in a gallery, net art is migrated from one server to another, or generally, when an artwork finds itself in a technical environment that is different from the one it was made in or made for, documentation plays a vital role in guiding curators, preservation specialists, and exhibition technicians. This essay proposes that specific types of documentation can become part of an artwork’s manifestation, and that, over time, artworks can be moved into a mixed form that is part full performance and part documentation.

Processes described below are based on a definition of digital objects as ensembles of artifacts and environments from the article Digital Objecthood.n This is put into practice at Rhizome, a digital arts non-profit organization founded in 1996, stewarding more than 2000 born-digital artworks in its ArtBase collection. Additionally, this essay elaborates and extends on ideas presented in the paper FencingApparently Infinite Objectsn that for purposes of preservation defines networked objects composed of local and remote out-of-reach artifacts as ‘blurry’.

Components of documentation

The classic practice of documenting digital artworks has two main components. First, technical documentation that describes how to maintain, stage, or even recreate a work. If everything goes according to plan, this type of documentation will contain clear, reproducible instructions on how to align the numerous elements typically required for the performance of a digital artwork. Second, narrative documentation that aims to capture the aspects of the work that are beyond its artefactual existence. This can take the form of artist interviews, art historical classification, videos of installations of the artwork, screenshots, press clippings, etc. The narrative documentation might influence what the technical documentation focuses on and help produce a list of ‘significant properties’ that are meant to receive special attention when a work gets preservation treatment. However, the two documentation components differ fundamentally in that the technical one is mostly concerned with a snapshot state of the work, basically describing and drawing from one occurrence of bringing it from a switched-off to a switched-on state, from artifact to performance. The narrative documentation considers the artwork regardless of its current performative state and can cover multiple instantiations and overarching conceptual aspects. Given the potential variability of digital artworks, the two documentation components can often not be clearly separated, which in turn can lead to confusion about what exactly is meant by preservation, restoration, and documentation, in relation or contrast to the artwork.

When approached consciously, a hybrid of technical and narrative documentation can provide invaluable materials for the preservation of software in its performative state – especially for objects that are, for preservation purposes, defined as having a ‘blurry boundary’, or being completely ‘boundless’. Blurry objects make use of remote resources that can, due to their design, function, or variability and vastness, not be acquired, maintained, or even owned, neither by creators of the artwork nor collecting institutions, and sometimes not by anybody really. Typical examples for blurriness are an artwork’s reliance on accessing products like Google Image Search, a social media feed like Twitter, or in general platforms that allow access to live data, such as stock market tickers or weather information. For instance, while the part of a work that interfaces with such resources has a ‘local’, artefactual representation as performable software, it is impossible to lay hands on Google Image Search and bring it into an artefactual state from which its performance can be reproduced. Instead, the behaviour of Google Image Search in the context of a particular artwork can only be observed and described. Boundless objects are completely located within such remote resources, for example, social media performances or other interventions on platforms that are not under the creator’s control.n

To understand how practices that can be considered documentation are able to support the preservation of performance, it makes sense to distinguish between the performance of objecthood and computer performance. During its execution software produces ‘inner states’ in computer (or emulator) components: bits in memory, storage devices, the CPU, etc., are set or unset. These inner states could potentially be intercepted, imaged, and examined with every tick of the system clock. The changes that could be observed from one tick to next are an expression of computer performance, but are not, on their own, necessarily legible as developments of or interactions between objects, or as objects at all. Only where computer performance touches the ‘outside world’ via input and output devices can a performance of objecthood happen, and hence, legible documentation be created. Forms of documentation that are located in between ‘physical imaging’ and ‘legible’ can be used in the re-enactment of a digital object, shifting the object itself to a manifestation in between full performance and documentation.

For instance, the mouse pointer is the performance of a legible digital object that can be directly manipulated: pixels on a screen are configured to look like an arrow that changes its position according to signals from an input device like a touchpad. The pointer’s computer performance is tightly coupled with its performance of objecthood, because through the pointer’s consistent and unique ability to visibly be moved to every single pixel of a screen with varying velocities, it can be recognised and separated from other things happening in a computer system. As a general means for interaction, the pointer can be applied for all kinds of purposes. For the sake of the argument, the context of navigating the web will be examined, which is pretty simple compared with for instance the role of the mouse in playing a flight simulator. In this web navigation setting, it would not make sense to document every possible inner state and every possible position of the mouse pointer on screen; there are simply too many, and too complex relations that produce changes in between states: the pointer can move from one pixel to another via an infinite number of paths. This is not necessarily the case for a web page the mouse pointer acts on: while it is performed as a ‘page’ – it is shown as visually bound width ‘edges’, displaying certain items (text, images, etc.), and reacting to high level user inputs like mouse events and key presses in a defined manner – many technically independent computer systems, each with their own inner states, are potentially involved in creating such a legible presentation. Each of these computer systems can influence how a web page’s objecthood is performed and perceived, possibly depending on many more factors than in the case of the mouse pointer. Still, documenting the occurrence of a web page loading makes sense as a semantic unit that represents a desirable, legible result of computer performance – quite unlike the infinite and overall homologous inner states of the mouse pointer.

The classic process for documenting the result of the browser reaching out of its computer system requesting remote resources, and from these resources compositing the visible graphical representation would be taking a screenshot, which is easily legible, yet not computable.n In an actual re-performance of the rendering process, a screenshot cannot play any role. A higher level of abstraction is more productive for that purpose: a protocol of the browser requesting and receiving remote resources – in other words, a web archive. Finally, a disk image of the computer system running the browser can be launched in an emulator and connected with a web archive that was specifically created to contain all resources required by the web page.n This ensemble has the capability to reach all possible inner states in any possible order when it comes to the mouse pointer, as its performance is supported by a complete, fully operating computer system. Using the pointer, links on a web page might be activated in a different order in each re-enactment session, but the resources requested by the browser will always be drawn from the same pool contained in a static, finite web archive.

Grading the performability of documentation

How exactly do web archives differ from the live web in terms of performance? As outlined earlier, requesting and receiving remote web resources always involves computing activity of at minimum two computer systems. A web archive abstracts away the computer at the other end of the network and reduces its behaviour to basic matching of requests and responses: if a current request for a web resource is similar enough to a request that was previously observed, the previously observed response will be returned. This is quite similar to other types of documentation that describe under what conditions or at what points in time something is supposed to happen or has happened. Obviously, even rather primitive variability, like a website showing different random elements on each access, or changing the background colour depending on time of day, cannot be expressed with that simple matching model. But this difference to full performance will not be relevant in a wide range of other cases.

If a remote web server exposes a fixed number of resources that are returned without regard to any input apart from a finite number of requests defined as meaningful, that server can be abstracted into a web archive in a lossless manner, effectively becoming identical with its documentation. Of course, this can be true for what is considered an artifact representing the core of an artwork (such as an artist-created website), or supporting artifacts (for instance, general web resources that provide material to be processed by software created by an artist). That a web server accepts only a finite number of request variations is key here: a fixed set of discrete affordances like links, checkboxes, radio buttons, or sliders that, for instance, provide bound views into a database, or a clearly defined continuous input like a map that can be panned and zoomed, resulting in set of finite x-y-z coordinates, offer a potentially vast but still countable amount of input variations.

A free-form text input field submitted to the server, or a random generator executed on the server typically introduce a level of variability, of infinite possible states, that cannot be represented as a web archive.n The preconditions for a web archive acting as a complete stand-in for a full web server performance can appear very limiting when not considering that object-specific web archives that are supposed to support a specific artwork are quite different from mainstream web archives like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine that is supposed to capture general, broad snapshots of ‘the whole web’. An object-specific web archive can be constrained so that in effect the preconditions are met, for instance by only taking into account resources revealed after a login process is completed on a website.

If an artwork is processing live web resources, replacing them with web archives obviously changes the artwork’s performance. The more performing artifacts are replaced with static, documentation-like artifacts, the more an artwork moves towards the documentation end of the performance-documentation spectrum. As long as fully performing artifacts are still part of the ensemble, the artwork becomes a hybrid of itself and its documentation. This can be a reasonable strategy for certain preservation, re-enactment, and staging challenges.

Four hybrids

The following examples from my own practice as Rhizome’s preservation director and as a freelance digital art preservation consultant illustrate how digital artworks can be prepared for or brought into a state of mixed performance and documentation, for purposes of stabilisation, preservation, or making current and future exhibitions more manageable. Emulation work was done using Emulation as a Service (EaaS), a preservation framework that manages and orchestrates emulators, containers, and disk images. Web archives were handled using tools from Webrecorder, an open source project that produces software components and end-user tools for advanced web archiving scenarios.n Custom artwork installation settings were achieved with scripted Linux systems.

Stabilising web resources

For the 2019 exhibition The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics at the New Museum in New York, skinonskinonskin, a web artwork created in 1999 by the artist duo Entropy8Zuper! was presented in a contemporaneous Windows 98 software environment equipped with legacy versions of the Netscape browser as well as Flash, Java, and Director plugins.n The artwork consists of a series of grandiosely designed web pages which the artists gifted each other online and originally had made available behind a paywall. Users are presented with lively and dynamic visuals and sound, in many cases interactive, but the web resources the artwork is performed with have not changed for more than two decades. Making them available to the legacy software environment via a web archive included in the emulated network environment removed the considerable burden of setting up and maintaining a web server or even just an Internet connection. The original paywall access mechanism would have required a fully performing server to execute some authentication logic. Since that was not desired the web archive could be used without any change to the artwork’s performance.

Public search services

The work onewordmovie by Beat Brogle and Philippe Zimmermann, originally created in 2003, outputs animation sequences that are only a few seconds long, with every frame being picked from Google’s Image Search service based on querying a single word users are asked to input (Figs. 14.4 and 14.5). When the artwork was accessioned by Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel (HEK) in 2016,n the preservation risk was evident: in the history of the artwork, the artists had to continuously adapt how the core software communicates with Google’s service, which regularly introduces changes to technical interfaces, usage policy, pricing, and rate limits. Of course, Google could discontinue the image search service completely, or change it so much that it would become impossible to use for the purpose of the artwork; the same applies to competing services such as Bing.

The preservation plan devised for the work was to expand the component that interfaces with Google so it stores the image search results for every user request in a database, including actual image data, image URLs, and timestamps. When no user is active on onewordmovie, the image search is queried automatically with user input the artists recorded during the history of the piece, and with regular dictionary words. Over time, this creates a body of data about images being matched with words at specific points in time. When interfacing with Google is impossible, this database can be queried instead. As soon as the switch from Google Image Search to the database is made, the artwork becomes a hybrid of performance and documentation: the video clips keep being assembled from user submitted words, but, with growing temporal distance to the last database records, less and less current imagery will appear. For some user inputs no results will be available. With Google Image search becoming inaccessible, representing the loss of a major dependency outside of the control of the artists or the collecting institution, onewordmovie will be historicised, but it will never be reduced to pure documentation.

Additionally, the collected data set will be usable by other artworks that rely on Google Image Search in a similar way.

Public news resources

For Hans Haacke’s solo exhibition All Connected, presented 2019/2020 at the New Museum in New York, the artwork News had to be installed. In its first iteration dating back to 1969, a telex printer machine was connected to news agency wires and filled the gallery space with news printouts. With the discontinuation of wire news, the work was redefined in 2008 to pull real-time data from RSS feeds offered on the web by news agencies and daily newspapers and to use dot matrix printers for output. In 2019, only very few websites still provided information in RSS format; the ones that did had stopped publishing full articles and reduced feed content to summaries. The challenge of web publishers to monetise their products has had the field abandon standardised formats and focus on proprietary websites, custom apps, and paywalls. In general, it cannot be assumed that a broad range of news outlets will keep making articles available in a text-only format that is comfortably processed and assembled as required for News. Faced with this situation, a new software was developed that scrapes news headlines and articles directly from publishers’ websites and stores the results in a database. Additionally, all interactions with the outside web are captured in a web archive. While performing on exhibition, News documented itself, in a form that has the potential to be used in a historicised re-enactment of the piece.

Distributed hosting

Olia Lialina’s 2020 net art work Hosted shows a looped animation of the artist swimming, with each of the 70 frames hosted on a different free web service, such as image sharing sites, social media, dating platforms, etc. The structure of the work is intentionally fragile since these free services frequently remove uploaded material for a variety of reasons, change addresses of resources, or require users to regularly perform certain activities to signal that their free account is still active. The artist has to constantly fix the piece and users on the web have to expect different frames from the loop missing at times.

For the 2020 solo exhibitions Best Effort Network at arebyte gallery and Something for Everyone at Espace Multimedia Gantner, a gallery version of the work was produced that on start-up presents a choice in between using live web resources or a web archive representing the last state in which all animation frames were intact. If one of the 70 hosting services is posing issues, curators have the option of showing a backup version of the work while the artist is fixing the piece, or present the live version with missing frames. Since the web archive is running on the same computer the artwork is installed on, it can also serve as a backup for general Internet outage. Again, once free web-hosting services stop existing in general, the web archival snapshots of the artwork’s remote resources will allow for a mixed performance/documentation staging.

Narrowing affordances

The examples presented earlier are dealing with artworks that have blurry boundaries. Making some parts of these works behave like documentation – that is: reducing possible inputs and inner states towards a basic, descriptive one-to-one relation of condition and result – perhaps paradoxically, is a reasonable strategy for stabilising and preserving their performance. To make such preservation actions productive, documentation has to be regarded not as creating a version of an artwork that has each and every performative aspect removed – by producing photos, screenshots, video documentation, or description – but as a careful, gradual restriction of the inner states a computer system or ensemble thereof can be brought into, a reasonable narrowing of available affordances, and replacing aspects of performance that are difficult to manage with more ‘static’ artifacts. The similarity in all discussed cases and examples is that these documentation resources are created by digitally recording observable behaviour in a structured format that can be computationally acted on to integrate it with fully performing parts of an artwork, and that provides enough variability to uphold a sense of the original performance.

Similar techniques have been applied to other forms of digital art that are ‘blurry’ in different ways. For instance, pieces engaging with what is currently defined as virtual reality are often created for fragile devices that are produced by highly competitive corporations with little interest in interoperability and hence involve quick market turnovers with products and software frameworks frequently being replaced with newer versions. Maintaining such a stack of hardware and software beyond its official support time is an enormous undertaking. However, if a virtual reality artwork does not allow for users to manipulate the simulated environment and restricts movement to changing the camera rotation,n documentation in the form of a best-possible resolution linear 360° video would be able to reproduce all the states of the work on future VR devices. Pixel resolution mismatches, colour inaccuracies, and other effects will have to be expected, but might be a reasonable trade-off.

From screen essentialism to network traffic essentialism?

It is easy to connect the hybrid performance/documentation approach with ‘screen essentialism’,n a term, coined by Nick Montfort to criticise the reduction of complex computational processes and digital materiality to what is the visual end product displayed on screens. And indeed, the preservation of digital art is often discussed in terms of time-based media. In the ensemble of an artwork, replacing a computational process with documentation of this process is similarly just recording of what is observable, maybe not by a human but by a specialised tool.

Some artists won’t agree to an animation that is computed in real-time yet produces the same linear, time-bound result on each run being rendered as a digital video because they define computation as the focus of the work.n Some artists will refuse to work with object-specific web archives because they define the real-time transmission of network resources or the materiality of network communication as significant for their work. Both positions are absolutely valid. However, in many cases, designing preservation projects around such ‘significant properties’ will lead to screen essentialism much quicker, and through a more painful process: insisting on conditions that are impossible to meet in the future – for instance, receiving data from discontinued commercial services – will cause preservation efforts to fail, artworks declared ‘irreparable’ well before their time, and hence result in full-on documentation – photos, screenshots, video captures, descriptions – as the only future leftovers of any even slightly media-specific or ‘complex’ (a.k.a. performative) digital artwork: ‘Documentation is often all that remains after a work has been shown and experienced’ (LIMA).n Instead, regarding documentation and performance not as absolutes but end points on a scale should lead to thinking about ‘reproducible properties’: every possible inner state of an object needs to be supported by an artifact.n Such an artifact can provide for full performance, as, for instance, a disk image of a web server; or support a reduced subset of the original performance via documentation in a machine-readable and actionable format, as, for instance, a web archive. Using the latter will reduce the amount of possible inner states for the overall ensemble. In many cases, like when the number of meaningful interactions is finite, a reduction of possible inner states is a benefit – for instance, if registering only desired interactions and leaving out errors, the preservation management of a performative system can be radically simplified. In cases where an infinite amount of inner states were supported in the original setting, there is a trade-off when using this reduced artifact: preservation is still simpler, and in case of blurry object boundaries made possible in the first place, but the complete breadth of inner states will not be reproducible. Yet, however noticeably or unnoticeably reduced, the inner states supported by artifacts will remain reproducible in the future.

Editor's note: Last year we decided to look back on Tumblr’s history by publishing an open call for artist-made Tumblrs to be accessioned to the Rhizome ArtBase, our archive of more than 2000 born-digital artworks. The accessioned works, announced in January, represent just a few traces of the many artistic practices on Tumblr, where users have built rich communities and subcultures that developed distinct ideas and aesthetics with bewildering speed, and often disappeared just as quickly. Digital cultural memory is difficult to sustain, but it's a crucial resource for the present and future. Now let a thousand vaporwave spinoffs bloom.

My junior year of college, deep in the midst of finals season, I downloaded an app to prevent myself from logging on to Tumblr. It was so addictive, so beguiling, and somehow so essential that to get any work done, I had to block it. More than a blogging platform, Tumblr felt like the place where my life—intellectual, emotional, social—was concentrated. Tumblr was where my friends were. It was where art was. It was where new aesthetics were declared and social justice terminology was shared with an earnestness that feels nostalgic now. On Tumblr we were all connected, networked through reblogs and replies; at times, the platform felt like a living, breathing being, a viral post surging through its body like a fever, or a quake. In the six years I regularly used the platform, I saw microcultures, art projects, and the lives of strangers all blossom and evolve. That was what Tumblr was for, or perhaps what it turned out to be for: a place to watch things emerge, shift, and articulate.  

The Tumblrs gathered in Rhizome’s recent ArtBase accessions represent some moods and modes within a wildly diverse landscape of blogs, projects, and archives, many of which no longer exist or exist only in fragments. Some are “single-serving Tumblrs,” in the parlance of the day, like Jack Madden’s SlurpeeBlog and Vincent Charlebois’s dailywiki, posting within strict parameters of concept and form, allowing poetic meaning to form within and between the posts’ accumulation. Others take opportunity of the platform’s customizability and free hosting to build web-native art pieces, like Chiara Moioli’s REAL_DANCING_GIRL, an analysis of (and homage to) the dancing girl gif, and Celine Lassus’s Neighborly Action, a networked series of Tumblrs that tell a story about entitled white women’s bad behavior. And yet other Tumblrs accessed are longer durational projects, like Vivian Fu’s eight-year photo diary and Pamela Council’s BLAXIDERMY, which alongside visual documentation offer views into the artists’ personal lives.

“Originally, BLAXIDERMY was my Tumblr evidence board for connecting the dots between our culture’s love for/derision of Black aesthetics combined with a lust for Black death porn,” writes Council in their artist statement. Scrolling through BLAXIDERMY, Council’s key interests emerge. There are the #tumbleweaves, stray braids and tufts of weaves spotted on the pavement; acrylic nails and nail art; snapshots of contemporary art on view; and found sculpture, moments where the city’s landscape speaks to the visual language of Council’s archive, like a flag made of sequins, waving in the wind. “#Harlem is hard to quit cuz there’s so much sculpture around,” Council writes, captioning a phone photograph of a shopping cart, reinforced with what looks like painted masonite, filled with milk gallon jugs. Council’s Tumblr—and should these be called Tumblrs, blogs, websites, or something else?—also contains selfies and short, off-the-cuff missives on topics like artistic practice and problematic satire. Together, the archive of posts invites the viewer into a way of seeing.

In cybertwee’s artist statement, the collective notes the project was an effort to identify and moodboard “a thematic similarity that always existed, but didn’t have a name.” It was a way of identifying something that is happening, an inquiry that always brings a certain urgency with it. Making a Tumblr—and anyone could make a Tumblr, with tremendous ease—was a way of iterating upon, documenting, and figuring out that something in a movement toward naming. Sometimes it was external, like cybertwee’s documentation of the sweeter—even saccharine—side of technofuturism. Other times, it was internal, bloggy, confessional, a person learning about herself. Often it was both. At its best, Tumblr bred intimacy and trust. The psychic distance between artist, publisher, and viewer felt on the level of skin contact: finger to touchpad, finger to touchscreen.

On Tumblr, you rarely ever saw someone’s work in isolation; the point of entry was the dashboard, the posts arriving in a stream, contextualized by the rest of the feed. Yet the browser view, the way a blog looked from the outside, was like an outfit, presenting the visual you wanted others to see. This container, endlessly customizable with HTML and CSS, offered one way to present a self. With one account, you could make as many side Tumblrs as you wanted; if you were tired of your persona on main, all it took was tapping a button to start a new blog. The digital self could be split into distinct parts, offshoots to be developed and styled at any time. Before personal branding became de rigueur for even casual netizens, side Tumblrs offered a place to play with—and learn through—the performance of various selves and projects.

In 314rritz, the artist Bia Rodrigues gathered glitchy, GIF-centric self-portraits on a Tumblr that served as an artistic hosting hub. The blog was also home to the project “Reblogada,” which reclaimed Tumblr’s reblog function, the ability to share another user’s post on one’s own blog, with or without additional commentary. Reblogging was key to Tumblr’s networked nature; it also enabled gross acts of misinterpretation and nonconsensual sexualization. When a self-portrait by Rodrigues began circulating on porn and fetish Tumblrs, the artist compiled screenshots of the reblogs, appropriating back the image. Presented in a 2 x 3 grid, the titles of the blogs (“Natural Girls Lover,” “Haarig-Hairy”), side-by-side, gain a kind of absurdity; they also demonstrate the ways in which Rodrigues’s image is exotified and categorized. The project Reblogada was captioned: “(it’s not me, it’s the internet)”.

This intersection of performativity, sexuality, race, and gender encapsulates Tumblr’s ethos in the mid ’10s. Tumblr was the home of selfie culture—starting with the hashtag #gpoyw, or “gratuitous picture of yourself wednesday,” later shortened to “#gpoy”—which developed in tandem with a burgeoning body positivity movement and the embrace of fourth wave feminism. For many users, especially young people of color, Tumblr was an accessible academic space outside of the academy; quotes from feminist writers were widely shared, such as excerpts from Gloria Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called My Back and bell hooks’s All About Love. The platform provided a space to discuss intersectionality, politics, queer theory, and social justice, outside of the primarily heteronormative, white media landscape. And its intimate environment, paired with its progressive politics, offered a safe harbor for the sharing (and perhaps conception) of strikingly vulnerable work. In Vivian Fu’s photo diary, she shared film and digital pictures from her daily life, self-portraits, and images of her and her longtime partner, Tim. The intimacy depicted in the photographs—their glasses resting on red sheets; their limbs tangled on a couch—is unguarded, though the images are formally composed. In the same way, though both are aware of the camera, the narrative of the relationship doesn’tfeel performed for a social media gaze. What performance exists is triangulated in a narrower way, between sitter and camera; between image and artist.

A similar kind of portraiture exists in Madeline Zappala’s gif face, the moving face of the artist repeated in a grid, often exaggerated, sometimes expressionless, once smeared with blackberry juice, as if bloodied. One senses that a major investigation is between the artist and their own body; another investigation, between the glitchiness of the gif and the blank landscape of the screen. Many of these Tumblrs include technological slippages, honoring the poor image, the janky website, the distorted gif. Tumblr wasn’t made for web hosting, but an enterprising artist could break it, even coding a custom theme so completely it eliminated all trace of Tumblr’s presence. At its freest and most independent, the platform allowed a user to supersede it, using it for whatever weird project one could dream of.

I realize that I’ve written this in past tense, as though Tumblr is dead, though Tumblr still lives. In gathering these Tumblrs to preserve them, the very act of archiving and accession has also surfaced the digital patchwork left by corporate censorship—a kind of inherent vice. When the platform, then owned by Verizon, instituted a stricter content policy in 2018, posts, whether truly pornographic or not, were flagged and censored, then unceremoniously deleted. Artist Christopher Clary’s archive, FkN JPGs, was a log of Clary’s webcam performances, themselves inspired by images from his porn collection. Many of the blog’s posts were censored and removed; later, public access to the Tumblr was revoked, meaning a viewer could only see Clary’s content on the dashboard, while logged in. At the moment, Clary’s blog is impossible to archive in its original form. Clary is currently working with Rhizome to reconstruct a version of the blog that reflects his artistic intentions. Paradoxically, porn has returned to Tumblr, in the form of bots, inhuman interlopers in what was the internet’s most human landscape.

Seeing these Tumblrs, gathered, serves to illuminate some of what we were thinking and feeling from roughly 2009 to 2020. We can’t see those connections now, from the outside, but there remains an aura of an era. These Tumblrs represent a snapshot—not only of a platform, but of a mode of thinking, making, and creating. Some Tumblrs persist into the present day: animated-text endures, posting about life’s cringes, crushes, and horrors. Others have perished to corporate intervention, frozen in time, like Solo Jazz’s investigation of the ubiquitous, iconic cup design, a project which itself mined 90s nostalgia. Time is an actor in all of these pieces, and time is an actor in how we access them now. In the next waves of the changing internet, how will these Tumblrs reflect what we once thought was possible?

Mainstream video sharing platforms can be difficult places to host artworks reliably. With unpredictable terms of service, algorithmically driven removal, and elusive support staff, videos are always at risk of suddenly disappearing without a clear path of retrieval. In order to ensure ongoing access to video artworks and our institutional archive, Rhizome is launching our own PeerTube instance: video.rhizome.org (VRO). 

Infinite video storage is not a good business

On May 16, 2023, Google announced that it would be updating its inactive account policy: “Starting later this year, if a Google Account has not been used or signed into for at least 2 years, we may delete the account and its contents – including content within Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive, Meet, Calendar), YouTube and Google Photos.”

While Google later amended this announcement to exclude accounts with YouTube videos from automatic deletion, this is a reminder that Google has the power to do this, and at some point will follow through because infinite video storage is not a good business. 

It is a necessary and affirming practice to make decisions about which content to keep and release, and at Rhizome, we encourage and empower users and communities to manage their own digital archive curation rather than relying on mainstream platforms. If you love to watch lady on a bike,bearded dragons playing Ant Crusher, Mid-West Freestyle Canoe 2007, Willow gets shooted by finger gun!, and other vintage videos, consider using some of the resources we recently shared in our preservation Office Hours to save them! Tools like yt-dlp, Rhizome’s Conifer web archiving service, or ArchiveWeb.Page can help to preserve videos hosted on services like Youtube.

The Fediverse at Your Fingertips

The risks involved in platform dependence were highlighted for us in stark fashion when Ann Hirsch’s horny lil feminist— presented by Rhizome and the New Museum as an online exhibition in 2015—was taken down by Vimeo. In order to keep the project online, we initiated our own node in the fediverse service, PeerTube to host the videos embedded in Hirsch’s project website. 

PeerTube was created as an independent, peer-to-peer alternative to commercial video hosting platforms. It’s one of many services that is designed to integrate with ActivityPub, enabling individuals, institutions, or collectives to create their own platforms, on their own terms.

Thanks to an Explorer Award, a new grant from Filecoin Foundation and Unfinished, Rhizome developed this node into a robust video archive at video.rhizome.org. Users can now discover and stream content including  artists’ works and talks. Rhizome also uses this instance of PeerTube as a primary home for documenting ongoing programs and events. For now, our instance remains closed and is updated by only our staff because we are not resourced to perform effective and responsible content moderation on a large scale.

Through Rhizome’s usage and advocacy, we hope to contribute to conversations around adoption of PeerTube as well as development of new functionality. We will occasionally use this instance as a testbed for experimental PeerTube features, especially those that improve accessibility and curation.

(NEW YORK, NY – June 21, 2023) — Rhizome is pleased to announce its upcoming benefit, taking place on Wednesday, June 28, will celebrate the history and future of the non-profit as the definitive organization for the preservation and advancement of digital art. The event commemorates the 20-year anniversary of Rhizome’s affiliation with the New Museum, which has further cemented the non-profit as a leading voice for digital art, and celebrates 27 years since the organization’s establishment in 1996. 

The event also marks the launch of Rhizome’s year-long partnership with TRLab, who is a sponsor of the benefit along with MoonPay. 

“Rhizome offers unique value as an institution of long standing in a fast-changing field,” said Makayla Bailey and Michael Connor, Rhizome Co-Directors. “Our longevity is due in no small part to the New Museum’s visionary partnership. And thanks to the invaluable contributions of our honorees and our community, and partners like TRLab, Rhizome will continue to play an integral role in both preserving and creating the histories of born-digital art.”

Benefit Honorees

The Champions
The evening celebrates the Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum Lisa Phillips, who played a pivotal role in establishing the museum's enduring affiliation with Rhizome, which began in 2003, and artist Mark Tribe, who founded Rhizome as an email community for some of the first artists working online. 

The Visionaries
Rhizome’s benefit also celebrates artists Ix Shells, a leader of generative art today, Lillian Schwartz, a pioneer of Computer Art, and longtime rhizome collaborator Rafaël Rozendaal. In 2021, Rozendaal gifted Rhizome the largest benefit donation in the organization’s history, directing half the sale of his platform Endless Nameless, a collection of 1,000 NFTs created through a generative algorithm, to the non-profit for 164 ETH. 

20+ Years of Rhizome
Established in 1996, Rhizome is internationally renowned for its esteemed 7x7 program, which saw visionary artist Kevin McCoy mint the first NFT artwork nearly a decade ago; the Net Art Anthology initiative, which chronicles the evolution of net art from its nascent stages in the 1980s to the present; its curatorial stewardship of digital art, demonstrated through exhibitions, commissions, publications, and public programming; and its early support of generative art. Since 2003, Rhizome has been an affiliate in residence at the New Museum, working with the institution to push the boundaries of contemporary art and technology. In 2022, Rhizome appointed Makayla Bailey and Michael Connor as Co-Directors, further bolstering its leadership team. 

NFTs
At the benefit, TRLab will launch SEED, the official genesis NFT collaboration from Rhizome and TRLab. SEED is a free, interactive multimedia experience that traces the evolution of generative art and creative A.I. through Rhizome's rich archive, highlighting the work of prominent Net artists and pioneers. Throughout the collaboration, TRLab and Rhizome will jointly introduce collectible digital keepsakes inspired by landmark commissions and exhibitions, beginning with SEED 1: Postcards from StarryNight – an exclusive and limited-edition series of NFTs derived from the preserved early 1990s artwork StarryNight by Mark Tribe, Alex Galloway and Martin Wattenberg.

“We are delighted to partner with Rhizome for this unique collaboration, which will help shine a light on the seminal role Rhizome has played in generative art from its earliest explorations,” said TRLab CEO Audrey Ou. “TRLab is known within the art world for using the inherent capabilities of Web3 and blockchain technology to create online art experiences that both educate and entertain, as we help on-board new audiences into the growing global community of digital art collectors."

Rhizome’s “New” Generative Logo
Earlier this year, Rhizome unveiled its new website and generative logo by Mindy Seu, Laura Coombs and Mark Beasley, Lead Developer at Rhizome. Inspired by the organization’s history, the new Rhizome logo references its 2001 iteration, designed by Markus Weisbeck and Frank Hauschild of Surface.de. Billed as “the world’s first generative logo,” it was rendered anew each time it was viewed, based on the IP addresses of the last four visitors. The new logo evokes the form and function of the previous iteration, responding to the distance of recent website visitors from Rhizome’s office in New York City.

ABOUT RHIZOME
Rhizome champions born-digital art and culture through commissions, exhibitions, scholarship, and digital preservation. Since 2003, Rhizome has been an affiliate in residence at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Since its founding in 2014, Rhizome has been an anchor tenant of NEW INC, the first museum-led incubator.

ABOUT TRLAB
TRLab fuses Web3 technology with fine art expertise to pioneer the future of collecting. Since its founding in 2021, TRLab has successfully designed and launched NFT collecting experiences with leading digital and traditional artists, including “The Calder Question”, a multi-season educational project developed with the Calder Foundation; “Your Daytime Fireworks,” an interactive collecting journey with contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang, which was shortlisted for a 2022 Lumen Prize; and “Vogue Meta-Ocean”, the first digital art collection curated by Vogue editors worldwide. Exploding the Self", a 2021 limited-edition NFT series co-developed with Cai Guo-Qiang, is now represented in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

ABOUT MOONPAY
MoonPay is a financial technology company that builds payments infrastructure for crypto. Our on-and-off-ramp suite of products provides a seamless experience for converting between fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies using all major payment methods including debit and credit card, local bank transfers, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay.

PRESS CONTACT
Marcella Zimmermann
Digital Counsel, CEO
marcella@digitalcounsel.xyz 

The latest in a series of interviews with artists who make work that responds to network culture and digital technologies.

Toniann Fernandez: We first met on the Do Not Research Discord around the time of the first IRL DNR exhibition at Lower Cavity in Western Mass (2022). Your artistic practice explores digital space, but also comes to life in 16mm projections and via slide projectors, very physical forms. What is the relationship between virtual space and film in your practice? 

Tomi Faison: I spent incredible amounts of time online growing up: my first romantic relationships mostly existed online, and with the exception of a brief anarcho-primitivist phase where I used a flip-phone and lived on an island in the Potomac River, it’s always been where I’m most at home. Nowadays that looks like semi-public spaces like Discord servers or message boards for niche interests like where we met, fast-moving group chats filled with multi-admin anonymous meme accounts, or more personal virtual relationships with other artists. The draw is a social one, sometimes as a participant, sometimes as a lurker-ethnographer. For the last few years, almost all my work is inspired by virtual phenomena or works with the visual language of internet subcultures or trends, often using these aesthetics or ideas to frame the questions I’m interested in about politics and drives.

I graduated from a very traditional film school in 2017, and since then I’ve shot and produced a number of experimental films, documentaries, and music videos on film. I’ve also produced moving image work as a part of large scale sculptures and installations. Much of my older video and installation work was interested in landscapes and processes, and I used to really view that practice as very separate from my constant online posting. That changed after a year-long three part solo show at the Frederick Arts Council titled, Phase Change in 2019, which used phases of the hydraulic cycle to explore Deleuze’s notion of becoming. It was ambitious, involving a 7ft stream simulation, a four channel opera, an 8mm short, and an installation of about half a ton of old brick I hand-carried into the space. I was covered in red dust for the better part of the year.

Coming off of that long show, I took a break from the studio and found myself spending more creative energy posting memes on anonymous accounts than I was making traditional art or films. For me, the difference between posting and making work for a gallery is mostly speed and audience. I still shitpost, but I can’t say much more about that without doxxing myself and losing an essential part: anonymity. 

The sort of art practice/shitposting practice divide started to collapse in 2020 when a bunch of us started Do Not Research (DNR) in artist and friend Joshua Citarella’s Discord server. I co-organized DNR’s film, video, and art critique programs. Working with artists like Filip Kostic and Harris Rosenblum, I started developing ways to integrate very online ideas and aesthetics that excite me into my existing film and installation practice. It has been far more fulfilling to make work about what I’m actually engaged with day-to-day on the internet than it is trying to, say, explain Deleuze through a gradually changing sculpture (lol). 

An example of integrating the two is First As Tragedy, Then As LARP, an installation including a 16mm film that I shot at the “Stop The Steal” protest turned riot at the Capitol on Jan 6. I went to D.C. after lurking right wing internet spaces; the gulags of the deplatformed. This installation is the first time I’m exhibiting film work on a film projector rather than from a digital scan. I did this because the work is largely about devirtualization. January 6th was in some ways a giant thedonald.win meetup, and there was a profound dissonance between what was going on at the Capitol and what was being circulated on the internet and reported by the news. By giving a physical body to the images with 16mm film, I’m also playing with the dissonance between what real events are unfolding in a physical space and the meme-ification, manipulation, and proliferation of those images. When the protesters asked me about my funny camera, I jokingly told them it was to keep the footage physical and therefore safe—so Zuckerberg could never get his hands on it. 

T. Fernandez: The flags alongside the projection in First As Tragedy, Then As Larp feature 2D prints of 3D scans of Roman Classical sculptures from the Louvre. The first flag shows Zeus’s Muse of Tragedy and reads “FIRST AS TRAGEDY.” The second shows the muse of comedy, and says, “THEN AS LARP.” The rendering and rerendering of IRL sculptures turned digital images turned printed images foregrounds some dissonance or confusion. How does the manipulation of images play into your work and why the muses of drama?

T. Faison: The classical sculptures on the flags are a reference to the neoclassical Capitol building itself and a neoclassical sculpture at the site that acts as the loop point of the film. Tragedy and comedy reference the lineage of theater, democracy, and mimicry which I was familiar with from a young age. I grew up near Capitol Hill. Protests in D.C. always looked like theater to me, and the national mall felt like a stage. The locus of power is not actually in the Capitol.

I’m very interested in not just images, but the apparatus that produces them. The events of that day, and the subsequent response, became more about politicized images than political power. The flags are printed on cheap materials from banners.com, which is where many of the protesters' flags came from. The text, printed in “top text/bottom text” meme format, is a riff on a quote by Karl Marx from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in which Marx says, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” The text is the go-to example of Marx putting his idea of historical materialism into action. When looking at Jan 6, I’d like to see more of a materialist analysis as to why the events occurred than the gut reaction to spectacle I observed in liberal and left discourse. I want Hegel, not click-bait. 

I have this image in my mind that briefly appears in the film where the “insurrectionists” are advancing up the steps of the Capitol, every so often breaking the line of police and gaining ground. However, with each advancement, they stop and wait and look at their phones, or hang flags with images of Donald Trump photoshopped onto Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, until they can take another step forward. Then the “insurrectionists” get past the police, they make it all the way inside of the Capitol, and then what? They don't start issuing arrests. They don't write a new constitution. They don't perform the actual coup. All they can do is roleplay. All they can do is take a selfie. All they can do is generate images. 

T. Fernandez: Let’s talk about Carousel #1 and Lack Loop. In these works, you explore complicated themes of psychoanalysis like desire and death drive through images of dental surgery and car crashes. But there is also a healthy dose of humor present in each piece. What are we seeing in these works, and how does your interest in psychoanalysis connect to the political?

T. Faison: Yes, both Carousel #1 (2023)  as well as Lack Loop (2021-present) explore desire in a similar vein. They also mark a new, more iterative, way of working for me. By using myself or close friends as characters, I can shoot these images with a quick turn around, almost the moment the idea comes to me. I try to do this before taking too much time to understand why I want to shoot them, rather I blurt them out the way a patient first brings a thought to analysis. I put these in conversation with other scenes or shots already in the work, analyze them, take notes, then go back and re-shoot new images or videos. It’s very different from, say, taking a script through production where I’m executing a steady plan. I hope it will be a fruitful process for exploring the ways material circumstance, unconscious desire, and political positions create a series of feedback loops and form postmodern subjects. 

Lack Loop is a modular multi-channel video installation. I just finalized a version with seven screens mounted in a strip for “The Manic American Humanist Show” at Public Works Administration curated by Abbey Pusz in March. Carousel #1 is a collection of 81 35mm slides housed in a looping carousel projector, which I showed in a solo show at Smack Mellon in January. Both works feature teeth, a reoccurring obsession of mine, as well as a series of jokes and word play.

The jumping off point for Carousel #1 is the way Freud and later Lacan describe desire as being structured like a montage. Like the internet, the unconscious exists in a non-physical space, and using film allows me to materialize both the images and projector’s cycling process. Then the looping projector can become the unconscious, driven to repeat and circle its desires, with no clear beginning or end. The content (film slides) is sourced three separate ways. First, there are 35mm photos of friends and loved ones driving cars, nude in bed, or browsing the web alongside close up shots of teeth. These images construct my physical, lived, and more conscious life. Second, slides I sourced from craigslist, yard sales, and random lots from eBay inject the outside world. Finally, digital images ripped from the internet and collages exposed onto celluloid introduce my virtual life and fantasies alongside screenshots grabbed online. 

Humor is important in my work—I heart jokes and double meanings. For example, in Carousel #1, the “death drive” of psychoanalysis is shown as a literal car crash. Or addressing lack (a concept originating in ideas around castration or penis envy) through montages of trans women and missing teeth. I love to flitter between emotional moments, dense philosophy, or theory and then suddenly pop culture or a joke: an intimate moment in bed is interrupted by the breezewood meme, then covered in error messages, then anime girls, then fire emojis, then a Lacan quote, then more car crashes. The humor is more on the surface in Lack Loop, which includes a performance where I act as a sovereign citizen who uses an esoteric reading of common law to argue with a police officer. It’s a recreation of a classic genre of Youtube video.

Lack Loop uses self portraiture, collage, and first person narration to explore the ways in which material circumstance and my body generate both desire as well as political positions. I use “meme-politics” to construct two opposing poles: the libertarian, wingnut, sovereign citizen vs the “live in the pod, eat the bugs” globalist liberal. I like these figures as caricatures of the current macro cultural/political battle occurring throughout the country, but I also use them as roles I can inhabit to play out personal psychodrama. Because I take hormones every day, or because I’m missing a bunch of teeth and would really like new ones, or because I have a nasty habit of making non-commercial installation art, my life would greatly benefit from certain state services. However, what seems more politically likely in my lifetime than universal basic services is universal rentierism. I talk about this more in 11 Notes From The Pod.

T. Fernandez: Tell me about the forthcoming feature film you’ve been working on, Transformers Terminal.

T. Faison: Transformers: Terminalis a film conceived by one of my oldest friends and close collaborators, Miles Engel-Hawbecker. We met working at a movie theater starting in 2012 as Marvel was really taking off and Star Wars had its second reboot. We wanted to tackle this culture of consumerist nostalgia and explore the sort of subjects that are created. It’s a cringe rom-com turned body horror about commodity fetishism and hyper fandom in a world where men are infantilized consumers while women are condemned to constant performativity.

The film follows a fanboy named Aidan, who one day works up the courage to leave his mother's basement and travel across the country to meet Sierra, the youtuber of his dreams, and shoot a new video series at Comic Con. But when they meet in person, they can’t connect. The whole situation devolves into nightmares, and Aidan takes Sierra’s phone, dawning her internet identity to finish the videos. 

Similar to the Jan 6 piece, one question of the film is, what happens when the internet goes offline? For this work specifically, what happens when the “soy boy,” homogenized, consumer fan-culture branch goes offline? For me, the answer is a body horror film. We hope it’s a critical, but loving, mirror to the communities it portrays. 

We just finished post-production and are currently exploring exhibition and distribution options. Miles and I met at the movies, so we’re interested in a traditional theatrical or festival run, but given the content of the film, I believe it will find its true audience on the internet. We’re looking for a partner in the Web3 space who could help us with that. Email me!

Age: 28

Location: Baltimore, MD 

How/when did you begin working creatively with technology?
I started posting the moment I logged on. I was about 10. I worked in MS Paint and then photoshop making content for sci-fi and fantasy book message boards. I also ran a terrible Youtube channel with my sister where we shot short films using our mom’s laptop’s webcam, moving and re-balancing the laptop on stools and stacks of books to get different angles. 

What did you study at school or elsewhere?
I studied narrative film production and philosophy in undergrad and intermedia/digital art for grad school, both at state schools in Baltimore County. 

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously?
For the last few years I’ve been focused on keeping my cost of living low and welfare-maxxing. There isn’t anything more valuable to me as an artist than time. I rode the pandemic unemployment payments to the bitter end (and had a lot of fun doing so), then enrolled in a funded MFA to get a modest stipend and healthcare. I’ve done a lot of freelance work: grip and electric department on film shoots, technical director for live events and film festivals, installation tech for artists. I recently started teaching and I love it so far.

What does your desktop or workspace look like? (Pics or screenshots please!)

Thanks to everyone for purchasing an NFT from SEED: Postcards from StarryNight, a special collaboration with TRLab in support of Rhizome’s work with generative art. The collection quickly sold out, but can still be purchased on OpenSea and Zora. The support this project received was extraordinary, and we are grateful to everyone who amplified and supported! Watch this space for our next collaboration with TRLab this fall...

About the Collection
Postcards from StarryNight is a series of 151 unique screenshots created from a restored version of an important early work of net art, StarryNight (1999).

In StarryNight, originally created by Alex Galloway, Mark Tribe, and Martin Wattenberg, every email within the Rhizome archive was visually manifested as a luminous point of light against a dark background. Through an ingenious navigation system, users could explore the emails by selecting assigned keywords, which would draw a constellation of interconnected points, evoking the interrelatedness of the database. As a timeless work of information aesthetics, it not only showcases the artists' vision but also offers a captivating glimpse into the early online community of Rhizome. 

Despite its historical importance, StarryNight was not accessible for more than a decade, until it was restored by Rhizome’s digital preservation department. Now, still images from this restored version form the basis of Postcards from StarryNight, the official launch NFT for SEED and the starting point for a new chapter of Rhizome’s work with online community and generative art.

Each screenshot is a 1/1 edition, featuring a keyword constellation unique to each collector. 

Note: Alex Galloway, who co-created this project while working as Rhizome’s Editor, is today a scholar of digital culture who has written critically about NFTs. Galloway, who remains a Rhizome supporter, respectfully declined to be involved in the Postcards from StarryNight NFT, and is credited here only as a co-creator of the original work. 

Last month, Rhizome celebrated our annual benefit, honoring generative artists Lillian Schwartz, Rafael Rozendaal, Ix Shells, and our 20 years of partnership with the New Museum. We commissioned artist Damjansky to create a physical award that we could present to trailblazing, digital artists, and what we received was half of an award, activated by a digital counterpart. It’s an Augmented Reality Trophy!! 

Aptly named “Celebration.obj”, Damanjasky considers the trophies an “IRL celebration of URL achievements.” While the AR award utilizes a trophy cup in its IRL design, the left half of the cup is missing 😵‼️. In order to access its left half, you must scan the QR code, conveniently located on the top surface of the cup.  

However, the trophy just seems to break even more when you activate the QR code, which utilizes Spark AR to project a deconstructed, broken-image icon. Damjansky regards the trophy as “two imperfect pieces merging into a renewed wholeness.” 

What better way to salute digital artists than with a hybrid sculpture. Both offline and online, IRL/URL, broken and whole. 

View more photos of the “IRL URL” trophy below:

video demonstrating how the AR trophy works, courtesy of Damjansky. 

About the Artist
Damjanski is an artist living in a browser. Concerned with themes of power, poetry and participation, he explores the concept of apps as artworks. The app Bye Bye Camera is the camera for the post-human era. Every picture people take automatically removes any person. The app Computer Goggles lets people capture the world like a machine sees it and the LongARcat app creates long cats in AR.

Last month, Rhizome held our annual benefit in partnership with TRLab, honoring generative art and artists Rafaël Rozendaal, Lillian Schwartz, and Ix Shells. The night was also a celebration of Rhizome's affiliation with the New Museum, which was a relationship forged by New Museum Director Lisa Phillips and Rhizome founder Mark Tribe 20 years ago. This text was included in a booklet that was distributed during the event, designed by Laura Coombs. View TRLab's SEED microsite.  

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“The artist creates a system, typically a piece of software, which is either used to create a work of art or constitutes a work of art in itself.” – Marius Watz

 Generative art today is associated with artworks that use code as a creative medium, often to create abstract imagery and dynamic visual effects. This way of working has a long history–arguably, one that predates the computer itself. Artists who use chance and instruction-based operations ranging from a roll of the dice to a reading of the I Ching may be considered generative, but the term has gained particular importance with the rise of digital culture, and the popularity of generative NFTs. 

Here, we share ten stories of generative art as seen through our archives, as part of a partnership with TRLab. 

1. The word “generative”

Beginning in 1996, Rhizome was an email list, where artists shared resources and developed new language around emerging media. Terms and neologisms were introduced, tested out and discussed; sometimes adopted, and perhaps later discarded. The kind of work we know today as “generative” was described in distinct ways; one popular term was “artificial life.” “Emergence” was another key term.

Still, the term “generative” did make appearances and was often discussed with considerable sophistication. In 1997, Simon Biggs wrote about his work  in a way that seemed to mirror today's arguments around AI and consciousness. He argued for “an avoidance of the notion of an ’artificial author’”—the idea that the computer is taking the place of the human author—which has been part of computer art discourse since the earliest days. Instead, he argued for linguistic models that generate patterns “that can be interpreted as meaning in the mind of the reader.” 

Biggs’s argument from a quarter-century ago mirrors a contemporary debate around AI and the role of machines in the creative process: do AI tools have true intelligence and artistry, or are they just generating patterns that we interpret as meaningful?

Today, the term “generative art” is increasingly also associated with generative AI. While generative art has long been concerned with code as aesthetic material, generative AI makes use of complex models that analyze large data sets and generate new images, sounds, and texts derived from this training data. 

With more kinds of artwork being described as “generative,” a further categorization suggested by Marius Watz in 2005 may be of use. For the term “generative art” to have any meaning, he argued, artworks must have a dominant focus on generative systems, not merely use a generative tool along the way. Whether it involves AI tools or Java Applets (or both), art can perhaps be most readily described as generative when it foregrounds the generative system through which it comes into being.

2. The World‘s First Generative Logo?

In 2023, Rhizome introduced a new logo designed by Mindy Seu and Laura Coombs. The new logo is dynamic, adjusting to the time of day and the distance of recent website visitors to Rhizome’s New York City office. 

This logo drew inspiration directly from an identity that Rhizome has long been associated with—a starburst formation, with colored rays emanating from a vertex. This logo was introduced in 2001, and it took a dynamic form even at that time. An article on Rhizome’s “Net Art News” series asked whether it was “The World’s First Generative Logo?” 

Ever noticed that the Rhizome Logo never looks the same twice? The logo that appears in the top left section of our website is an example of generative art. It is generated "on the fly" each time it is viewed, depending upon the IP addresses of the last four people to visit the website. The logo was designed by Markus Weisbeck and Frank Hauschild of Surface.de. Check it out, we think it's pretty cool.

3. Flash & Splash

Splash art originated in comics from the 1940s, where the term referred to a full page of visuals at the front of a book. In the late 1990s, when the widespread use of the application Flash opened up new possibilities for animation and interactive media, the idea of the splash page migrated to web design. Online splash pages brought visual excitement to a webpage when low modem speeds made it impractical to post large or moving images amid a site's textual content. 

Flash introduced generative methods to a wide range of artists. It incorporated a timeline which allowed for visual editing, and allowed artists to easily incorporate code into their work using a language known as ActionScript. Artists like Entropy8Zuper!, for example, utilized ActionScript to program interactive elements, animations, and user interactions in their web-based artworks.

In 1998, Rhizome introduced splash pages to its website in order to display artwork with greater immediacy. These splash pages were designed by artists such as Josh Davis and the aforementioned Entropy8Zuper! duo, Aureia Harvey & Michaël Samyn.

4. The New Museum & ArtBase 101

In 2003, Rhizome and the New Museum entered into a unique partnership, aiming to increase the visibility and recognition of digital art within the contemporary art world as well as foster new opportunities for exhibitions, programming, and preservation of digital artworks.

In 2005, the New Museum, which was located in Chelsea at the time, presented the exhibition “ArtBase 101.” The show offered a curated selection of forty works from Rhizome.org's ArtBase, an online archive of new media art launched in 1999. At that time, the Museum frequently hosted digital exhibitions in its Media Z Lounge – an ideal context for an exhibition curated by  Rhizome. 

In ArtBase 101, ten underlying themes were drawn out to characterize distinct areas of practice from Rhizome’s communities, which included considerable crossover with generative practice. The exhibition included Amy Alexander’s theBot (2000), Casey Reas’s Software Structures (2004), and John F. Simon’s Every Icon (1999).

In Amy Alexander's piece TheBot, visitors were asked to input search terms, prompting a web crawler to scour the internet for relevant quotes and their respective URLs. The gathered material was then transformed into visual poetry, which was displayed on screen, while the appropriated text was recited by a computerized voice. With Software Structures (2004), Casey Reas aimed to illustrate a significant rapport between Sol LeWitt's concerns regarding conceptual art and the related issues of mutability and translation in software art. The piece was created using a set of instructions LeWitt had drawn up for assistants to draw prescribed "structures," which Reas implemented through coding software to create various digital structures. John F. Simon, Jr.'s artwork Every Icon (1997) utilizes a grid of 32x32 squares to represent all possible combinations of white and black elements. Although the artwork gives the impression of displaying every icon imaginable, in actuality, it would take billions of years for it to render a recognizable icon.

5. The Demoscene 

The demoscene is a distinct network fo communities that have been a frequent source of inspiration for Rhizome’s community.

In the early 1980s, dial-up bulletin boards hosted extensive libraries of pirated software and videogames. These titles were distributed by software companies with copy protection in place, which was removed by savvy users, who would customarily add some digital graffiti to the software intro screen before sharing it with others. These intro screens grew into an early digital art form. “Intros were the computer nerd version of graffiti,” artist Cory Arcangel has observed. Crews made an effort to introduce as much visual complexity and style as they could into a highly constrained medium. 

Intros grew in popularity, and eventually crews began to use their visual vernacular to release standalone demos. Demos were often elaborate moving image works that were typically limited to tiny file sizes, like 4K, and sometimes written over the course of short hackathon-style competitions. “Like intros, demos are real-time graphics-and-sound software presentations, but they exist solely to push a computer to its limits,” Arcangel has observed. “They are a performative way for programmers and crews to flex their coding skills.”

6. The Birth of Processing 

In the early 2000s, the Processing programming language started to feature prominently in many projects supported and featured on Rhizome. 

Casey Reas, Co-Founder of Processing, reflected on the origins of the programming language in a 2009 Rhizome interview:

It was sometime in June 2001, as I was finishing up at MIT. We made a list of the basic specs for the environment and drawing functions. It was one 8 ½ x 11 inch typed page. By the fall, Ben [Fry] had something working and the first workshop took place in Japan in August, 2001... The big idea of Processing is the tight integration of a programming environment, a programming language, a community-minded and open-source mentality, and a focus on learning -- created by artists and designers, for their own community. The focus is on writing software within the context of the visual arts. Many other programming environments embodied some of these aspects, but not all.

John Maeda's Design By Numbers is the direct parent of Processing. Our goal was to emulate its simplicity and focus on making images, animation, and interaction. But, we wanted to exceed the limits of DBN: 100 x 100 pixels, grayscale, and integer math.

7. Glitch Art

Artists have long been fascinated by moments in which technology breaks down–perhaps none more so than JODI, an artist duo made up of Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans. In a post on the Rhizome lists from 1999, in which he discusses JODI's software-based artwork OSS (2000), Alex Galloway argues that "Focusing specifically on those moments where computers break down (the crash, the bug, the glitch), JODI discovers a new, autonomous aesthetic.” The aesthetic was certainly not entirely new even then, but JODI's early work is a particularly strong exploration of the principles of glitch art, before the term came into common usage.

It was some years later, in 2010, when the idea of “glitch art” began to circulate with greater intentionality. Rosa Menkman, a theorist and visual artist, was a key advocate for this new digital art practice. In her Glitch Studies Manifesto, she reflect on how computers, devices hard-coded in logic and predictable functions, are the perfect playground for pushing the boundaries of artistic expression: 

...the spectator is forced to acknowledge that the use of the computer is based on a genealogy of conventions, while in reality the computer is a machine that can be bent or used in many different ways. With the creation of breaks within politics and social and economical conventions, the audience may become aware of the preprogrammed patterns. Now, a distributed awareness of a new interaction gestalt can take form.

The ideas at play in glitch art have had many lives, and one of the most significant is the use of the word by Legacy Russell to describe “glitch feminism.” In her 2013 Rhizome essay “Elsewhere, After the Flood: Glitch Feminism and the Genesis of Glitch Body Politic,” Russell proposed that “the glitch encourages a slipping across, beyond, and through the stereotypical materiality of the corpus.” Russell's concept of "glitch feminism" highlighted the transformative potential of glitch and its usefulness in breaking down broader societal rules and codes.

8. The First NFT

Kevin McCoy's artwork Quantum (2014) features pulsing, multicolored rings of light against a black background, creating the sensation of moving through an astronomical phenomenon at speed. The artwork is a screen recorded loop, consisting of 179 frames, derived from a code-generated animation written in the Processing language.

Quantum is widely regarded as the first NFT artwork. In 2014, as part of Rhizome’s 7x7 program at the New Museum, McCoy and Anil Dash developed a system for establishing provenance for digital artworks on the NameCoin blockchain, called Monegraph. Prior to the launch of Ethereum, the project demonstrated that the blockchain could be used to establish a cryptographically certified chain of ownership of a digital work, allowing digital works to be authenticated, bought, and sold. 

The work’s evocation of a futuristic science fiction narrative is balanced by the presence of what looks like traces of image compression, though on closer inspection, they are effects introduced intentionally by the artist. In some ways, the story of Quantum is an example of how NFTs can allow the often-overlooked cultural value of digital works to be properly recognized. McCoy chose Quantum from his digital sketchbook to be the first work to be minted in this new system; the code had been written for possible use in a 2013 project, as a backdrop for a drag-racing video. Today, the work is very much in the foreground, inseparable from this origin story: suggestive of new worlds arriving, while rooted in the digital material of its time.

9. A Queer History of Computing

Jacob Gaboury’s 2013 series of articles A Queer History of Computing, published on Rhizome, explored five foundational figures in computing history and drew out the ways their sexuality impacted their lives and work. In particular, Gaboury wanted to “question the assumption that the technical and the sexual are so easily divided.” 

One work that surfaced in the series is a very early generative artwork by Christopher Strachey, made using a computer that weighed 10,000 lbs. 

In 1952 Strachey developed a love-letter generator that ran on the Manchester Mark 1 using a random number generating algorithm, predating the ELIZA natural language processing program by twelve years. The project is considered by many to be the first example of algorithmic or computational art, though such claims are always highly contested. As a mathematician and computer scientist, Christopher Strachey was also one of the founders of denotational semantics and a pioneer in programming language design; yet this is not the path Strachey began on as a young man growing up in Bloomsbury among artists and intellectuals.

10. Ix Shells, Rafaël Rozendaal, and Lillian Schwartz

Rhizome’s 2023 benefit honors three artists at differing stages in their careers who all have had a profound impact on the development of generative art.

Lillian Schwartz first encountered a computer at Bell Labs in the late 1960s. After participating in the MoMA exhibition The Machine at the End of the Mechanical Age, she was invited to tour the facilities by fellow participating artist Kenneth Knowlton, and ended up staying on for more than three decades. 

Despite being an unpaid “resident visitor” on a male-dominated environment, Schwartz made artistic use of an incredible range of research topics at Bell Labs. Among her many experiments, it is her work with early computer animation that is perhaps most immediately relevant to today‘s conversations about generative art. 

Schwartz developed computer animations, programming on punch cards, 2D and 3D graphics without pixel shifting. She wrote, “There is a definable chemistry behind the electronic palette, a combination of data, logic, and equations that inevitably begins as an obstacle to an untrained artist and as a potential diversion from his future sophistication. I had to push the early machine and cajole scientists to make the computer an art tool. The functions of the machine could not remain mystical if I was to assess how far it could be prodded.”

 The answer, initially, was “not very far.” As Zabet Patterson described it, 

Schwartz drew patterns on graph paper and then used EXPLOR to code pixel-like blocks that became generative shapes once input into the computer. She had to wait until the full processing was done and the image sequences were output to 35-mm film before she could see precisely what she would get.

Despite these limits, Schwartz had a relentless drive to find the edges of her medium and material. Through her relentless experimentation, she contributed significantly to defining what it means to make art with the computer.

In 2008, Rafaël Rozendaal was commissioned by Rhizome to create a website in which the user could shake a gelatinous dessert. It was a single-serving website—a form of art that had come to popularity around a movement known as NEEN, founded by Miltos Manetas and Mai Ueda in the early 2000s. As Rozendal recalls, 

I started publishing each “experiment” as a single webpage in a unique domain name... The domain name was my solution to create digital scarcity and a proof of authenticity: when a collector bought one of my websites, their name would be listed in the title tag of the website, and the domain name is transferred to them. They become the full owner. It was a proto-NFT form.

Like many of Rozendaal’s early works, that work was focused on a simple, humorous interaction, but he soon began to delve also into visual abstraction, using a simple set of rules to develop a seemingly endless set of variations, all at a tiny file size.  

In 2012, at the invitation of Rhizome Executive Director Lauren Cornell, Rozendaal was commissioned to present a selection of works for Seoul Square, the world’s largest LED screen. He presented a collection of single-serving websites, including Much Better Than This .com and Like This Forever .com, to name a few. The new canvas was well-suited to Rozendaal’s work. "The idea is that the website is like liquid, or like a piece of gas," he observed. "It adapts to whatever environment it has."

In 2021, Rozendaal named Rhizome as the beneficiary for an auction on the Art Blocks platform, which offered NFTs that were rendered in-browser from computer code that was stored on the blockchain itself. Rozendaal’s work for that auction, titled Endless Nameless, was the largest donation in Rhizome's twenty-five year history.

Itzel Yard, also known as Ix Shells, is a contemporary artist with a background in creative code who achieved early success through NFTs that involved flowing, organic forms realized through geometrical, black and white patterns. A way of reacing these works is suggested by Shells’ moniker, which as the artist has noted, evokes both computer terminal shell commands and oceanic life: 

Animals create "shells" to protect themselves- also "shells" is a computer program that takes the command from your keyboard to the OS and lets us start, kill, or automate processes. In short its a way to keep control while so many things are happening out there in the ocean, or, "the ocean of data.

This makes for a potent metaphor in the field of generative art; as Ron Eglash has observed, the shell is often associated with the concept of the infinite in African culture: 

The scaling properties of their logarithmic spirals; one can clearly see the potential for the spiral to continue without end despite its containment in a finite space – indeed, it is only because of its containment in a finite space that there is a sense of having gained access to or grasped at the infinite

“Grasping at the infinite” is perhaps an apt summary of what is at stake in much of generative art – and, indeed, of art of all kinds.

11. Starry Night by Alex Galloway, Mark Tribe and Martin Wattenberg

 In StarryNight, every email within the Rhizome archive was visually manifested as a luminous point of light against a dark background. The brightness of each point increased every time its corresponding message was accessed online. Through an ingenious navigation system, users could explore the emails by selecting assigned keywords, which would draw a constellation of interconnected points, evoking the interrelatedness of the database. As a timeless work of information aesthetics, it not only showcases the artists' vision but also offers a captivating glimpse into the early online community of Rhizome. 

Despite its historical importance, StarryNight was nonfunctional and partly lost for more than a decade, until it was restored by Rhizome’s digital preservation department using a partial copy of the Rhizome email archive copied from another work. Now, still images from this restored version form the basis of StarryNight Postcards, the official launch NFT for SEED and the starting point for a new chapter of Rhizome’s work with online community and generative art.

A GENERATIVE PARTNERSHIP

Excerpts from “Artforum Meets Altavista: An Interview with Mark Tribe and Laurel Ptak”

Laurel Ptak: I was hoping we could focus our conversation on the founding of Rhizome back in 1996. Can you set the scene for us? What were the events and experiences that led up to this for you? 

Mark Tribe: In 1995 and early ’96 I was living in Berlin, making relational art projects—although I don’t think we would’ve called them relational back then. I thought of them as art events. I was also making net art and working by day as a web designer at a place called Pixelpark. And I was hanging out in clubs a lot. There was a good deal of overlap between the club scene—particularly clubs where the music was techno and jungle—and the new media art or digital art scene. I was meeting other artists who were excited about the changes that were happening with the Internet, and about intersections between contemporary art and emerging technologies, particularly digital and networking technologies.

I had a couple of formative experiences that year. One was piling into a van with a bunch of other artists and driving overnight down from Berlin to Linz, Austria for the Ars Electronica Festival. That’s when I realized that there was a big shift going on in the world of electronic art, a.k.a. computer art, a.k.a. digital art. Many new people were coming in from various backgrounds. It was becoming, in a way, less specialized. The barriers to entry were falling for artists, as we reached a tipping point in terms of the accessibility, capability, and ubiquity of personal computers, and networks.

The Internet and the web had started to go mainstream, and suddenly people all over the world were waking up to the possibility that we could all be connected in a different way. The term “disintermediation” was on people’s lips; journalists and venture capitalists investing in companies like Netscape were talking about how the Internet would disintermediate economies, how it would cut out the gatekeepers and middlemen. And for artists, that meant direct access to audiences without having to go through gallerists, dealers, curators, and magazines. We could create our own art world that was more egalitarian, more open, perhaps more of a meritocracy. And as a young artist who was just starting to find his way in the art world, that had a lot of appeal, because I was on the outside of most of those barriers. 

LP: I would love to hear more about the name Rhizome, which comes from Deleuze and Guattari. For them, it was based on the botanical rhizome, an underground stem that connects plants in living networks. They use it to describe multiplicities and horizontal, non-hierarchical exit and entry points and trans-species connections. Where did the name come from for you?

MT: I was checking for domains on InterNIC to see what was available, and thought, oh, I should look for names in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, which was one of the few books I had brought with me from California. So I turned to the index, the pages fell open to the Rs, and my eye went right to “rhizome.” I thought, "that’s perfect." I registered the domain on December 13, 1995. Rhizome means many things for Deleuze and Guattari, but I took it as a metaphor for nonhierarchical, distributed networks. I liked the connotations. I thought it was a great name. And it was available.

LP: Were you responsible for the New Museum affiliation in 2003? 

MT: Yes. David Ross had joined Rhizome’s board and he introduced me to Lisa Phillips, who had become director of the New Museum in 1999. The New Museum’s back door was across the street from Rhizome, on Mercer Street in Manhattan, and Lisa and I met for coffee a few times to talk about the future of both organizations and how we might work together. I organized a couple of shows at the New Museum, working with [then-associate curator] Anne Ellegood, and we developed a good working relationship. In one of Rhizome’s nadirs, when money was tight, I started to explore different opportunities for becoming an organization in residence—I thought maybe at a university or a museum—and the New Museum was just a natural fit. I worked out the details of the affiliation with Lisa Roumell, then the Deputy Director of The New Museum. In a nutshell, the New Museum agreed to provide space and access to resources in exchange for Rhizome's expertise in digital art.

ARTIST BIOS
Rafaël Rozendaal is a visual artist who uses the internet as his canvas. He also creates installations, tapestries, lenticulars, haiku and lectures.

Best known for her experimental films, animation, videos and computer-aided art analysis, Lillian Schwartz became an early adopter of computer art in the mid-1960s. Born in 1927 in Cincinnati, her creativity was apparent at a young age, and she experimented with painting, drawing and sculpture before turning to technology to expand her artwork.  

In 1968, her kinetic sculpture Proxima Centauri was selected as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age exhibit. She then expanded her work into the computer arena, becoming one of the first resident artists at AT&T Bell Laboratories (1968-2002) and later acted as a consultant at AT&T, IBM and Lucent Technologies. 

Her films were recently included in the 2022 Venice Biennale Milk of Dreams exhibit and, in the 1970s, began receiving honors at a variety of animation and film festivals, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, CINE, Cannes and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. In 1984, she received an Emmy Award for her computer-generated public service announcement for the Museum of Modern Art.

Itzel Yard, known as Ix Shells, is a self-taught creative coder and artist based in Panama with a background in Architectural Technology and Computer Science. With humble beginnings learning creative coding online, Yard has become one of the most recognizable names in contemporary generative art. In 2021, her breakout work, 'Dreaming at Dusk', a collaboration with the Tor Project, sold for 500 ETH—over 2 million dollars at the time of sale—making it the highest selling NFT by a female artist.That same year, Yard was featured in Fortune’s “NFTy50.” Her work has been sold at auction houses such as Christies and Sothebys, acquired by the permanent collection of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and exhibited in world renowned shows such as Art Dubai 2022, Kraftwerk Berlin 2022, and Fotografiska Stockholm. Most recently, Yard’s work was featured on the April/May cover of Fortune Magazine. In 2023 Yard released an artwork titled Ahead of Time in collaboration with the L.A. County Museum of Art for their debut NFT release titled Remembrance of Things Future. Additionally, IxShells has worked closely with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, in a series of talks including Art Basel Miami and the Digital Life Design conference in Munich, Germany where she spoke alongside fellow artists for the panel It's Natural To Be A Machine.

Back in March, Rhizome relaunched its Microgrant program, inviting proposals for Browser-based projects and pitches for articles about works of born-digital art in the Rhizome ArtBase. Our staff reviewed over 500 proposals—an unprecedented amount in Rhizome Microgrant history—from all over the world, with some truly standout applications. 

Proposals were evaluated based on conceptual strength and relevance to the proposal category.

We’re so excited to announce the full list of awardees! 

Browser-based projects 

Chia Amisola, When We Love

“When We Love is a series of interconnected experiences about love extending beyond one screen. Made of variable duration vignettes, solo/shared encounters–questioning offline/online boundaries of love (or lack thereof). Inspired by my growing in a repressive Catholic country & placemaking online—it's uncontained, dwelling within extant languages/rituals for radical joy/care on the web & reclaiming transgressive publics. A main dating sim is hub to other pieces (from sites to Chrome extensions, bots); you stargaze, tend gardens, shelve libraries, collect, gather together; to themes of queerness, liberation, surveillance, spirituality, ritual, & worlding.The grant helps fund extensive server costs & stipend for this long chaptered project.”

Jenna deBoisblanc, Public Access Memories Gallery Show

“Public Access Memories Gallery (publicaccessmemories.com) is a net art gallery that offers the HTML gallery as a canvas. PAM’s latest project is a new group show of 8-12 artists titled “Beyond” that will coincide with the 2023-24 Wrong Biennale. The show will include an open call for any digital work that considers, probes, or reimagines the spatial dimensionality of the web.”

Erma Fiend, Eternal Organs

“Eternal Organs" will be an interactive browser based experience made up of layered stop motion animation loops to create a Cronenberg-meets-Rube Goldberg machine system of surreal breathing organs. This grant will allow me to learn new tools and expand my established techniques and aesthetic to create dynamic animation that can engage the viewer with an interactive, nonlinear experience.”

Daniela Medina Poch, Aqualiteracies: A Decentralized and Living Repository of Water Practices

“Recognizing water as a living archive of situated knowledge, we address multispecies everyday communications and performativities as agencies of futurity in relation to the current water crisis.

Aqualiteracies is a research in flux that emerges from sensitive experiences and direct exchange with water. It has taken shape as a workshop in the framework of La Escuela___ with participants from all over Latam. During this workshop we generated valuable content.

We would use the grant to generate A Repository of Aqualiteratures, a platform to offer a playful and accessible navigation to these and an invitation to other users to share their ways of relating to water.”

Tanvi Mishra, Tridal: a collaborative game about land use

“Tridal is not saving the world we lost, but building anew.

As a multiplayer, cooperative environment, Tridal advocates responsible land use. It reprioritizes current resources– forests, farms, urban land, etc. – using mechanics that shift thinking paradigms.

Players develop strategies to ensure continual food security and habitation while keeping rising tides at bay. The resultant carbon emissions challenge players to adapt and evolve. Every in-game action has multitudinous consequences, illustrating the scale of human damage.”

Daniel Murray, Chaos Layout Generator

“I'm interested in creating a play on website layout generators (such as https://layout.bradwoods.io, pictured above) - these tools allow people to create organised and formal website structures. The Chaos Layout Generator will focus on creating deliberately anarchic websites without straight lines, consistent colours or fixed fonts. My generator will encourage people to explore intentionally broken and unstructured design; while still delivering HTML code that is usable and inviting for less experienced web developers and homepage creators. My goal is to contextualise the browser as an artistic medium and express the belief that the web is an extension of humanity and must represent its messy, colourful and inexplicable need for chaos and reinvention.”

Dominique Petit-Frere, Archiving Africa's Liminal Futures

“The archive is a web-based, interactive repository that maps the architecture of incomplete and abandoned heritage sites in Africa, dating from the independence period to the present. The archive collects and displays buildings and structures across Africa in an effort to bring to light under-represented typologies in African architectural discourse. However, we are at a critical stage to which we need to find the right web-based platform / portal for the 3D artifacts of the archive to live in one setting and we believe the support of Rhizome will help us in our efforts in doing so!”

Blake Planty, CATBOY.CHURCH

“This project is a browser-based adaptation of my prose short story "THE CATBOY IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS" about autistic catboys and their new pseudo-religion. The story was published on the now defunct literary magazine SURFACES.CX, therefore not integrated into my personal site proper.

I will create pages in a style consistent with my Neocities-based serial narrative project CATBOY.CHURCH: Collective nostalgia for a past that never existed spreading like toxoplasmosis. Capricious individuals are involuntarily remembering things they’d rather not. Faustian “CATBOYS” will save them."

Beckett Rowan, goodbye.monster

“goodbye.monster is a game about saying goodbye by Eugene An, Rook Liu, Beckett Rowan, and Matt Wang. gameplay includes caring for short-lived creatures; wandering a text-based world; and having limited interactions with other players. our overall goal is to interrogate agency in “creature collector” games. we focus on the creatures being able to die in opposition to player-centric models of gameplay and against the idea that these creatures can be meaningfully “used".

this project requires a server and database, and our costs are about $110 per year currently. A $500 microgrant would ensure that we’re able to cover those costs during our development phase and give us the time to find a sustainable solution for long-term hosting.”

Irene Ruby and Cori Cannavino, Digital Domestic Work Sampler

“Digital Domestic Work Sampler proposes a browser-based, archival, and visual research study of kaoanis as a digital medium. Our research historicizes early pixel art within the tradition of needlework samplers. Funding will aid in the creation of an interactive website centered around a physical piece in progress: Digital Domestic Work Sampler. The site will attempt to translate a large cross-stitch needlework sampler into digital space, using GIFs from the early 2000s to allude to historic cross-stitch spot samplers created by domestic workers at the height of their popularity. Each GIF corresponds with a motif on the physical sampler and links to a subpage exploring a facet of the research involved in the project.”

Nitcha Tothong and Kengchakaj Kengkarnka, Network gong ensemble archive

“A browser-based experiential communal sonic experience and an aural archive of Southeast sound cultures(tuning systems) where the site has collections of various sounds that can be played with others through the network. To explore Southeast Asia's microtonality and sound cultures generatively, aiming to create decolonized possibilities and reconnect and reinterpret ancestors' knowledge within the Internet space and contemporary context where the sound can resound, migrate and transform from the uneven geographies to digital geological sites. To challenge the music technology rooted in the hegemony and dominance of Western sound. We look into the past, honor the non-dominance and suppressed history, and search for an alternative future.”

Helen Shewolfe Tseng, Trickster at the End of a World

“Trickster at the End of a World is a visual poetic narrative involving coyotes, trickster archetypes, PTSD, lost dæmons, colonialism, migratory adaptations, spirit dimensions, quantum uncertainty, ancestral folk magic, and relearning how to be an animal. I first created this piece as a part of a mainstage talk for ICON11. 

I propose to adapt this piece for the browser, with sound, video, animation, and interactive/computational forms in addition to visuals and writing. Alternately, I propose adapting some excerpt of the piece, e.g. this fission/fusion animation as a mini-game."

Zichen Yuan, Local Wind

“Inspired by the ever present wind both as a natural phenomena and a cultural analogy, Local Wind introduces the unstableness and flux of the physicality of moving air into a browser. The project engages with wind in two ways: cursor and live stream.

Cursor represents the viewer in the browser space. On a computer without touch screen, it is arguably the only connection between the real and the virtual. Local Wind reverses the permanence and stableness of the cursor by adding weather-like effect to the cursor.

Live Stream is the second fold that I am currently working as the content for this website.”

Asad Ali Zulfiqar, now/here

“now/here is a map of walks in the city of Karachi recorded in a thread of 28 emails. Through an epistolary story about queer relationship blooming and wilting, this project is an experiment in creating a queer autobiographic practice that honors and upholds the transient nature of identity through the transformative potential of compassionate remembering. This browser-based work unfolds in the private space of the user’s inbox and is rich with hypertext."

Articles about works of net art in the Rhizome ArtBase

Jo Suk

“Presentation software has become an emblem of white-collar industry, where it has transcended its synoptic function and is now a standalone commodity. My work will analyze presentation software as an apparatus for a neoliberal managerial ideology that trains workers to parrot the needs, desires, and beliefs of corporations. I will reference existing critiques of slide software and Artbase works that remix the medium’s intended purposes, such as “ppt.xxx”, “ikebananana2”, and RTMark’s powerpoint. The work will expose readers of Rhizome—presumably cultural workers reliant on such digital collaboration tools themselves—to a critical perspective of their crafts, while also validating the use of low-entry software for creative work.”

Johann Yamin

“I propose a text that examines the lifeworlds of Flash. This begins with a curiosity about Saraswati Gramich’s Plunge! (2002), an obscure Flash artwork from a feminist Eurasian artist once based in Singapore, and more recently in France. Gramich’s practice is featured within cyberfeminist theorist Irina Aristarkhova’s article, “Happy Endings: Engagements with Women Artists in Singapore" (2003), broaching broader artistic trajectories of cyberfeminism.

I seek to connect Gramich’s practice with Flash works by Yael Kanarek and Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, emphasizing the ability for Flash to nurture imagined worlds of artificial life and alternative logics, raising critical questions about the afterlives of Flash.”

Rodrigo Arenas Carter

“My interest is in Detrimundo by Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga, approaching it as a practice of resistance, an ironic problematization/disruption of the multidimensionality of both gentrification and the American Dream. The last one is represented in the perfect smile of the liminal figure of Don Francisco, welcoming you to the website. It's relevant not only due to those issues, but also because it dialogues with the current gentrification of CDMX and other Mexican territories. I want to write it for Rhizome because of: the scarcity of articles (I found 2) and digital artworks (I found 9) from Latin America in your database; the current relevance of both issues for Latinxs; and the continuous interest of Rhizome in digital arts.”

Kaloyan Kolev

“STICKYPHONE is a proto-social network contained on a single audio file, viewable and editable by everyone. Made on Flash in 2005, it predated the craze over social audio and decentralized ledgers by over a decade. Ivan Bachev, the creator of STICKYPHONE, is a little-known Bulgarian musician. In the mid-2000s, he created social audio tools and translated essays on new media via a now-deleted online library. His tools were all about communal ownership, archiving and remixing – a philosophy radically different from Silicon Valley tech companies. I’d love to interview Bachev for a piece on STICKYPHONE and the community around it. What can they teach us about the state of ownership & collaboration today? I hope that writing this piece for Rhizome will not only introduce the Bulgarian net music scene to a Western audience, but also help reintroduce it at home.”

Natasha Chuk

“In Rosa Menkman’s live audio-visual performance The Collapse of PAL (2010), a glitch aesthetic illustrates the relationship between performance failure, distant memory, the specter of remediated media, and the materiality of data loss. The live performance, which is now archived as an 8-minute 30-second documentation, included live-glitching via a NES game console and a broken camera to use the aesthetic of loss characterized by the obsolescence of technology in what reads as a defiant final act of restoration and renewal. Menkman’s corporeal participation with various forms of banished technologies chronicles a familiar pattern. The work feels especially relevant today as the fast-moving, pervasive impact of AI is needlessly forcing out many imaging technologies, despite the continued relevance and hidden traces of existing visual media (drawing, painting, photography, digital art) and human labor (creative, emotional, research, data entry, transcription, verification, and review), which necessitate their ability to function. Like Menkman, this written text will contextualize this work in relation to today’s activities involving remediation and technical obsolescence.”

Rhizome’s commissions program is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Rhizome Microgrants 2023 are made possible by Teiger Foundation. 

Please join us in welcoming Skawennati to Rhizome’s Board of Directors! 

Based in Montreal, Skawennati's artistic practice questions our relationships with technology and highlights Indigenous people in the future. An early adopter of cyberspace as both a location and a medium, she creates machinimas—movies made in virtual environments—as well as still images, sculpture, fashion, and performative experiences. 

Skawennati writes,

I have been interested in Rhizome since the beginning. I hope to bring to the organization my experience and perspective as a contemporary multimedia artist, a non-profit organizer, a peace activist, a cyberpunk avatar and an urban Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) woman.

The chair of Rhizome’s Board, Greg Pass, notes that Skawennati’s membership of the Board builds on her long commitment to the digital art field. He observes, “Skawennati is a true believer in digital art, and alongside her own practice, has fostered collectives and institutions that have supported the involvement of Indigenous artists in digital culture in transformative ways. We are honored to welcome her to the Board.”

Last December, Rhizome presented CyberPowWowat the New Museum, which was a restaging of one of the first major online exhibitions, launched by the Nation to Nation Collective, of which Skawennati was a founding member. CyberPowWow presented works by Indigenous artists–sometimes in dialogue with works by settler artists–in a multi-user, graphical chat environment, which was available online as well as in community centers across North America.

Wa’tkwanonhwerá:ton’, Skawennati! Welcome!

Bio
Skawennati’s works have been presented in Europe, Oceania, Asia and across North America and are included in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Thoma Foundation, among others. She is honored to have received a 2022 Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions Grant; a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship; a Visiting Artist Fellowship at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library and an Honorary Doctorate from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. 

Over the years, Skawennati has been active in various communities. In the 1980s she joined the nuclear-disarmament peace group, SAGE (Students Against Global Extermination), and the Quebec Native Women’s Association. In the 1990s she co-founded Nation to Nation, a First Nations artist collective, while working in and with various Indigenous organizations and artist-run centres, including the Native Friendship Centre of Montreal and Oboro. In 2005, she co-founded Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research-creation network based at Concordia University whose projects include the Skins workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling and Digital Media as well as the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. Throughout most of the teens, she volunteered extensively for her children’s elementary school, where she also initiated an Indigenous Awareness programme. In 2019, she co-founded centre d’art daphne, Montreal’s first Indigenous artist-run centre.

Originally from Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory, Skawennati belongs to the Turtle clan. She holds a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, where she resides. She is represented by ELLEPHANT.

Learn more about Rhizome and our Board of Directors

Part 1 : Performing Internet

Welcome to My Homeypage - Paper Rad, 2002

Read the essay "WELCOME TO MY HOMEY PAGE: SEVEN YEARS OF PAPERRAD.ORG" on archive.rhizome.org.

Hello Ana Voog - Ana Voog, 1998

This work was originally extracted from the release of Ana Voog's "Please God" CD single. This was screened alongside a private, feature-length work provided to us by the artist that consisted of various compositions and highlights from a decade+ of her '24/7 art+life cam!' 

Melissa Gira Grant mentions Ana Voog, as well as Jennifer Ringley of Jennicam, in her 2011 Rhizome essay "She Was A Camera. In this article, Grant outlines some of the technical and communal aspects associated with early webcam streams online.

Learn more about Ana and her extensive work as an artist. 

Jawpan - Troy Innocent, 1993

This work was originally presented at FISEA'93: Fourth International Symposium on Electronic Art.

Electronic Cafe 84, 1984 12’ (Net Art Anthology) - Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz, 1984

"Staged alongside the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Electronic Cafe '84 offered networked computer terminals and other more inclusive high-tech audiovisual tools at the Museum of Contemporary Art as well as eateries with deep roots in four distinct communities: The Gumbo House in the predominantly African-American community of South Central, Ana Maria Restaurant in the Latinx enclave of East LA, The 8th Street Restaurant in Koreatown, and Gunter’s Cafe in Venice Beach.

Drawing on the long history of cafés as institutions that foster community, revolution, and social justice, Electronic Cafe ’84 aimed to give people agency in shaping the networked world to come, rather than having it decided for them.

A key part of the project was an extension of Community Memory, a text-based bulletin board system that had been founded in the Bay Area in 1973. Community Memory had long served as a digital resource where the public could store and retrieve messages, exchanging ideas and information via terminals in public spaces such as coffeehouses."

Read the full description of this project and it's history on Net Art Anthology.

Samsung - Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, 1999 

"Since 1997, Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge have been working together under the name Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries. Adopting the model of a fictional corporation, they produce online artworks that follow a strict formula: Flash movies consisting of texts set in all-caps Monaco typeface, appearing onscreen in sync with jazz and bossa nova soundtracks. Employing an “extremely pushy visual language,” in the words of Josephine Bosma, the works of YHCHI borrow from cinema, poetry, and propaganda.

In Samsung (1999), one of the duo’s earliest works, a narrator finds salvation from their life of aimless ennui thanks to Samsung—not the South Korean company or its products, but the very idea of Samsung. Their repeated expressions of love and admiration seem absurd, but also point to the ineffable quality of brands and corporations."

This excerpt is from Rhizome's Net Art Anthology.

Smashmouth Recreated From Windows XP Sounds - James Nielssen, 2017

An internet classic. The description for the video reads: "pass me the floppy disk."

≈ - Sebastian Schmieg, 2014

"For all fans of liquids and computers." —The YouTube video description of ≈. 

DESCENT (desktop performance) - Peter Burr, Mark Fingerhut and FORMA, 2017

"Looking back at this historical trajectory, Peter Burr, Mark Fingerhut, and Forma have created a spiraling inter-dimensional narrative aptly titled DESCENT—a meditation on one of humanity’s blackest hours. Taking the form of a desktop application, descent.exe gives the user a brief glimpse of a world descending into darkness - an unrelenting plague indifferent to the struggles of the user. There is a silver lining, however, tucked into the software’s final sweep. An equanimous watcher, reduced to a single eye, looks on as the plague of rats that has infested your desktop destroys itself."

Money2 - Lorna Mills and Yoshi Sodeoka, 2012

"Money2 by Lorna Mills and Yoshi Sodeoka is a brief, merciless video assembled from Lorna Mills's found and altered animated gif collages. These looping animations play against a soundtrack by Plink Flojd, a super audiovideo collective started by David Quiles Guillo with co-founders Yoshi Sodeoka and Eric Mast.

Money2 is the cacophonous, dysfunctional, absurd, idiotic sequel to Pink Floyd's classic “Money”. The band’s original version from the 70’s exhorted their audience to reject wealth and conspicuous consumption, while at the same time launching them into the stratosphere of commercial success.

Pink Floyd's "Money" remains an enormously popular song, despite the fact that all of the ideas about capitalism embedded in the song are now four decades out of date. Money2 expands the original imagery to include the darkness, desperation, folly and anxiety that surrounds wealth and the lack of it.

By pairing a mashed, mangled musical version with found then re-arranged animated GIFs, Pink Floyd’s “Money” is revived and buried alive at the same time."

—digitalmediatree 

Selekthor - Viktor Timofeev, 2013

“Selekthor is a looping collage-based puzzle without instructions written in native Javascript, originally hosted at minerpie.net.” To play the piece in-browser, visit Viktor's website.

Read Timofeev's Artist Profile

Deep Down Tidal- Tabita Rezaire, 2017

Somewhere between a video collage and performance series, Tabita Rezaire weaves together visual and auditory landscapes that highlight various aspects of technological colonialism. Commissioned for Citizen X - Human, Nature and Robots Rights by Oregaard Museum, Denmark.

Computers are Fun - Sally Pryor, 1983

Created during a time when using computers was mostly male-dominated, Computers are Fun is "an experimental video artwork that playfully explores the possibilities, relationships and intersections between gender, art and technology. Barbie, as a role model for young girls, confidently manipulates the computer and leads the way. The video ends with a note of caution: 'Use With Care.'"

Video retrieved from a neglected videocassette as a part of the “Creative Micro-computing in Australia, 1976-1992” ARC Future Fellowship.

Rejected or Unused Clips, Arranged in Order of Importance - Seth Price, 2003

"Rejected or Unused Clips, Arranged in Order of Importance purports to be a collection of unused video and audio clips left over from the artist's other works, from an abandoned audio piece on religious themes to an exploration of web video as it emerged in a time before YouTube and video search engines. Interlacing voice-over and sound with the sorts of graphic imagery that could belong equally to advertisements, corporate reels, amateur home pages, and video games, Price takes on religious and scientific discourse, the history of experimental cinema, the interrelation of culture and technology, and the social naturalization of violence. At the same time, however, this index of material at once discarded and made useful, with its claim to a formal structure based on 'importance,' provokes the question of how much its themes and messages are actually intended to cohere and communicate."

—Electronic Arts Intermix

Eulogy for a Black Mass - Aria Dean, 2017

"Memes–infinitely self-referential, seemingly originless, and virally proliferating–have come to be not merely part of our daily life, but a force that shapes how we see the world itself. And memes have something black about them. So says artist, writer, and curator Aria Dean as she explores how black people create, care for, and share memes, or images defined not by what they are in and of themselves, but by their transmission.

These images born of black creative labor circulate independently of the black body, forming networks deeper in time and wider in distribution than any singular individual. Mobile and unmored, they move about the digital world marring clear ontological lines along the way. Memes are propelled into a universe where they might mutate and grow, where they might be reuploaded and compressed, and where they might even be stolen by white users. This narrated compilation of videos that are themselves seemingly sourceless, but yet cared for and re-uploaded, is but another node in this network of infinite circulation. It is an exploration in thinking blackness through memes and memes through blackness."

The film can be viewed on Arkvive's Website.

Breaking Bad: the bitTorrent Edition - Conor Mcgarrigle, 2013

"This video is made from the final episode of Breaking Bad incompletely downloaded from the internet via bittorrent.

The video has been linearly edited, no digital effects were used and all effects are in the corrupted file. The final episode of Breaking Bad broke bitTorrent records when it was released with over 500,000 people sharing the file within 12 hours of its release.

The video captures this episode of the popular TV show in the act of being shared by these users on bitTorrent. The video simultaneously acts as a visualisation of bitTorrent traffic and the practice of filesharing as well as being an aesthetically beautiful and unique by-product of the bitTorrent process, the file codec and the size of the bitTorrent swarm as the pieces of the original file are rearranged and reconfigured into a new transitory in-between state."

—Conor Mcgarrigle

User Unfriendly Interface - Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski, 1994

The 2023 FWB festival marked the first time this video has been screened since 1997. The piece is described by Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski as “a CD ROM/Installation” exploring “themes of conspiracy theories, male vs. female concept of space, dating services, men's issues & personality testing.” It was originally produced with the assistance of the Australian Film Commission.

Core Dump - Francois Knoetze, 2018

"The four films of Core Dump are rhizomatic assemblages of found footage, performance documentation and recorded interviews that form narrative portraits of the uncertainty in the nervous system of the digital earth. The films are fragmented arrangements of images and sounds, with each chapter forming links across geographic and temporal discontinuities.

The series compares critical contexts and histories to suggest that the crucial technologies involved in moving towards a more just and equitable world are less physical than they are social. While the cynical billionaires of Silicon Valley invest in transhumanist technologies in an attempt to become immortal, build luxury underground apocalypse bunkers to fight off future climate refugees, and design rockets to colonise mars, Core Dump emerges from the dystopian landfills of consumer culture as an imaginary of a new inclusive humanism that underscores relationality and interhuman narratives."

—Francois Knoetze

Watch the trailer

Anti Social Media - Kurosai, 2023

Self-proclaimed "afro surrealist anime anthologist" and genius video editor, Kurosai describes this video for his typical youtube audience: "After Elon's Twitter takeover, the world of social media is shifting. Place your bets on where the future of social media leads us." 

Coincellpro7

Coincellpro7 is yet another mysterious pseudo-anonymous meme account but every once in awhile, the complexity of a post's video editing is nothing short of an internet masterpiece. Another favorite video on their account connects the tiktok / k-pop danc-ification with a few classic, predecessors of internet dance. 

Bed PC 24 Hour Stream (6 Minute Cut) - Filip Kostic, 2021

"Bed PC 24 Hour Stream (2021) was an endurance performance in Bed PC in which I live streamed on twitch for 24 hours straight. During the stream I gamed, tried to work on some art, spoke with friends who called in to talk about things ranging from making art, to gaming, to being in motion vs. being sedentary, to the future of art and institutions, to Yugoslavian monuments, watched documentaries, drank a lot of energy drinks, and tried to sleep on the Uberman schedule."

—Statement from artist's website.

The image below is from a gallery-presented variation of the original sculpture from the stream.

A 24 minute cut of the stream is currently hosted on youtube by the artist.

Adversalife - Ville Kallio,  2018

This animated work is a precursor to the much beloved game, Cruelty Squad. Ville's work consists of vivid colors, a love of the nostalgic limitations of early 3D video game aesthetics, and a healthy amount of techno dystopia.

Ville's company slogan is "The authority on Life."

How To Give Your Best Self Some Rest - Sebastian Schmieg, 2014

A video tutorial introducing the “aesthetic of detachment,” published as a standalone website.

Strategically underperform as a vacuum cleaner robot, smart lock, delivery robot, or AI assistant.

Commissioned by Goethe-Instituts of East Asia and Haus der Elektronischen Künste Basel for the online exhibition “Hybrid by Nature: Human.Machine.Interaction“.

Party on the CAPS - Meriem Bennani, 2018

"Party on the Caps is set mainly in a Moroccan neighborhood of an island in the Atlantic called the Caps that has been set up as a prison for unwanted immigrants in a future where teleportation has become the travel norm. People deposited in the island’s shantytown are immigrants who have been intercepted mid-teleport by American “troopers,” who appear in the film as circling drones—bright, ominous, watchful spots hovering in the distant sky. Some residents of the Caps suffer strange disorders (“plastic face syndrome”) as a consequence of being molecularly intercepted and reassembled."

Watch the trailer.

This program was organized by Briana Griffin, Rhizome Community Designer, and Michael Connor, Rhizome Co-Executive Director.

We're excited to introduce the cohort making up NEW INC's 2023-24 Art & Code track, a partnership between Rhizome and NEW INC.

NEW INC is the first museum-led cultural incubator, which supports a diverse range of creative practitioners with a values-driven program and safe space for gathering and developing creative projects and businesses. The Art & Code track is a space for artists, designers, researchers, and technologists to redefine the artistic landscape through internet-based practice. Celine Wong Katzman, Co-Director at the School for Poetic Computation, was a mentor for the 2022 and 2023 cohorts. This year, Eileen Isagon Skyers, Co-Founder at Gemma will serve as a mentor. 

Learn more about the 2022-23 Art & Code cohort below:

Chia Amisola is an internet / ambient artist from Manila, Philippines. Their (web)site-specific art is an act of worldmaking constructing spaces, systems, and tools that posit worlds where creation is synonymous with liberation. Ambience functions as a political practice: their work deals with visibility, placemaking, organizing, archives, infrastructure, identity, labor, and ubiquity to radically reimagine our ecologies. Chia is the Founder of Developh, a critical technology institute in the Philippines founded in 2016. They also steward the Philippine Internet Archive, a publishing / research project and series of new media artistic inventions based on the premise that the history of the Filipino internet is a history of Filipino people.

Simply put, they wish to gather all the people they love in one place and build a poetic internet that might be that place.

elekhlekha (Nitcha Tothong and Kengchakaj) is a Bangkok-born, Brooklyn-based collaborative artist practice focusing on research that examines and decoded past histories by creating, using code, algorithm, multimedia, and technology to experiment, explore, and define decolonized possibilities.

elekhlekha has received a City Artist Corps Grant for their first collaborative project, Jitr (จิตร), a performative audio-visual that utilizes historical research, Southeast Asian sound cultures, and live coding tools to reconcile Southeast Asia's shared heritage, along with funding from Queens Council on the Arts and Babycastles. In 2022, they were awarded The Lumen Prize Gold Award.

Dan Gorelick is a musician, creative technologist, and organizer who is based in the Bay Area and has a presence in Brooklyn and Berlin. He graduated from Boston University with a degree in Computer Engineering. Dan creates live audiovisual performances, blending his classical cello experience with the practice of live-coding: creating music with code. He explores what is uniquely possible when combining the acoustic and electronic practices to create live expressive and improvisational works. He also teaches workshops about live-coding and speaks about the creative possibilities of the practice.

He values growing with community and is a co-founder of the Bay Area live audio-visual collective AV Club. He is also an organizer and member of the LivecodeNYC and TopLap Berlin collectives. In addition to working on various creative research projects, he is now developing a new project called Club Code, a non-location-specific collection of artists focusing on live-coding performance.

Born in Beijing, Banyi Huang黄半衣 (they/them) is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Their interdisciplinary practice combines animation, digital fabrication, and writing to explore queer reenactments of Chinese mythology, folklore, and spirituality. Through the creation of digital-ambient environments and talismanic ritual devices, they address themes of shame, alienation, and intergenerational wounds within the Asian diaspora, creating a feedback loop of healing, unblocking, and recursive transformation.

Their work has been shown at Smack Mellon, The Soto Velez Clemente Center, Special Special, Artist’s Space in New York, and the Flat Earth Film Festival in Seydisfjordur, Iceland. Banyi has contributed writings to the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Spike Art, ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum China, Performa, Frieze Magazine, and has realized curatorial projects at the Musée des Arts Asiatiques in Nice, France, PRACTICE Yonkers, and Assembly Room in New York.

Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She creates performances inviting viewers to engage. To remote control her dates. To be followed. To welcome her in as their human smart home. To attend a party hosted by artificial intelligence. Lauren is the creator of p5.js, an open source programming language for learning creative expression through code online with over 10 million users worldwide. Lauren is a Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. She has been recognized as a United States Artist Fellow, Sundance New Frontier Fellow, Eyebeam Fellow, and Creative Capital Grantee.

Maya Man is an artist focused on contemporary identity culture on the internet. Her websites, generative series, installations, textiles, and posts examine dominant narratives around femininity, authenticity, and the performance of self online.

Our Friend the Computer is the research-based creative team of Camila Galaz and Ana Meisel. Highlighting lesser-known histories of computing and technology, Our Friend the Computer develops engaging historically grounded podcasts and multimedia projects promoting digital and historical literacy. With Camila's background in research-based video art and writing, and Ana's background in creative coding, curation, and online learning production, Our Friend the Computer creates audio and video projects based on a belief that an understanding of the ideas and dreams that came before can lead people to imagine tech futures beyond our current paradigm. Their eponymous monthly podcast is a sister project of the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado.

Processing Foundation’s mission is to promote software learning within the arts, artistic learning within technology-related fields, and to celebrate the diverse communities that make these fields vibrant, liberatory, and innovative. Our goal is to support people of all backgrounds in learning how to program and make creative work with code, especially those who might not otherwise have access to tools and resources. We also believe that some of the most radical futures and innovative technologies are being built by communities that have been pushed to the margins by dominant tech. We hope to support those who have been marginalized by technology in continued self-determination by providing time, space, and resources. Our New Inc team members are comprised of Suhyun (Sonia) Choi, Tsige Tafesse, and Rachel Lim, with project leads and their mentors, as well as board members based in other parts of the world.

RaFia Santana is a Brooklyn-born multidisciplinary artist using repetition, self portraiture, and music performance to self-soothe, seek pleasure, and crack jokes throughout their experiences with mental illness, chronic fatigue, sensory overload, and everyday racial violence.

RaFia uses bright saturated colors and rhythmic productions to stimulate energy and attention. They use hashtags and slogans as both memorization practice and call to action. RaFia constructs audio and visual loops that "breathe" which simultaneously represent and calm their anxiety. With their compulsion to edit and visualize the self, RaFia is in full control of their display.

Across all mediums RaFia's focus is rhythm, repeat, rest and reflect.

Ruby Thelot is a designer and researcher based in New York. He is the founder of the award-winning creative research and design studio 13101401 inc. His work focuses on the interactions between humans and artificial intelligence, the metaverse and the implications of being-on-line. He has given talks and shown works in Tallin, Berlin and Abuja, amongst other places.

Babette Thomas is a radio producer, artist, writer and PhD student at Yale University in the departments of African-American and American Studies. They’ve worked at institutions such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, The National Museum of African American History, SF MOMA and NPR. In their work, they explore how new media (specifically sound media) can be used to tell Black history and Black stories in ways that are tangible, educational and accessible.

They produce podcasts, radio stories, and sound works about Black history and culture. They also use their research skills and knowledge of histories of cultural production to digitize in-house exhibitions at museums and cultural centers.

Space Type is a studio practice that specializes in typographic design in the form of custom typefaces, large-format murals, digital experiences, and riso-printed publications. Run by Lynne Yun and Kevin Yeh, their work focuses on nurturing meaningful typographic relationships that highlight the rich histories of languages and fresh perspectives beyond traditional methods.

Their work has been recognized and presented internationally and installed in public galleries, exhibitions, and open-air sites. In addition to their exploratory practice, they collaborate with students, educators, organizations, and galleries to incorporate new technologies and diverse typographic influences into their practice. They regularly engage with communities and institutions through traditional and experimental workshops, classes, and open-source tools and resources.

In June, Rhizome and NEW INC presented works by artists in the 2022-23 Art & Code Track in a culminating exhibition at Dunkunsthalle, a former Dunkin’ Donuts turned art space founded by artist Rachel Rossin in 2022. Earlier this year, Rhizome undertook a curatorial residency in the space, where we presented Internetausdrucker Book store + Reading Room. We are pleased to share documentation of works by the Art & Code members, made up of artists, teachers, technologists, and more, who practiced together over the course of a year to expand ways of thinking about art, technology and the Internet. 

Works on view ranged in concept and medium; from an interactive CD-ROM storytelling game, to a poetry commission project first published on Venmo, to glass video sculptures that use the concept of fog as a way to realize liberatory ideas about trans futurity. 

The Art & Code showcase was curated by Celine Wong Katzman, who also served as the track’s mentor, and produced by Lauren Goshinski. Special thanks to Rachel Rossin, Vincent Naples, Technical Producer, Tony Tirador, Production Assistant, installers Blake Robbins and Brian Oakes, and docents Paola Ortega Hurtado, Drew Atz, and Sydney Abady.

Herdimas Anggara, RASUK

RASUK embOdies the essence Of spirit pOssessiOn, exerting its influence. Over the cOurse of the past twO years, I have delved deep intO the realm Of live ZOOm desktOp perfOrmances, manipulating and cOnjuring fOrth digital vernaculars. In this prOcess, I twist and distOrt the very fabric Of standard business platfOrms/applicatiOns (GOOgle DOcs and GOOgle Spreadsheet amOng Others), unraveling the threads Of familiarity and shattering precOnceived ideOlOgies embedded within each system. What if, within these ethereal realms, religiOus ecstasy reverberates and resOnates? What if these cOrpOreal pOssessiOns transmute Our perceptiOns Of symbOlic cOnventiOns, such as the user interface? HOw can we fathOm Our true sense Of agency as we navigate these seemingly mundane machines?

Learn more about the Artist’s work 

xtine burrough, Paying it Forward

Paying It Forward is a one-cent poetry commission, publishing, and translation project. Participants who submit 166 characters or fewer about the dehumanizing effects of capitalism receive their commission as a one-penny payment on Venmo. This action transforms the payment app into a poetry publishing platform. I translated screenshots of these poems to video and printed ephemera to explore the aesthetic possibilities of combining type, images, sound, and moving content. 

Poems in this video are by Anne Bray, Laura Rea, Therefore, Gordon Winiemko, Joshua San Nicolas, AllStreet, Liz Trosper, and Nick Graf.

View more work by xtine 

Jaehoon Choi, 4:00 - 12:00

In this performance, I assemble and disassemble a mechanical watch over the course of eight hours, from 4pm to midnight. The sound of this process is amplified by a piezo microphone.  The performance questions how multi-temporality and multi-relations are embedded in technology.

Learn more about 4:00 - 12:00

Jackie Liu, Chao Bing: A Read-Only Memory Experience

Chao Bing: A Read-Only Memory Experience is an interactive memoir in the style of a 90s CD-ROM storybook game, presented in a computer desktop environment with real and imaginary items from the artist’s past. The game navigates between narrated storybook scenes and mini-games about childhood memories in a 640x480, point-and-click environment simulated in the browser. Named after a chopped and stir-fried scallion pancake dish, Chao Bing incorporates imagery of scallion pancakes and CD-ROMs into a story about read-only memories, obsolescence, cycles, and the ways we might break (or chop and stir-fry) them through the transformative act of creation.

View the project page on the artist’s website.

John Provencher, haha

haha is a transactional program for a receipt printer. The program is designed to live on the web, allowing users to interact with the script through smart contract transactions in the form of a generative on-chain artwork. Overtime, these transactions accumulate into iterations of potential outputs that the script affords. The installation of this program is an exploration of these transactions in physical space.

View more photos of haha

Chelsea Thompto, Fog Lights

This work critically interrogates what society holds up as monstrous and looks to one of these figures (fog itself) as an aspirational rather than antagonistic figure. Drawing on work by Susan Stryker around the idea of trans identity and the monstrous, the work questions how subjects are perceived as monstrous and what that process says about the societies that produce them. 

Further, the work looks at fog's ability to resist capture, visualization, and control as a way to develop liberatory ideas about trans futurity and embodiment.

View the artist’s website 

Roopa Vasudevan, Intrusive Order (v1)

Drawing its title from intrusive thoughts about my own worth and talent, Intrusive Order is based on 15 descriptors that I wrote about myself during various stages of my own experience on the academic job market between 2022 and 2023. The descriptions were repurposed as prompts for AI image generators, and the results were combined with hand drawings, found imagery and photography, and generative animation to expand, reimagine, and problematize them.

Learn more about Intrusive Order

Or Zublasky, Merge Conflicts

Staged as a series of video tutorials, Merge Conflicts engages a process of unlearning settler colonial pedagogy through using Git, a software tool for managing multiple versions of digital documents. This work draws on my research into how the peak of the ongoing Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948 has been taught in Israel. The videos bring together findings from the archive of the Israel Ministry of Education and the Israel State Archive. These are shown alongside Time Travels: Building a State in the Middle East, high school history textbooks with machine-cut interventions. 

Learn more about the work. 

Watch the digital version of the work.

NEW INC is the first museum-led cultural incubator, which supports a diverse range of creative practitioners with a values-driven program and safe space for gathering and developing creative projects and businesses. Rhizome is pleased to partner with NEW INC for the Art & Code Track, now in its fourth year. 

Learn about the Year 10 Art & Code Members. 

See Documentation from the Year 8 cohort at Public Works Administration.

Dunkunsthalle is an artist-run museum and project space founded by Rachel Rossin, out of a defunct Dunkin' Donuts in the Financial District. Borrowing from the museum structure of the German 'kunsthalle,' the space mounts historic and contemporary exhibitions, as well as offering educational classes, film screenings and readings.

At the beginning of this year, Rhizome launched a pay-what-you-wish Discord to create a space for community members to share resources and internet discoveries, and connect for IRL and online events. Shortly after, Discord became the home of our informal talk series, Office Hours, which featured artist talks, showcases, and project walkthroughs that relate back to rhizome's ecosystem. Recordings of these events are available on our self-hosted video platform.

Rhizome is now launching Season 2 of our Discord this week, with more participatory formats for community events. There are two new monthly formats, “presentation parties” and “reading groups.” 

Discord members can now sign up to casually present anything they want at a monthly presentation party. Presentations can vary from WIPs from an ongoing project to a montage of your favorite animated GIFs. We’re excited to be exposed to new ideas and see how our discord members challenge traditional presentation formats. These will happen on the last Friday of each month (with the exception of holiday weekends + our next microgrants community program). 

Reading groups will happen on the 15th of every month and cover a range of articles related to digital culture. A mini-syllabus will be shared preliminary to the event as a notion page (similar to the reading list we put together for our Office Hours on the Internet Pigeon Network , then we’ll meet in a voice-channel and read excerpts from the writing. Throughout the event, members can discuss their thoughts via text-channels and forward recommendations. Post-reading group, we’ll update the mini-syllabus to include community links that relate to the month’s theme. 

As a note, Discord members will also continue to have discounted access to IRL rhizome’s events. We’ll update the group in discord for further updates.

See you in the chat!

Schedule:

October 27 - presentation party #1

November 15 - readings on archives & libraries

December 15 - readings on soundweaving

January 15 - readings on networked communication

January 26 - presentation party #2

February 15 - readings on non-human intelligence

February TBD - microgrants community program

March 15 - readings on queer histories of computing

March 29 - presentation party #3

On October 7, Rhizome held the first Microgrants Community Session for 2023 Micrograntees, who, in August, were awarded between $500-$1500 via an open call to create a browser-based project or write an article about a work of born-digital art in the Rhizome ArtBase.

Although it’s still a bit early in the program, grantees took the opportunity to introduce themselves and talk about the motivations and inspirations behind their projects. The session was open to Rhizome discord members, and three microgrants alumni were invited—Manuel Arturo Abreu, Martha Hipley, and Cassie McQuarter! 

The program was packed with wonderful projects, some of which sought to expand how we interact with the web, and others which used an archival lens to explore lesser-known histories of the web. Here are a few highlights from the session. 

Tanvi Mishra, Tridal: a collaborative game about land use

Tanvi Mishra is developing a multiplayer collaborative game about land use, a subject she became interested in while thinking about changing coastlines of India and a personal fear of not finding a way back home. The game uses data from sources such as the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, to map actions intended for human benefit to their environmental consequences. Tanvi ended their presentation by posing the question: “If our games inform how we tackle crises, what kinds of games should we be building?". 

Jenna deBoisblanc, publicaccessmemories

Jenna deBoisblanc is the creator of the virtual exhibition space, publicaccessmemories, originally developed as part of her MFA thesis. The Rhizome microgrant was put towards the development of  new features, such as support for spatial audio, for the platform, and to assist in the organization of a show called "Fields of You" that will feature work by 12 internet artists. Jenna is interested in creating new experiences for viewing art and interacting with other artists online. She’s interested in eventually hosting and recording artists' talks for future visitors. 

The publicaccessmemories virtual exhibition, put together as a pavillion within The Wrong Biennale,   opens November 1st. Visit their instagram for more information! 

Rodrigo Arenas Carter, Microgrant article recipient

Rodrigo Arenas Carter walked us through Dentimundo, a website by Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, which is the focus of his article. Dentimundo is an online resource that covers American tourism to the Mexican border for dental treatment, and explores the evolution of medical tourism in Latin America and its connection to the gentrification of CDMX. The website also reflects on how Latin America builds its iconography, referencing figures like Don Francisco. In writing this article, Rodrigo hopes to explore how Latinos are shaping their iconography in the digital era. 

Irene Ruby and Cori Cannavino, Digital Domestic Work Sampler

Irene and Cori are working on a project called Digital Domestic Work Sampler, in which they’ve created an archival website to serve as a collection of research surrounding an early pixel artform, "kaoani" (顔アニ, animated face). The website will feature a cross-stitch band sampler and will explore the connection between early internet pixel art and domestic labor reflected across historical needlework. The site will also include an archive of old GeoCities websites and will delve into topics such as class dynamics, gender, and aesthetic signifiers.

Zichen Yuan, Local Wind

Local wind is an experimental project by artist and designer Zichen Yuan that explores the intersection of air, web, and images. The project aims to challenge the static nature of the web cursor through a solar-powered device that captures and streams movement from the wind. This movement is linked to mouse movement and a camera, allowing the website itself to serve as an interactive archive for the device’s geographic location. Visitors of the site are encouraged to experiment with their own movements in order to counter the forces of the wind, which may reveal certain interactive elements of the website in the process. 

The latest in a series of interviews with artists who make work that responds to network culture and digital technologies.

Stephen Kwok: Let’s start with your most recent work, Candy Glazed Eyes of Haunted Machines. You begin with a commonplace, cute kiddie ride machine for children, but through labor and repetition transform the cuteness into something not so cute—something absurd. Can you expand on the relationship between cuteness and absurdity and how you come to this shift in the work?

Rosalie Yu: I like to look at it a few different ways. After I had a conversation with Cassie Tarakajian, cuteness and absurdity, or cursedness, became aesthetics at play in my work. It’s hard to pinpoint where it lands because it’s somewhere in between. I connect it now to my Taiwanese heritage and the identity of the island, something I’m asked to define. As a post-colonial country, Taiwan is constantly borrowing iconographies from places like Japan and the United States, manga and Disney characters, for instance, and it ends up producing a bootleg culture. It doesn't really matter how strange it looks, even if it’s a Pikachu head on top of a Mickey Mouse body, as long as it produces nostalgia. This may be weird, but we don't care. The people who make it don't care. My grandpa, who repaired and repainted kiddie rides in our backyard, didn't care. But they are post-colonial artifacts and they’re disappearing. They appear in our everyday, like ghosts on our periphery.

SK: I’m drawn to this idea of bootleg culture and thinking about it as an act of translation gone wrong. There is a mistake or misinterpretation in the process that produces something new. There’s a through-line here between this recent work of yours and some of your earlier projects such as Photographic Knitting Club and Knowing Together, where the translation of intimate everyday spaces or exchanges, like an embrace between people, becomes corrupted by technologies prone to error. Can you speak more about this impulse to work with error and what potential error holds for you?

RY: I used 3D scanning technologies for both works. I think a lot of times people tend to think spatial imaging is a tool that can capture the complete and total truth—the reality. But it's true for any kind of tool, right? That there's always the backside that we don't see. Hito Steyerl calls this the white shadow. I was interested in seeing people collectively use this tool to see what kind of specter we could capture together and what kind of insight we could gain together. That’s why the work took place in the form of a workshop rather than a tutorial hosted by a tech guy on YouTube saying, this is how you do a drone shoot. 

In a workshop environment, people give and receive attention and are intimate with each other—with strangers. A lot of errors can happen when you work collectively over a period of time, due to so many factors. For example, if someone holds an embrace for 10 minutes, their body might just give out. Legs go to sleep or start shaking, and all these things are captured, as well as the errors produced by people who don’t really know how to use a camera. I wanted to make a sculpture that preserved everything that happened. I didn't take away all the errors produced by bodies or technologies, because a lot of times what was missing actually shed more light into the whole experience. There's a way I can work with these errors to turn them into a physical object.

SK: It's interesting that you bring up collectivity and non-dominant forms of gathering and learning. Is there a political component to error for you? 

RY: In the beginning of this project I was thinking about my feelings as flaws—that, from a western perspective, my way of perceiving physical intimacy was an error. I didn't greet people physically, and when I received it, I felt ambivalent. I think I see that feeling—not being able to express or receive intimacy—as a defect. There's a scholar named Xine Yao who calls this "unfeeling." It doesn't mean that it's not there, but it’s a feeling that's not registered, and it can even be seen as a form of resistance. It's usually associated with people at the margin or those not from the predominant culture. So I was very interested in finding a way to recreate that situation and capture that with a group of people. 

SK: I’m struck by this idea that marginal cultures could be seen from a dominant perspective as full of error. Can you elaborate?

RY: Yeah, and on the opposite side of Asians not having feelings, Black Americans are racialized to have excessive feelings. Sianne Ngai who wrote, “Ugly Feelings”, described feelings that are difficult to categorize. One of them is animatedness, and talking about Black Americans being stereotyped as people with exaggerated emotions. We have memes of Black people that people of other races use to express their emotions without the living experience. I feel like Asian people, maybe more of just where I'm from, are on the other end of the spectrum. 

I think of Taiwan as an error. If I connect back to errors and images, errors and tools, there are some images that don't render because of the codec or of the available technology. Sometimes there are scans that just never come out because you are not supposed to use the technology that way. So I'm guessing when we talk about purposely glitching something, to break the tools in order to see how the system works, I'm trying to use or misuse image-making tools as a way to explore the errors of intimacy, or how I feel the errors of my own feelings.

SK: Are you working on any other projects that continue to explore your personal archive?

RY: I’m currently researching karaoke for a performance-driven project. When I was a kid I would go on these prayer bus trips to temples with my grandpa. They were special for me because of all the old people singing karaoke on the bus. But I think he was there for the karaoke and not the Buddhas. He would change from a fishnet tank top to a suit, then comb his tiny baby white hair with oil. On the bus, he would sing Japanese tunes and switch between Taiwanese and Japanese. I was fascinated by those songs because they were like time capsules with glitches. 

I learned later that my grandparents were the first generation to attend elementary school in my family. Japan made primary education mandatory during their occupation but it was a way of subjugation, to make Taiwanese people feel that they belonged to and would fight for their empire. They learned their history from a Japanese Imperial framework and because of this, there’s a culture of not seeing themselves.

Karaoke as a performance also contains errors of various kinds, like, singing off key, forgetting lyrics. I’m thinking of “karaoke in a transitional place” as a narrative device, how it’s about transcendence, death and rebirth, Japan's influence in Asia, and also a cultural technology (a machine that organizes and is organized by local culture, a term from the book Karaoke Around the World). 

I’m curious, actually, about your thoughts on this, since my interest in karaoke explores an inversion in the dominant direction of culture—an American take on Asian culture rather than the other way around. How do you understand that as an Asian-American person who also grew up with both Taiwanese and American culture, but in the context of America rather than Taiwan?

SK: Well, the way you talk about your relationship to growing up in Taiwan is fascinating—thinking through a framework in which Taiwan occupies a marginal space and adopts culture from other places like the United States and bootlegs it. I think your interest in technology and the errors that are produced through amateur or bootlegged uses of it has something to do with this. Perhaps your interest in these technologies and the ways in which you can utilize them in non-dogmatic and non-normative ways mirrors your perception that your positionality contains errors, which you’ve felt culturally and personally. I think that might be connected to you aligning yourself to and using these technologies in a way that embraces error, and that’s a rich place to make from.

Location: Brooklyn, NY

How/when did you begin working creatively with technology?
I didn’t grow up with a computer at home, I think the first time we had it was maybe in high school, but I mainly used MSN and BBS to talk to friends and get cursed photos in emails. 

I taught myself digital/design software for work, but I had no idea what coding was until I went to grad school, and even then, I wasn’t using it to make art. My high school math teacher was the coolest but he also told us that as an artist, all we needed math for was to get the right change. When I was introduced to creative coding I regretted not spending more time on algebra. 

What did you study at school or elsewhere?
I received classical art training during high school in Taiwan and it emphasized technique. I would say a lot of that comes from the Japanese education system, which learned from Western art. I spent a decade recreating the image of Michaelangelo’s David and fine-tuning the tip of his nose with charcoal. What was more memorable to me was a mole on the cheek of a painter in a picture found in a textbook. I spent a lot of time unlearning but also appreciating that muscle memory.

I studied psychology (with a minor in film) and interactive telecommunications. I don't have a studio art degree, but artists around me have been very generous in giving me critique. I found residencies a good place to learn and experiment too.

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously?
I now teach and have my own art practice. Previously, I was a researcher at a journalism school. My first job was pouring orange juice at a wedding banquet, then drawing illustrations for the cups of a boba franchise and making Warhol-style boba art for store displays. I still remember during the interview they asked me to draw a hamburger.

What does your desktop or workspace look like? (Pics or screenshots please!)

On October 26, 2023 Rhizome presented Neural Net Aesthetics at the New Museum, the latest in a series of panels that explores current artistic practice as it relates to the changing landscape of digital art and technology. 

Artists Refik Anadol, Maya Man, writer Eileen Isagon Skyers, and Rhizome Co-Executive Director came together to discuss AI and the implications it has on digital art practice. Documentation from the New Museum event is now available on video.rhizome.org, our self-hosted video platform. 

Rhizome and the New Museum today announce the relaunch of Seven on Seven (7x7), the iconic art and technology program, to take place at the New Museum on January 27, 2024. Founded in 2010, 7x7 pairs leading artists with visionary technologists and tasks them with a simple challenge: make something new. The results are presented at a public, experiential conference. 

Presented by Hyundai Motor through an ongoing partnership with Rhizome of the New Museum, the 2024 edition will focus on AI and is co-organized by Michael Connor, Co-Executive Director of Rhizome, and Xinran Yuan, independent curator and producer. The first in-person edition to be held since 2019, 7x7 2024 draws together creative pairings from across disciplines. The collaborators will consider how AI may alter our understanding of love, humor, and improvisation; biology, politics, and histories.

Tickets for 7x7 2024 are on sale now. The event will take place in an intimate setting at the New Museum's theater 1:30pm-6pm on Saturday, January 27, followed by a reception in the Sky Room. It will also be live streamed on the New Museum’s YouTube channel for a global audience.

The 7x7 2024 participants are:

• Quantum physicist Dr. Stephon Alexander with comedian, artist, and musician Reggie Watts
• Replika AI CEO and Founder Eugenia Kuyda with artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson
• Boston Dynamics Director of Human-Robot Interaction David Robert, with artist Miriam Simun
• Nym Technologies CEO and Co-Founder Harry Halpin with artist Tomás Saraceno
• Ginkgo Bioworks Head of Creative Christina Agapakis with artist Xin Liu
• Runway CEO and Co-Founder Cristóbal Valenzuela with comedian, writer, and actor Ana Fabrega
• Engineer and entrepreneur Alan Steremberg with artist Rindon Johnson

“Neural networks and other AI systems have long been topics of note at 7x7. With these technologies now widely available, 7x7 2024 takes an expansive but critical view of their role in society. The participants look beyond the dreams of apocalypse and the endless drive to extract, and ask, what new kinds of collaborations and entanglements will AI enable?” —Michael Connor, Co-Executive Director of Rhizome

Since its inception in 2010, 7x7 has been a catalyst in the evolution of art and technology collaboration, often acting as a mirror of significant cultural contexts and an indicator of emerging trends in our increasingly technological society. The site of the creation of the first NFT by artist Kevin McCoy and technologist Anil Dash in 2014, 7x7 has catalyzed some of the earliest creative experimentations and critical engagements with machine learning, blockchain, and social media technologies. Past participants include Ai Weiwei, American Artist, Alex Chung, Miranda July, David Karp, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Trevor McFedries, Jonah Peretti, Aza Raskin, Tabita Rezaire, Hito Steyerl, Martine Syms, and Meredith Whittaker, to name a few.

“In recent years, the art and tech ecosystem has expanded to encompass a wider range of institutions, companies, and stakeholders. The relationship between artists and technologies, platforms, and collaborations has grown increasingly complex," states Xinran Yuan, Producer and Co-Curator of 7x7 2024. "To plan the 2024 edition in this evolving context, we spent time refocusing on what makes 7x7 unique: it is a risk-tolerant, experimental, and most importantly, public forum. Here, what is foregrounded is not only the intriguing outcomes of such collaborations, but also the negotiations, uncertainties, even failures that are integral to the shaping of these collaborative ideas, knowledge, and creations.”

“In recent years, the art and tech ecosystem has expanded to encompass a wider range of institutions, companies, and stakeholders. The relationship between artists and technologies, platforms, and collaborations has grown increasingly complex," states Xinran Yuan, Producer and Co-Curator of 7x7 2024. 

“As part of our twenty-year affiliation with Rhizome, the New Museum is gratified to convene this critical gathering on a topic of such importance to contemporary culture,” said Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum. “7x7 has long been a key part of our vision to make the New Museum a campus for new art and new ideas, supporting not only the display of art but knowledge creation in many forms.”

Learn more about 7x7's history and past participants.

7x7, presented by Rhizome and Hyundai Motor is made possible through an ongoing partnership between Rhizome, the New Museum, and Hyundai to showcase leading digital art globally. This partnership, which began in 2020, has included exhibitions in three countries as well as on the web and several artist commissions.

Visionary partners for 7x7 are project partner SMK-National Gallery of Denmark, supporting the pairing of Eugenia Kuyda and Lynn Hershman Leeson, and research partner APOSSIBLE. 

Additional support for 7x7 is provided by Refik Anadol, Rudy Austin, and Fred Benenson.

ABOUT RHIZOME

Rhizome champions born-digital art and culture through commissions, exhibitions, scholarship, and digital preservation. Founded in 1996 by artist Mark Tribe as an email discussion list including some of the first artists to work online, Rhizome has played an integral role in the history of contemporary art engaged with digital technologies and the internet. Since 2003, Rhizome has been an affiliate in residence at the New Museum in New York City. 

ABOUT NEW MUSEUM

The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.

ABOUT HYUNDAI MOTOR’S ART PROJECTS

For over a decade, Hyundai Motor Company has deepened its partnerships with global museums and cultural organizations, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), Tate, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Hyundai Motor’s own art-initiatives include open call programs such as the VH AWARD, the Hyundai Blue Prize, and Artlab Editorial, a digital platform dedicated to art writing by transnational voices. Our ongoing collaborations embrace the complexities of the cultural landscape by exploring new ideas and perspectives within and beyond the art ecosystem.

Visit artlab.hyundai.com or follow @hyundai.artlab #HyundaiArtlab to learn more about our partnerships and programs.

What do GIFs as a practice look like today? 

With support from GIPHY Arts, Rhizome commissioned ten artists to make GIFs, or GIF-adjacent works. We invited artists that don’t maintain exclusive GIF-based practices, but whose work is engaged with digital art and technology, as well as analogue media such as illustration, painting, writing, and kinetic sculpture.

While some artists chose to respond to the nostalgia that early internet GIFs often evoke, other artists situate their GIFs within complex worlds of the present, the GIF becoming a tool that helps unfold a larger narrative. Others experimented with the medium to make sense of physical projects, the GIF serving as a digital interpretation of a physical artwork or phenomenon. These works represent only a sliver of the countless ways that artists are continuing to experiment with GIFs as sites for creative expression today.  

GIFs are available to share on GIPHY and have been accessioned to the Rhizome ArtBase—our archive of over 2,200 works of born-digital art. 

Keep Scrolling to view GIFs are a flat circle, with works by Balfua, Taína Cruz, Scott Gelber, Mas Guerrero, Teng Yung Han, Liby Hays, Daylen Seu, Nichole Shinn, Tyler Cala Williams, and Harrison Wyrick. 

Content Warning: A work in this project contains nudity. 

7x7 presented by Rhizome and Hyundai Motor pairs seven leading artists together with seven visionary technologists, giving them a simple assignment: make something new. The results of these creative collaborations are presented at a public conference. 

Founded in 2010, 7x7 returns on January 27, 2024, with a new edition focusing on AI. Organized with presenting partners Hyundai Motor and New Museum of Contemporary Art, project partner SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, and research partner APOSSIBLE, this year’s 7x7 draws together creative pairings from across disciplines to consider how AI may alter our understanding of love, humor, and improvisation; biology, politics, and histories.

7x7 will be livestreamed free. Tickets for the in-person event are on sale, and a limited number of artist tickets will be made available via lottery. 

• Stephon Alexander is a theoretical physicist, musician, and author whose work is at the interface between cosmology, particle physics, and quantum gravity. He works on the connection between the smallest and largest entities in the universe pushing Einstein’s theory of curved space-time to extremes, beyond the big bang with sub atomic phenomena.

  Alexander is a Professor of Physics at Brown University, with previous appointments at Stanford University, Imperial College, Penn State, Dartmouth College and Haverford College. Alexander is a specialist in the field of string cosmology, where the physics of superstrings are applied to address longstanding questions in cosmology. In 2001, he co- invented the model of inflation based on higher dimensional hypersurfaces in string theory called D-Branes. In such models the early universe emerged from the destruction of a higher dimensional D-brane which ignites a period of rapid expansion of space often referred to as cosmic inflation.

  In his critically acclaimed book, The Jazz of Physics, Alexander revisits the ancient interconnection between music and the evolution of astrophysics and the laws of motion. He explores new ways music, in particular jazz music, mirrors modern physics, such as quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the physics of the early universe. He also discusses ways that innovations in physics have been and can be inspired from "improvisational logic" exemplified in Jazz performance and practice. Alexander is also a professional touring jazz musician, and previously served as President of the National Society of Black Physicists (NSPB).

• Reggie Watts is an internationally renowned Musician/Comedian/Writer/Actor who most recently starred as the bandleader on CBS’s The Late Late Show with James Corden. Using his formidable voice, looping pedals, and his vast imagination, Watts blends and blurs the lines between music and comedy, wowing audiences with performances that are 100% improvised. He was the DJ at the 2021 Emmy Awards, which saw a 15% ratings boost from 2020. 

  Reggie’s memoir, Great Falls, MT was recently released by Penguin’s highly curated Tiny Reparations imprint, founded by Phoebe Robinson.

  Watts’ first Netflix special Spatial released to massive critical acclaim, with the New York Times calling it “a giddy rush of escapist nonsense” and dubbing Watts “the most influential absurdist in comedy today.” The A.V. Club described Spatial as “signature Watts, meaning it’s alternately exhilarating, silly, exhausting and transcendent,” and Exclaim! Magazine called his performance “engaging, absurd, thoughtful and, most importantly, wholly unpredictable.” As a solo performer, Watts brand of musical/comedy fusion has led to sold out headlining tours in the U.S. and Europe, including festivals such as Bonnaroo, SXSW, Bumbershoot, Just For Laughs, Pemberton and more. 

  In 2020, Watts released his own content app called, WattsApp, a techno-savvy look into his life, work, and techno junk drawer. WattsApp has all original content including a show called Droneversations, where he interviews guests while it’s filmed by drones along with other fun content. 

  In 2010, Watts released his debut comedy special, Why Shit So Crazy? on Comedy Central Records, and is now available to stream on Netflix. Why Shit So Crazy? featured Watts in live performances at New York venues such as Galapagos, The Bellhouse, and Le Poisson Rouge, bookended with brief sketches and music videos. Later that year, at the invitation of Jack White, Watts recorded Reggie Watts: Live at Third Man Records which was released in limited edition vinyl. In 2012, Watts recorded his second comedy special, Reggie Watts: A Live At Central Park, which was released by Comedy Central. 

  Watts was born in Germany, raised in Montana, and currently resides in Los Angeles. 

project partner SMK – National Gallery of Denmark

• Eugenia Kuyda is the CEO and founder of Replika, an AI companion designed to build deep emotional connection and help people feel better, and has been at the vanguard of AI for the whole of her career. Eugenia started working on conversational AI in 2012 - and launched the first publicly available chatbot fully powered by generative AI in 2015. Prior to that she was an investigative reporter and journalist.

  Replika is backed by Y Combinator and Khosla Ventures and has been recognized as one of the “Five Technologies that will Rock Your World” by New York Times AI tech reporter Cade Metz.

• Over the last five decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her art and films. Cited as one of the most influential media artists, Hershman Leeson is widely recognized for her innovative work investigating issues that are now recognized as key to the workings of society and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. She is noted for pioneering contributions to the fields of photography, video, film, artificial intelligence and bio.tZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, mounted the first comprehensive retrospective of her work titled Civic Radar. A substantial publication, which was cited in The New York Times “one of the indispensable art books of 2016.” and the publication "Lynn Hershman Leeson - Antibodies" (published by Hatje Cantz) was noted as "a major book on art" in 2019. A survey of her work was at The New Museum in 2022 and a retrospective of her films will occur in 2024 at Moma, Her work is in the permanent collection of Moma, The Whitney and The Tate, as well as other public and private collections. She is represented by Altman Siegel Gallery, SF and Bridget Donahue, NYC.

• David Robert is a human-centered robot designer and the Director of Human-Robot Interaction, a transdisciplinary design group at Boston Dynamics that integrates UX, UI and Industrial Design practices to make robots safe, simple to understand and intuitive to use. David's graduate research at the MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots Group focused on creating Blended Reality robot-characters for playful informal learning environments. He's a tech-ethicist who advises EU policy makers on the pro-social design of embodied AI, a passionate educator, social venture mentor and a robot literacy advocate. David lives in the Boston area where he maintains an art research practice focused on exploring interspecies communication between human and non-human intelligences. Together with composer Hannah Elizabeth Cox, David records and releases music as Animated Matter.

• Miriam Simun is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice uses science, somatics, scent, power, poetry and humor to create art works in various formats, for example - video, installation, painting, performance, and communal sensorial experiences.

  Simun’s work has been presented internationally, including Gropius Bau, New Museum, MIT List Center for Visual Art, Momenta Biennale, New Museum, Himalayas Museum, Rauschenberg Project Space and Bogota Museum of Modern Art. Recognized internationally in publications including the BBC, The New York Times, The New Yorker, CBC, MTV, and Flash Art International, the work has been supported by Creative Capital and the Foundations of Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Gulbenkian and Onassis.

• Harry Halpin is the CEO and co-founder of Nym Technologies, a startup building a decentralized mixnet to end mass surveillance. Prior to founding Nym, he worked at MIT, where he led the standardization of the Web Cryptography API across all browsers, and at Inria de Paris where he led interdisciplinary research on socio-technical systems and privacy. He has a Ph.D. in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh and also teaches cryptocurrency at the American University of Beirut.

• Tomás Saraceno (b. 1973, he/him/his) is an Argentina-born, Berlin-based artist whose projects dialogue with forms of life and life-forming, rethinking dominant threads of knowledge and recognizing how diverse modes of being engage a multiplicity of vibrations on the Web of Life. For more than two decades, Saraceno has worked with local communities, scientific researchers, and institutions around the world, and has activated open-source, interdisciplinary, collective projects, including Museo Aero Solar (2007–), the Aerocene Foundation (2015–), and Arachnophilia, towards a society free from carbon emissions, for intra and interspecies climate justice.

  Saraceno has been the subject of solo exhibitions and permanent installations at museums and institutions internationally, including The Serpentine Gallery, London (2023), The Shed, New York (2022), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires (2017); K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Ständehaus, Dusseldorf (2013); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012); and Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2011). Saraceno has participated in numerous festivals and biennales, including the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale (2020) and the 53rd and 58th Venice Biennales (2009, 2019).

• Christina Agapakis is a synthetic biologist and artist whose work brings together biologists, engineers, designers, artists, and social scientists to imagine different futures and cultures of biotechnology. She has made cheese using starter cultures collected from the human body, resurrected the smell of extinct flowers, and photosynthetic animals. Christina is the head of Creative at Ginkgo Bioworks, a publicly traded synthetic biology company based in Boston. At Ginkgo, she leads a dynamic interdisciplinary team working at the interface of synthetic biology and society to build more ethical and equitable technology, through design, strategic communication, and public policy. Her artwork has been exhibited in institutions such as the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, Centre Pompidou, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. She has a PhD in synthetic biology from Harvard University, was a L’Oreal For Women in Science Postdoctoral Fellow, and named one of Fast Company’s most creative people in business in 2016.

• Xin Liu (1991, b. Xinjiang) is an artist and engineer.

  Xin is the Arts Curator in the Space Exploration Initiative at MIT Media Lab and an artist-in-residence at SETI Institute. Her recent institutional solo exhibitions include Seedings and Offspring at Pioneer Works, New York, and At the End of Everything at ARTPACE, San Antonio. She is an advisor for LACMA Art+Tech Lab and a researcher at Antikythera, Berggren Institute.

  Her work has been shown at Shanghai Biennale, Thailand Biennale, M+ Museum, Yuz Museum, MoMA PS1, MAXXI Rome, Sundance Film Festival, Ars Electronica, and Onassis Foundation, among others.

• Cristóbal Valenzuela is the CEO and co-founder of Runway, an applied AI research company building multimodal AI systems to create new types of artistic and creative tools. Before Runway, Cris was a researcher at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

• Ana Fabrega is a writer, comedian, and actor in NYC. She co-created, co-wrote, and co-starred in the HBO series Los Espookys, among other things.

• Alan Steremberg is a computer engineer and entrepreneur who enjoys creating consumer products. He co-founded the Weather Underground, a leading weather website in 1995 while completing his Bachelors in Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan. Alan completed a masters degree at Stanford University in Human Computer Interaction. After graduating, he became President of the Weather Underground and grew the company to become the second largest weather website, with 50 employees and over 20 million unique monthly visitors. In 2012, Weather Underground was sold to The Weather Channel. In 2014 Alan worked as a Presidential Innovation Fellow at NOAA to help the government copy data to modern cloud services, so that private companies could build innovative new products on this treasure trove of environmental data. He currently advises startups in San Francisco and has been helping teach computer science classes at local high schools. Alan still finds himself out in the rain without an umbrella.

• Rindon Johnson is an artist and poet. In 2022, Johnson was awarded the 12th Ernst Rietschel Award for Sculpture by the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Johnson has presented solo exhibitions at Albertinum (Dresden), Chisenhale Gallery (London), The Julia Stoschek Collection (Düsseldorf), and the SculptureCenter (Long Island City), among others. He is the author of four books of poetry and prose. He was born on the unceded territories of the Ohlone people and lives in Berlin.

On January 27, Rhizome presented the 14th edition of Seven on Seven at the New Museum in New York City. As in previous years, artists and technologists came together for short term collaborations to “make something new”—but it was a much broader cast of characters who made the unforgettable experience possible. To thank a few by name:

Our presenting partner Hyundai Motor, and our colleagues there who have worked with us over several years to create new platforms and points of connection for the digital art community.

Our research partner APOSSIBLE, project partner SMK - National Gallery of Denmark, and our outreach partner Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation,

7x7 council (Refik Anadol, Rudy Austin, and Fred Benenson) and Rhizome’s Board.

Our Collaboration Day Partner WSA, for offering us such a fantastic space to host our participants as they worked on their projects.

7x7 participants:  Dr. Stephon Alexander, Reggie Watts, Eugenia Kuyda, Lynn Hershman Leeson, David Robert, Miriam Simun, Harry Halpin, Tomás Saraceno, Christina Agapakis, Xin Liu, Cristóbal Valenzuela, Ana Fabrega, Alan Steremberg, and Rindon Johnson, who brought such generosity and care to this project. 

Our colleagues at the New Museum: Regan Grusy, Laura Coombs, Brittney Feinzig, Sarah Bailey Hogarty, Maureen McElroy, Sarah Morris, Dave Singh, Derek Wright, for your support and guidance.

SDN broadcast for another flawless AV and livestream production,

Our stalwart PR specialist, Vyoma Venkataraman of PR Butter 

Our documentarians Alexey Kim, Mettie Ostrowski, and Owley Studios for capturing beautiful moments from our dinner, conference, and collaboration day at WSA; John Maringouin for documenting Lynn & Eugenia’s collaboration; Art Beats Berlin for documenting Tomás and Harry, and Hany Osman for filming Miriam and the Boston Dynamics collaborators.

Ruby Thelot and Briana Griffin, Rhizome Community Designer for delving into the rich history of 7x7

Transcendence Creative for their mesmerizing AI-generated videos, Peter McCain for his thoughtful video on 7x7 with music by Ben Shirken, and Grant Lau for launch graphics. 

Laura Coombs, for bearing with us to create a new identity for this year’s 7x7

Qasim Naqvi of Dawn of Midi for the live sound modulation for Xin, Christina, and Josh, and to Ben Shirken for bringing Stephon & Reggie’s AI effects pedal to life. 

Tara Rose Morris for producing AI visuals for Stephon & Reggie’s performance;

Dancer Mor Mendel, and Hannah Rossi (Field Applications Specialist, Boston Dynamics), for bringing robot-human dance to fruition,

Xinran Yuan, Co-Curator and Producer; Zandie Brockett, Consulting Curator; Danica Newell, Event Producer.

Our support staff: Alexis Sanford, Hampton, Maia Liebeskind, Moses Jeune, Sean Kennedy, and Selma Lundstrom.

NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator, is seeking an intersectional community of applicants including artists, creative technologists, creative/design studios, entrepreneurs, and more to apply for membership to their 11th cohort! The application is available via submittable through March 8. 

As in past years, Rhizome will partner with NEW INC to co-host the Art & Code Track, which is a space for artists, designers, researchers, and technologists to redefine the artistic landscape through internet-based practice. 

To learn more about Art & Code, meet our Year 10 cohort, or check out works from our Year 9 exhibition at Dunkunsthalle, which featured an interactive CD-rom storytelling game, glass video sculptures, a generative on-chain artwork, and more. 

This new series showcasing works from the history of born-digital art is made possible with support from Teiger Foundation.

Created during a period of increasing corporatization online, the works in this exhibition represent a fierce commitment to the web as a home for artists and amateurs, where creative experimentation with the browser was encouraged.

The exhibition begins with entropy8.com (1995), the artistic platform and personal website of artist Auriea Harvey, and continues with three further works that were created collaboratively with Michaël Samyn as the artist duo Entropy8Zuper! The works are rich sensory experiences combining Flash, JavaScript, and custom HTML to create elaborate, multi-layered websites, often testing the technical limitations of early browsers.

Restored by Rhizome for the exhibition “My Veins are the Wires, My Body is Your Keyboard” at Museum of the Moving Image, these works–many of which have been inaccessible for years–are presented here in legacy software environments via emulation; TheGodlove Museum is also made available as a download for Windows computers. 

Auriea Harvey, entropy8.com, 1995

Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, Whispering Windows, 1999

Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, Skinonskinonskin, 1999

Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, The Godlove Museum, 1999-2006

ArtBase Anthologies, a new program showcasing the history of born-digital art, launches today with an online exhibition of newly restored artworks by Auriea Harvey and Entropy8Zuper!

Each month, ArtBase Anthologies will present a selection of works – either a deep dive into a a solo artist, a snapshot of a historical moment, or a thematic curation of works from the recent or more distant past. The series aims to deepen and enrich the public understand of digital art as a whole, and to offer an equitable accounting of its history. Each selection will be accompanied by public online and IRL events. 

ArtBase Anthologies 001 features four artworks – one solo project by Harvey, and three made with her longtime collaborator Michaël Samyn under the name Entropy8Zuper! These works may be seen in emulation on the exhibition microsite along with contextual information, images, and software downloads.

This installment of the series was curated with Regina Harsanyi / Museum of the Moving Image in conjunction with Harvey’s ongoing survey show “My Veins are the Wires, My Body is Your Keyboard.” Conservation of these works was undertaken by Dragan Espenschied and Rhizome. A panel discussion at Onassis ONX in New York City (and streamed online) on April 3 contextualizes the program. 

ArtBase Anthologies is made possible by a grant from Teiger Foundation. 

Shu Lea Cheang’s Fresh Kill is a fever dream of New York City at the dawn of the internet. Unfolding in a series of vignettes that are structured like the stanzas of an epic poem, interrupted by ad breaks and news flashes, it portrays a sci-fi world of collapse, corporate control, media saturation, and environmental disaster, inhabited by a creative resistance of foragers, artists, queer lovers, and hackers. It fluidly links two islands where waste is dumped: Staten Island, in NYC, and Orchid Island, off the coast of Taiwan, where a man announces on a megaphone, “The landfill is here!” while the locals follow along with imported American fitness television.

The narrative it weaves of corporate malfeasance through technology, and underground communities that oppose it, is timeless, but the film is especially rewarding as an early vision of how online communication might change communication and refigure power, and the glimpses it offers of NYC and its artist community. A new 35mm restoration of Shu Lea Cheang’s Fresh Kill premieres tonight at BAM in Brooklyn and Thursday in Chicago at Gene Siskel Film Center– don't miss it!

Supporting the 2024 Rhizome microgrants program

Celebrating ArtBase Anthologies, our new repertory program offering transformative histories of digital art

Featuring live performances, dinner, and drinks

rhizome forever is a dinner and party that celebrates figures who cultivate community and infrastructure for artists and creators, and who have explored new ways of being in the world through technology. Including a dinner, a party, live performances, and artworks on view, the program will raise funds for Rhizome’s vital microgrants program and our memory work for the field of digital art.

This year’s honorees include Shu Lea Cheang, an artist and filmmaker who has long explored hacktivism, gender, and the “digital commons,” artist Lauren Lee McCarthy, who makes social practice art for the algorithmic age and founded the P5.JS programming language, and the team behind the ”first NFT,” technologist Anil Dash, and artists Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, whose work has long explored data-driven culture and the corporatization of the internet..

The event marks the ten-year anniversary of the minting of the first NFT at the New Museum as part of Rhizome's 7x7 program. rhizome forever celebrates the importance of building value and support for artists, as a return to the founding ethos of that moment.

The first in a series of videos and posts about each of the seven collaborations from 7x7.ai

Founded in 2010, Rhizome’s 7x7 initiative brings together seven artists and seven technologists – roles that are defined expansively – to work in pairs, responding to a simple assignment: “make something new.” The results are presented at a public conference.

This year, 7x7 returned from a several year hiatus with a special AI-focused edition co-presented by Hyundai Motor through an ongoing partnership with Rhizome of the New Museum. Each pair considered how neural networks and other kinds of machine learning may alter our understanding of love, humor, and improvisation; biology, politics, and history. We have produced short in-depth documentaries for each pair, including behind-the-scenes and interview footage, to open up these collaborations to our audience.

Although 7x7 has been engaging with issues around AI for over a decade, we decided this year that we had an opportunity, and maybe even a responsibility, to make it more central to the program than ever. With these technologies now widely available, the 7x7 2024 cohort looked beyond the dreams of apocalypse and the endless drive to extract, and asked: what new kinds of collaborations and entanglements will AI enable?

This question was very much on the minds of Ana Fabrega and Cristóbal Valenzuela as they entered into their collaboration. Ana is a comedian, writer, and actor, best known for co-creating the cult-following show "Los Espookys" on HBO. Cris is the CEO and Co-Founder of Runway, a notable AI startup in the field of generative video, which is transforming filmmaking and commercial videos. As an ITP graduate, he is well-acquainted with Rhizome and is, in many ways, part of the broader digital artist community.

When we first brought them together, we were pondering the question: Can AI be funny? Or, is there anything funny about AI? This question was charged with political import, as the two began their discussions against the backdrop of the Writers Guild of America Strike, in which AI was a key topic. The WGA, of which Ana is a member, foresaw that AI would be used to generate content and undermine writers’ rights and ownership. Ostensibly, the two were positioned at opposite ends of this discourse.

Their presentation is a testament to their open dialogue, demonstrating courage, vulnerability, and a commitment to staying engaged in not-always-easy conversations. In the end, as curators, we’ve come to realize that the question might not be whether AI can be humorous, but how we can understand its role in a creative process, and how we might write with and against it.

By developing an understanding of its affordances, we can ultimately make better decisions as artists, technologists, filmmakers, or general computer users about what roles we should – and shouldn’t – give to AI within our industries and practices.

This is especially important because the discourse about AI has been dominated by exaggerated hopes and fears that create an image of AI that often feels quite disconnected from its realities. Cris refers to this as the “hyperreal” moment of AI.

Hyperreal discourse about the computer has a long history. In the late 1960s, according to Armin Medosch, the computer was already figured as a new electronic brain encroaching on "a domain previously considered to represent the essence of what it meant to be human: art." This was part of what Medosch called a "pseudodiscourse" which "served to divert attention from the real problems connected with computer technologies."

For decades, a key part of the pseudodiscourse around the computer has been the idea that old forms of political organizing or aesthetic analysis are now defunct. In generative AI’s hyperreal moment, this bad idea has returned with a vengeance. As Ana put it, "In the context of the strikes, it’s not AI that will take away someone’s job, but a company can say 'because of this technology, I’m going to devalue your labor now.'" The difference might seem small, but it’s crucial to know if one is in a conflict with a technology, or if one is actually in conflict with management.

There is a kind of discourse that is possible only through the process of making and exploring across disciplines, and this is very much a part of 7x7’s DNA. This is where Ana and Cris found real common ground – a shared interest in moving past the hyperreal understanding of AI to a more grounded analysis. It is important to build literacy about AI technologies through, in order to counteract the AI pseudodiscourse.

We would like to thank Hyundai Motor as a part of their ongoing partnership, as well as 7x7’s Research Partner APOSSIBLE, Project Partner SMK-National Gallery of Denmark, Outreach Partner Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, and Collaboration Day Partner WSA.

For more about Ana and Cris’s collaboration, see Leslie Katz’s thoughtful article in Forbes, “A Comedian and a Generative AI Tool Walk into a Bar.”

Last month, Rhizome celebrated its 2023 benefit, honoring generative artists Rafael Rozendaal, Lillian Schwartz, and Ix Shells. We also celebrated 20 years of affiliation with the New Museum, saluting Lisa Phillips, New Museum Director and Mark Tribe, Rhizome founder.

We’re so immensely grateful and humbled by the incredible support of our community. 

Thank you to the wonderful and supportive staff at the New Museum, TRlab, our partner for this event (which marked the launch of SEED, an exciting long term joint initiative!), lead partner MoonPay, program partner Zora, and table partners Gemma Projects and East West Bank. 

 We want to thank our honorees in attendance, Rafael, Mark, Lisa, and Itzel.

Big thanks to all of our terrific community partners, 8-ball, are.na, do not research, and FWB, who helped transform our afterparty into a lively celebration, and to Refraction, who sparked it with their offer of support via a wonderful Sara Ludy edition.

We enjoyed breathtaking floral displays by Under New Management, danced to music by DJ JUICY (Patia from patia’s fantasy world) and BAPARI, and Madre Mezcal and Ami Ami wines. kept our glasses full all night long🍸

Our deepest thanks to our wonderful Board, including Lindsay Howard, Fred Beneson, and Mendi and Keith Obadike. 

We’re also grateful to Samantha Katz for putting together an 🍭 epic gift bag, with neat products donated by Curious Elixirs, Powderful, Pattern Brands, East 29th, Yield Design, Modern Love Club, Athletic Greens, Visitor, Stojo, Arkive Dao, Everyday Dose, and Abel Fragrance 🕺 ‼️

🤝Thanks to Laura Coombs for designing a special tote bag 🖍👛 to match this years benefit theme of generative art. The tote commemorates rhizome’s first logo, considered “The World’s First Generative Logo”, designed by Markus Weisbeck and Frank Hauschild of Surface.de in 2001.

Finally, thank you to our stalwart collaborators Zandie Brockett, and Danicka Newell, the night wouldn’t have been possible without your leadership + support :D

On April 3, Rhizome celebrated the launch of ArtBase Anthologies at Onassis ONX with a conversation between Michael Connor, Rhizome Co-Executive Director, Dragan Espenschied, Rhizome Preservation Director, Auriea Harvey, Artist, and Regina Harsanyi, Associate Curator of Media Art at Museum of the Moving Image. 

Documentation from the event is now available on video.rhizome.org, our self-hosted video platform. 

ArtBase Anthologies is a new monthly series showcasing the history of born-digital art. For the first iteration, Rhizome presented four early works by Auriea Harvey and Entropy8Zuper! Enter ArtBase Anthologies 001.

Lauren Sorresso: Since 2017, you’ve been exhibiting an episodic series of autoethnographic works about a feminist religion you initiated titled Leymusoom. These works include animated videos and games, archival websites, digital collages, multimedia installations, and performances or "rituals" that reimagine your personal/family histories across time. How has the Leymusoom "universe" expanded since then in terms of both your daily art practice and the different digital media used to produce the work (videos made using 3D scanning apps or 3D modeling software, photos altered through AI image generation, sculptures with digital or 3D-printed and hardware elements, etc.)?

Heesoo Kwon: I think of these technologies as shamanistic tools that allow me to travel between this world and the other world, 이 세상 (i sesang) and 저 세상 (jeo sesang) in Korean, to connect, remake, and expand my relations. I use lots of different programs as portals—Polycam, Daz 3D, Adobe Premiere Pro, and, lately, Adobe Firefly—to bring together real people and places from my life into a shared sanctuary. I invite my ancestors, collaborators, and converts to commune with me, unconstrained by the bounds of time or space and free from the traumas of patriarchal violence. So far, more than 250 people have converted to Leymusoom, offering their individual stories and feminisms.

Expanding my world is a personal-communal spiritual practice. It’s continuing and ever-changing. Leymusoom started during graduate school at the University of California Berkeley; my studio there was the first church. It has extended to my home studio in San Francisco, my childhood home in Seoul, sites where I’ve exhibited work, such as a basement gallery in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a room in Oakland where I lived and worked for part of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Bong Sun Sa Buddhist temple, Golden Gate Park, and most recently, my family’s mountain garden in Korea. I actively cultivate these environments where I reside with my female relatives and fellow practitioners.

Leymusoom refers to the artworks and their larger religious community. They inform one another. The term derives from 무성별 (museongbyeol), the Korean word for agender. I wrote down an English translation based on the Korean pronunciation and then reversed the letters, emphasizing that there are no boundaries within gender identity. 

LS: The care with which you render specific details of those spaces—for example, the avatars’ recognizable likenesses or the inclusion of meaningful objects—in Leymusoom Digital Shrine (2021) is quite moving. In what ways does familiarity, or maybe proximity, influence your work? 

HK: I find inspiration for Leymusoom in the people and places around me or existing in my memory and family archive, as well as Korean shamanism and the iconography of Catholicism and Confucianism. Growing up in South Korea, though I lived among four generations of women, I was taught to obey patriarchal systems without question. In my Leymusoom practice, I have agency as both creator and historian to replace misogynistic beliefs and re-document these memories.

A Ritual for Metamorphosis(2019) is a pivotal work. I came across some old home videos, and while watching them, I was so angered seeing scenes of my mother and other female relatives relegated to subservient roles that I intervened in the footage, inserting my avatar and the human-snake deity of Leymusoom to reimagine patriarchal family and religious dynamics. It was so cathartic I modeled the four other women in my family, and the work grew from there. My process of recreating or reconstructing our collective memory began with that intervention.

The Leymusoom figure reclaims the Catholic genesis story and the Mago myth from Korean folklore. Snakes are spiritual beings, God and female energies are the same, and female and male energy are related rather than binary in Korean shamanism. These stories, and those of the Christian tradition (my paternal grandmother was a devout Catholic who read the Bible daily with me and my sister), influenced me as a child. I reinterpret these memories within the work by combining elements of the different belief systems imbued with new meaning.

LS: The Leymusoom godhead represents a theme of hybridity that carries through your episodic series. There are powerful connections between places, moments, conventions, materials, gatherings, et cetera—because you interweave them. I’ve been thinking lately about how our memories combine with experiences to influence belief and how that recurring accumulation can be traumatic but also liberating in its adaptability. Can you speak to the role of memory within your practice? 

HK: When I started researching my family history, I found a startling lack of public records about my matrilineal relatives. Because they were women who engaged primarily in domestic labor, the predominant culture did not consider their stories worth recording. This frustration led me to create an online archive for them with 3D portraits and biographical stories. 

During the process, I became interested in a house where I lived as a young child in the early to mid-1990s. I tried remembering the layout and connecting particular features like furniture but could only recall pieces. I had about 30 family photos of different parts of the home and decided to extend them using AI so that I could picture the rooms better. The program I used filled in the photos based on a collective database of stock images and other public archives, adding strange objects and even people. These became my 2023 Leymusoom Firefly series (2023). 

I was fascinated by the variances in perspective—between what I remembered as a young girl and what the original photographs suggested, and how the algorithm interpreted and enhanced the visual information of timestamps, clothing styles, faces, and such. The effect is haunting. The manipulated images are smooth, but the details don’t make sense. When I see these photos, it seems like I know the place, but I’m not sure if it's the right place, which is how I feel thinking about the details of my childhood. Is this my real memory, or not? It’s a version. That fragmentation—technology’s ongoing rearrangement and its shifts in capability and limitations, parallels how memory works. 

LS:Leymusoom involves both personal research and collective praxis. Often, you host events or organize performances that activate installations, for example, a Ganggangsullae dance with Dong-Ji Collective for the opening of your solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José. You’ve invited artists to help produce parts of videos and installations. And you encourage people to engage with Leymusoom as welcome converts, sometimes featuring them in your videos. What is the role of collaboration in these works?

HK: One of the biggest motivations for my Leymusoom practice is to build community with my ancestors, family, and chosen family. It’s a liberated spirituality. For me, manifesting a shared feminist sanctuary, specifically in the digital realm, is a powerful form of resistance. When we conduct rituals of 탈피 (talpi), which means “to molt” and “escape from'' in Korean, we can transform beyond the burdens of generational trauma and patriarchy.

I am interested in reimagining religion as a feminist site that can frame alternative forms of belonging—both for the self and others. I want Leymusoom to keep growing and evolving, to include more of my world, and for the community to initiate their versions and queer their worlds. I believe that if you practice art or perform other kinds of rituals repeatedly, it will change the way you see and sense your life. 

From the early works I made at Berkeley to now, people have related to that message strongly, and more people have begun practicing and participating in Leymusoom. I am a part of a community of musicians, designers, ceramicists, curators, poets, tattoo artists, and teachers, many of whom appear in my digital works. I developed Leymusoom Gift Shop (2023), an installation at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Bay Area Now 9 exhibition accompanied by a publication, by working with around 30 collaborators. For my newest project, Leymusoom Mukkuli, I am working with a group of artists, writers, dancers, and our respective ancestors to develop a process that will allow us to heal from generational trauma together.

Age (if you’d like to share): 33

Location: San Francisco, California

How/when did you begin working creatively with technology?

In school—first as a self-taught hobby, then later as a daily practice and to exhibit 

What did you study at school or elsewhere?

I hold an MFA from UC Berkeley. Before that, I studied Business Administration at Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul.

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously?

During my undergraduate studies, I invented a new packaging design that disguised menstrual pads and started a company from the idea. However once I realized that I was profiting from the shame of internalized patriarchal values, I quit the business, began making art, and applied to graduate school. I wanted a different path for my life where I could discuss these feminist issues with other people. In addition to my practice, I am an assistant professor in the animation department at California College of the Arts. 

What does your desktop or workspace look like? (Pics or screenshots please!)

Right now, the desk in my physical studio has a keyboard, a vertical monitor, and two desktop computers. It sits underneath a large fiddle leaf fig plant, next to a big window that looks out onto a backyard garden. I work at home, so there are usually snacks and toys around. I’ve reproduced my workspace for a handful of Leymusoom installations and animations if you want to check it out.

“Let’s Play Majerus G3” explores a previously unexplored aspect of artist Michel Majerus’s archive: his laptop.

Majerus (1967–2002) was a painter who used the computer extensively, incorporating digital imagery and media into his work. His laptop, which held sketches and compositions, working materials, notes, and appointments, could be thought of as an extension of his studio. Following Majerus’s death, this rich window into the artist’s late work was not accessible for nearly two decades – until artist/musician/researcher Cory Arcangel brought Rhizome together with the Majerus Estate to restore access to the laptop. 

In this series, Arcangel will don the role of a YouTuber who films “Let's Play” videos, a popular genre on YouTube wherein gamers record their playthroughs of videogames, often providing commentary while doing so. In this situation, the "videogame" in question is the laptop of Michel Majerus. 

Through this process, Arcangel will share insights about the artist’s practice that can only be gleaned by exploring his digital environment. In so doing, the project will consider how artists’ use of digital tools might inform an art historical understanding of their work, while yielding rich insights into the late work of Majerus, a painter who engaged deeply with the computer at a turning point in digital culture. 

Watch episode 1: Could we get this ancient artist's laptop to boot up?

As Cory explains in the first episode, Emulation as a Service (EaaS) is an open source emulation framework originally developed at the University of Freiburg that provides management of and access to emulators running in the cloud. In this case, EaaS was utilized to perform a copy of the hard disk originally built into Majerus’ Macintosh G3 laptop, bringing the whole system back up in the original state it was left in when last used by him. Similarly to saving your progress in a video game, EaaS allows you to make changes in an emulated environment without affecting the original copy.

As part of a special partnership, Rhizome is posting digital artefacts and original images for collectors on the Zora blockchain. A low-cost layer of Ethereum, Zora is designed more like a social media platform than an art marketplace, where each post is also up for collection. The first series of posts gathered documentation of live performances from our Benefit last May, Rhizome Forever, with GIFs by Sidewalkkilla. Still available to mint are: 

• Rhizome Forever Module 01 featuring Laser Days, a real-time rendering, worldbuilding studio co-founded by Jack Wedge and Will Freudenheim. For the rhizome forever party, the duo installed a laser that projected illustrations modulated live with stable diffusion, all running on a trusty, behind-the-curtain touchdesigner setup. 
• Rhizome Forever Module 02 featuring Poncili Creación, an experimental puppetry troupe from Puerto Rico that forges new worlds from repurposed materials. At the rhizome forever party, the duo migrated the audience from the main performance space to a carpeted area, where hundreds of people sat amphitheater-style to watch the puppets in action. This module provides a glimpse of that moment.

A percentage of transaction fees on these otherwise free mints goes to support Rhizome and the creators of each post!

In April, Rhizome hosted the launch of a new zine by Our Friend the Computer, a technology history podcast hosted by Camila Galaz and Ana Meisel.  

Rhizome Community Designer Bri Griffin joined Camila and Ana in the Rhizome Discord, where they discussed pre-internet networks, Skeuomorphic design trends, "aesthetic obsolescence," their new digital zine, and more.

An audio recording of the Discord event is now available.

Whether you choose to listen to this interview on your Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6, Unihertz Jelly Star, or sticker-blasted MacBook Air, it is easy to overlook the lineage, technological development, and marketing that brought our devices to us. Thanks to Our Friend the computer, these lesser-known histories are preserved and made accessible right at our fingertips!
 
 
 
 
 

This essay was originally published in  Our Friend the Computer's zine.

“In our dreams we have seen another network, an honest network, a network decidedly more fair than the one in which we now live.”

—Zach Blas, after Subcomandante Marcos, from Contra-Internet Inversion Practice #1: Constituting an Outside (Utopian Plagiarism). 

There have been so many internets.

The computers and networks that we have today have such a monumental aura of inevitability in how they figure our collective conscious, it is almost impossible to see around them and through them, to catch furtive glimpses of the other internets that were and might have been. The computer and the network that seem so ubiquitous today are fashion accessory, family and friend, passport, pacifier, and instrument of social control, wrapped in sleek titanium and glass. “It could never have been any other way,” our devices and software tools whisper to us, soothingly. 

It has been said before, but it is worth saying again, and cannot be said enough: this aura of inevitability is an ideological construct. Going back to the late 1960s, US military-funded research in computer science consistently prioritized central command and control and automation at a distance—which, in doing so, bolstered their vison for military defense while undermining the power of organized labor. More recently, investment dollars from the US sought to “disrupt” industries on a global scale. Homegrown platforms that served well the needs of particular peoples and nations around the world were outmuscled by imported alternatives, backed by a flood of investment, that could be managed efficiently and from afar—while gathering information about far-flung users. 

In short, the “inevitable” technologies of the present are the heirs of decades of corporate and military influence, and it certainly could have been different. In this context, recovering histories of the computers and internets that were and could have been is a vital task. By narrating the multiplicitous history of technology, we can better understand alternatives that might still be viable, and we might find new inspiration to go against the grain of the monolithic internet, to behave within it in ways that open up broader horizons of social possibility. 

As my colleague, digital folklorist and conservation specialist Dragan Espenschied, has argued, the history of digital culture can be thought of as a kind of embodied knowledge. Forms of embodied knowledge tend to be underrepresented in official histories and in formal archives, because this knowledge is not rendered in forms that are legible to such bodies–think, for example, of a family recipe, or a traditional dance. Similarly, the experiences of digital culture can be very difficult to grasp except from the perspective of the people who lived it. The obsolete flip phone may offer little more insight into technology history than your average brick, and the real history may often be found in conversations and informal history practices – such as a podcast called Our Friend the Computer. 

At Rhizome, we aim to support the narration of digital art’s history by maintaining access to the legacy digital materials – software tools, websites, digital artworks, servers – that so deeply shape users' experience of the internet and, by extension, human society. (We don’t do much with hardware, though – for that, you’d have to talk to Media Archaeology Lab). This memory work is sometimes described as nostalgic, which is a term that sounds innocuous and navel-gazing. But to support the memory of digital culture is important work. We must remember how we got here, in order to understand how to get out. 

There have been so many internets. Today, there are perhaps fewer than there have been. Let there be more, tomorrow. 

 On April 20, rhizome hosted the zine launch in our Discord—see documentation from the online event or read the zine on Our Friend the Computer's website.

The latest in a series of interviews with artists who make work that responds to network culture and digital technologies.

Anisha Baid: When we spoke last, you mentioned that your recent trip to the United States (as part of a residency at Amant in New York) felt like a significant juncture for your practice. Part of this, you shared, was seeing Marcel Duchamp’s works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We’ve spoken a lot in the past about the readymade, and I wanted to start by asking you how you are thinking about this now?

Nihaal Faizal: To me, Duchamp is an endlessly rewarding figure. It’s like he had access to time travel and so did everything first. Among other things, I recently realized that he was also one of the first to produce what we now know as “artists’ books,” working as author, publisher, designer, and distributor, with works like the The Green Box from 1934 or La Boîte-en-valise from 1941. Seeing his works in person was really special, because you see that he was very invested in scale, weight, tone, and color—it wasn’t just about the idea of something. He started off as a painter, and this is where the readymade comes from—the first signs of the readymade are sighted in Cubist paintings where bits of paper, string, and netting start to make their way in.

Personally, for me, the readymade is a form that shares a close affinity with photography. As you know, I started as a documentary photographer, and taking pictures was a way of preserving something. It was an act of taking something from the world and moving it around, from one context to another. The readymade functions in the same way, but instead of flattening an object, it allows one to preserve it in full, without privileging an angle or a viewpoint. Historically too, the readymade and the photograph have stood-in for each other. Though now of contested authorship, Duchamp’s most well known example of the readymade, the urinal called Fountain from 1917, was actually destroyed soon after it was made. Its survival is owed to a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, and it was the wide circulation of this photograph that preserved the work’s place in history. 

AB: Much of your work draws from a hyperlocal but globalized media and urban landscape. I'm thinking here of Emergency Vehicle (2022), your series of photo-realistic colored pencil drawings of the back of ambulances in Bangalore where the figure of the Michelin Man appears. This work, and others such as Dummy (2022), which brings together a collection of dummy CCTV cameras, points to a complex web of media history playing out outside and alongside a mainstream and globalized narrative of media technologies…

NF: I make work with and about what’s around me. Most often this is my urban environment, and most often this happens to be Bangalore. This is true of Emergency Vehicle but applies equally to a work like Dummy where all the dummy CCTV cameras that I’ve collected are turned on and displayed along with their packaging. These works, and many others, are about the city but really they are about seeing—about really seeing things.

When I was much younger, my high school art teacher would try and teach me to paint—a hopeless exercise. I would be working on a landscape, and while looking at my sky, he would ask, “where’s the green, where’s the purple?” I was convinced he was taking me for a ride, because I just didn’t see it. He would then demonstrate and it all turned out pretty great. This was when I realized that I could never be a painter. It wasn’t about mastering skill or technique—that could potentially be achieved with enough practice and discipline—but it was about a way of seeing, which I just didn’t have. Though I see a lot better these days, I don’t think I’m there yet.

The city is often like that, it is full of details—colors, objects, signs, textures—that are hard to see, especially because there is so much of it, and all at once. Often there are things that are everywhere, like surveillance cameras, but then there are also doubles—stand-in dummy cameras—that are equally ubiquitous. Both flash a red light and both appear to be working, until you look closely enough. Another example would be bottled water. In India, we have the brand Bisleri, which has been around for decades, but one can also find, with identical packaging and questionable quality, Beverley or Blislife or Blisleri. The funny thing is that unlike most knock-offs or replicas, water under these labels costs exactly the same as what it imitates. 

AB: I’m interested in the specificity of Bangalore city as a site in your work, how it becomes a locational marker for technology in the “global south,” often referred to as the “silicon valley of India”. Could we talk more about how things you are observing in the city act as either detritus from a global culture or as signs liberated from their commercial contexts, as in the case of the Michelin Man that appears on ambulances in Bangalore?

NF: The Michelin Man, which is the official mascot of the Michelin tire company, is one of the world’s oldest trademarks still in active use—it made its first appearance in 1894. Over the last several years, it has started to appear as a sticker on ambulances in Bangalore, completely divorced from any association with the brand. I asked an ambulance driver what this was all about and he told me that the figure was the patient, severely injured, wrapped in plaster, rushing to the hospital. It was simultaneously an image standing-in for both the patient and the ambulance, the injury and its potential remedy.

This mix-up of signs could have happened anywhere, but it happened here, in Bangalore. This is something that happens because of how information travels, and there is a fair bit of imagination involved. Something similar happened with desktop publishing (DTP) in India. Alongside the sudden introduction of computers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a new field of design and print production emerged. Suddenly, software like Microsoft Word was used not as a word processor, but instead as a design application to make banners, invitation cards, posters, and flyers. It was turned inside out and put against its use, but still towards a certain kind of production. I’m interested in this kind of productive misuse, and we see it all the time in our cities, where neither tools nor signs nor methods are fixed and stable, but always transforming, as per need. Bangalore is full of these examples.

AB: I think there's something complex about vernacular design—design that arises from the local sensibilities that maybe predate what ideas of “good digital design” mean. It's interesting to talk about less professionalized tools and how their traces can be spotted in the city—like how you can tell what software something was made on. This work of yours, along with a few others, are interested both in digital design, as well as urban landscape in a way that makes the boundary between them difficult to define. Could you talk a little more about your work MK Stickers, which exists both as a freely circulating PDF and as a physical work consisting of five binders?

NF:MK Stickers is a work from 2021 in which I collected a sample of every product for sale from a vinyl sticker wholesaler in Bangalore. These stickers are all produced for use on automobiles, and in the city of Bangalore, where one’s experience of traffic is intimate and endless—we see these stickers all the time. Some express love and affection, others impose aggression and threats. Some are aspirational, while some mark personal, religious, or caste identity. Often these stickers repeat and recur, as they all come from the same distribution networks (like the shop that I based my work on), though sometimes they are also custom-made.

Having collected a sample of each sticker available, a total of over 300, I decided to organize this collection in two ways. One, to return it to the internet, which is where most of the source graphics for these stickers come from; I made a PDF featuring scans of all of these stickers still held within their packaging. Two, towards preserving and presenting these stickers in use, I made a set of five binders cataloging the stickers—essentially a large volume of sticker books. While one version circulates as a free-to-download PDF, the other circulates as an artwork in exhibitions. Both versions contain aspects missing in the other, and in this way neither one assumes a privileged form.

I often think of the context for a work and increasingly try to make works that are in response to their conditions and affordances. Once I was invited to contribute an insert for an art magazine popular in India (Take on Art, Issue 28). After some deliberation, I asked them to simply move the front cover masthead of this issue, from the top-left to the top-right. This particular issue was on history, and while looking through the magazine’s archive, I realized that the masthead had been fixed to the top-left for every issue but one—their inaugural issue twelve years prior. This simple gesture was my way of leaking back into the magazine’s history with something that would go on to be largely invisible. Though this intervention went on to be published on the cover, and though the magazine’s colophon confirms this gesture, I don’t think anyone’s ever noticed, and certainly no one’s ever brought it up with me.

AB: As an artist, you seem to operate as a collector, drawing on your observational practice to point to hyperlocal signs and histories. In some works, collections present themselves more traditionally (as groups of objects in Dummy), while in other works you revert to a laborious artistic production to represent the collection, like in Emergency Vehicle. How do you strategize how to work with a particular archive or collection?

NF: I’ve been collecting things as far back as I remember, and recently I’ve been thinking about where this impulse comes from. A friend and I were discussing the work of Lutz Bacher, and she mentioned that the artist used to claim a show-and-tell from her days in kindergarten as her first ever artwork. This show-and-tell was not about an object, but about a method that she had discovered—a method for cleaning dirt from under her fingernails. I also recently watched a film called (Untitled) from 2009, about a brooding sound-artist who claimed that his first composition was a page full of dots that he had sketched as a child. Excited by his production, he had asked his mother to perform this score, but she laughed at him, and he’s been bitter ever since. 

Thinking along these lines, I remembered that when I was very young, I was fascinated by how my grandmother drew stars. I would sit with her, and ask her to fill page after page, notebook after notebook, with these drawings. This activity occupied us for hours. I had no real interest in learning to make these stars, nor of doing this myself—that wasn’t the point. I laughed when I remembered this, because it’s not so different from how I work today. Many of my works are collections, many are instructional or rather propositional, and many are built through repetition. A lot of my work is quite simple or modest in terms of material, means, and scale and a lot of it involves doing very little, beyond setting things in motion, or collecting something. These works are never about any kind of mastery but always about a kind of curiosity.

Working in this way, the strategy I settle on for each work comes largely from the work's subject. I always work with what exists—whether it’s an object, an image, or a document. Sometimes presenting the thing itself does the trick—isolating it, pointing it out, combining it with more of itself. Sometimes I find that it needs an additional gesture—maybe a method of reproduction, to bring out something that I want to highlight. Occasionally, the thing does not speak, no matter the effort, and in these cases I try to find something else that can stand-in for it. This was the case with my film Mohammed Rafi Fan Blog from 2017, where the thing in question—a fan blog that my uncle ran for the singer Mohammed Rafi—no longer existed, and neither did recordings of a song that the singer performed at my grandparents’ wedding in 1958. In this case then, my film, a documentary featuring my uncle and my grandparents, came to stand-in for both the blog and the recording, while also coming to stand-in for my family’s telling of this story. The wonderful thing is that now this film is something shared between my extended family as a repository of memories, similarly to a photo album. It’s really an example of when a work exceeds its own conditions, to become something else—not art, not a document, not a film, but a very personal thing.

Age: 30

Location: Bangalore, India

How/when did you begin working creatively with technology?

When I was around five years old, my father brought home a laminated print-out featuring me with the comic characters Asterix & Obelix, that he had made on Photoshop with help from a friend. We were all roughly cut, extremely pixelated, and some of us cast a shadow, but it was the most wonderful gift and it really felt like a new world had opened up. This must have been when I first saw the potential of technology as a creative tool, or at least as a portal to something fantastic. 

What did you study at school or elsewhere?

For my undergraduate programme, I attended what was then an experimental study programme in Bangalore, at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. Every semester we could pick our courses from all that was available across disciplines and departments, so I mixed up experimental film and art history and graphic design in various combinations and permutations. I subsequently attended the “Home Workspace Program” at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, which was also an experimental study program, but this time with a clearer contemporary art focus. 

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously?

I run a publishing house called Reliable Copy, which I founded six years ago, that publishes works, projects, and writing by artists. I am also involved with Press Works, which is a design agency, art book store, and a distributor for independent publishing in India. 

What does your desktop or workspace look like? (Pics or screenshots please!)

Set in the beautiful redwoods near the Mendocino coast of California, DWeb Camp is a five-day retreat for builders and dreamers to connect, learn, share and have fun as we work towards building a better, decentralized web. A web that actualizes the principles of trust, human agency, mutual respect, and ecological awareness. 

At camp, Rhizome Co-Executive Director Michael Connor will gave a performative lecture on the history of digital art, and speak on a panel concerning decentralized culture in the creator economy. Rhizome Lead Developer Mark Beasley will present our work on Conifer and give a preview of our new solar web server. If you're at DWeb camp, be sure to say hi. 

Visit DWeb to learn more about the festival. 

Are you an artist, museum conservator, or collector looking to restore or archive a work of software- or network-dependent art? Is your community organization trying to recover access to a meaningful online resource? Is your creative agency paying high server costs for outdated web projects that you can’t bear to let go of?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, Rhizome’s preservation services program may be for you. 

Initiated to support ongoing access to the Rhizome ArtBase, an archive of more than 2000 artworks, our digital preservation program has spent 15 years developing archival strategies, tools, and systems that are cost-effective and scalable, supporting a decentralized ecosystem of digital archives. 

Building on this work, we now provide services to a wide range of individuals and institutions, including notable recent collaborations with Walker Art Center and the Majerus Estate. We specialize in software-based artwork, particularly legacy artists’ software and CD-ROM art, as well as web-based projects.

Many of our services are available on a paid basis, though we strive to keep costs low for this mission-aligned service. We make further discounts and subsidies available where possible to deserving projects, and we also sometimes collaborate with partners to secure outside funding. Beyond our direct support, we also offer the web archiving platform Conifer, which is a robust and accessible hosted tool for making interactive, archival copies of human-scale websites.

Born-digital art is frequently obsoleted by a tech industry that consistently undervalues digital culture and its history. Through this initiative, we hope contribute to a richer and more inclusive digital social memory for all. 

We look forward to hearing from you! 

If you are interested in our services or in a collaboration, please fill out this interest form to the best of your ability. 

Now through September 15, Rhizome is accepting submissions for our 2024 Microgrants, offering support for new artworks on the web!

Artists, thinker/tinkerers, game-makers, creative hackers, digital archaeologists, code poets and dreamers: Rhizome gives small annual grants to people like you, to support new online projects. No experience is necessary – just review the guidelines, submit an idea, and we will review it in collaboration with guest jurors (Mindy Seu, Chia Amisola, and Tega Brain).

It's been 10 years since we began offering microgrants as a part of our Commissions program.  When the program first began, 'microgrants' was described as “a commitment to browser-based art at a moment when art contextualized within the frame of digital culture fill(ed) galleries worldwide.” Ten years on, we've seen many new waves of communities that develop around an interest in art on the web. Rhizome wants to make it feel possible for anyone to host their own website or learn to use the web to tell their own stories.

A creative web for everyone.

Apply by September 15th, 2024

Awarded grants will...
● Receive Feedback from peers, rhizome staff, and jurors ●
● Share progress via our email list, social media, discord, etc. ●
● Be considered for future rhizome programming ●

Submit to one of the following categories !

*If you aren’t sure if your project qualifies or if it overlaps with multiple categories,
please submit anyway !  <3

• 
  

  Imagining lighter alternatives to an over-developed and resource intensive web, inspired by rhythms found in nature.

  “Natural Cycles”, in collaboration with Solar Protocol, rewards the creation of resilient resources, minimal use of external dependencies, open source development, non-predatory attention environments, and repairable network structures that escape the commercial internet. Imagining technology that’s held accountable for its physicality, including geopolitical issues, environmental emergencies, and levels of access.

  Inspired by rhythms of nature, “Natural Cycles” encourages the web to go local, take a moment to rest and recharge, to expand and contract, to repurpose and translate.

  From “slow tech” to “low tech”, from “tiny web” to “solar web” 

  Inspiration Board for "Natural Cycles " ►

• Gathering experience or research-based stories of “lost” media, forum discoveries, niche communities, and personal collections.
  

  “Lost Web Histories” is dedicated to uncovering and preserving hidden narratives of the internet's past, with a special focus on non-commercial websites, “homemade” webpages, and personal histories and collections.

  Lost Web Histories gathers stories of “lost” media and discovered files from sources such as forums and blogs and diverse community-driven digital spaces and communities that have been overshadowed by commercial platforms.

  The program encourages a variety of approaches, from academic research to personal storytelling.

  Inspiration Board for "Lost Web Histories" ►

• Diving through file structures, browser windows, and automated triggers for the purpose of live performance via a screen.

  We’re in the age of performance; from webcam ballets and to the worlds of live steaming and VJing. Even a screen-recorded lecture can dive in and out of our file systems in ways we could never imagine. The cursor as an actor that traces along the paths of the internet. Experiences that only happen when ‘played’ within the complex ensembles of hardware and software, audience input and feedback, and external libraries and APIs.

  
  Do we need cursors? Keyboards? Can we script narratives for operating systems?
  
  

  “Desktop Performance” seeks applicants interested in performance that involves components such as sound, images, browsers, folder structures, application windows, etc.

  Inspiration Board for "Desktop Performance" ►

• Breaking out of dominant global systems of exchange and value to bring into focus narratives related to alt-systems.  
  
  

  Money as a “universal” system for expressing value has long prioritized speculative views of the world based on antiquated methods of measuring and storing information. Types of exchange and value creation between people and communities become increasingly complex as people express themselves across networks that blur the boundaries of what a “community” is. What do we collectively value that escapes the traditional marketplace?

  As our current notion of individual ownership and intellectual property becomes overwhelmingly challenged by modern technologies, how do we begin to negotiate new forms of trust and value-creation on both local and global scales?

  What are our new modes of survival?

  –

  For this microgrant, Rhizome is asking our community of artists to either imagine smaller, more-private, and localized layers to our dominant global system of exchange or to translate and bring into focus narratives of how these types of systems already exist.

  Inspiration Board for "Money as Medium" ►

Projects will be selected with the help of a Jury! 

•  ● Mindy ●
  ● Seu ●
  
  2020 First Look Commission
  ►
  2022 Cyberfeminism Book Launch
  ►
  2023 Rhizome Website Re-design
  
  https://mindyseu.com/
  
• ● Chia ●
  ● Amisola ●
  
  2016 Developh
  ►
  2023 Microgrants / Art & Code Alumni
  ►
  2024 Forbes Under 30
  
  https://chia.design/
  
• ● Tega ●
  ● Brain ●
  
  2016 Microgrants Alumni
  ►
  2016 First Look Commission
  ►
  2021-Ongoing
  Solar Protocol
  
  https://tegabrain.com/

Graphic Identity and Animations by : Darius Ou

--

The Rhizome Commissions Program is supported by Teiger Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York legislature. The 2024 Microgrants are made possible by the Rhizome community <33.

We'd also like to thank all of the incredible individuals who have contributed towards our microgrants program in the past year !

If you would like to contribute directly towards microgrants, please visit our support page.

We're excited to introduce the cohort making up NEW INC's 2024-25 Art & Code track, a partnership between Rhizome and NEW INC.

NEW INC is the New Museum's cultural incubator, which supports a diverse range of creative practitioners with a values-driven program and safe space for gathering and developing creative projects and businesses. The Art & Code track is a space for artists, designers, researchers, and technologists to reexamine digital and cultural landscapes through internet-based practice. Rhizome serves as track partner, working to support and amplify the cohort over the course of the year. Writer/curator Eileen Isagon Skyers will return as track mentor. 

Learn about the 2023-2024 Year 10 cohort members.

Introducing the 2024-25 Art & Code cohort!

Avneesh Sarwate& Sumanth Srinivasan

Sumanth is an engineer, visual artist, writer, and musician. His work thus far has centered around digitizing human imperfections and playfulness in art, and the presentation of noise and degradation as an aesthetic.

Avneesh is a programmer, musician, visual artist, and improviser. His work focuses on using real time computer systems to enhance the gestural and impulsive elements of the creative process. A guitarist since childhood, “jamming” with computers has been a goal of his from the minute he started making art with them. 

Spurred by our own adventures and challenges with making and sharing software-based multimedia art, we want to build browser based tools and software libraries that allow artists to more easily design, collaborate on, and share digital work.

Dan Gorelick is a creative technologist, musician, and organizer living between Brooklyn and the Bay Area. Dan creates audiovisual performances, blending his lifelong classical cello practice with live-coding to create music with code. He explores what is uniquely possible when combining acoustic and electronic practices to develop improvisational pieces that can evolve and respond to the energy of a space. He investigates the healing nature of sound and the relationship between music and the different timescales of the natural world.

He also teaches workshops about live-coding and speaks about the creative possibilities of technology, with a goal of helping more people access their creative potential. He values growing with the community and is a co-founder of the Bay Area live audio-visual performance collective AV Club. He is also an organizer and member of the LivecodeNYC collective and was a member of the NEW INC Year 10 Art & Code cohort.

Hiba Ali PhD shares their digital art in the form of immersive digital environments, sculpture-based installations, moving images, garments, and sound. They developed the term, digital somatics, to embody the body-mind-spirit connection to the principles of game design, worldbuilding and narrative storytelling. They use virtual reality, 3D animation and augmented reality to slow down time and create portals of solace and care and consider the digital portal as a liminal space where they call forth more loving and healing into our world. Their work has been presented in VBKÖ (Vienna), Deichtorhallen Internationale Kunst und Fotografie (Hamburg), re:publica (Berlin), Centre A (Vancouver), Horse Hospital, 15 Folds (London), Ars Electronica Festival, Onassis Stegi (Athens), Chicago Architecture Biennial (Chicago), Portland Art Museum (Portland), Interaccess, Trinity Video Square, Images Festival (Toronto), Alserkal Avenue (Dubai), Dhow Countries Music Academy (Zanzibar), Rehnsgatan 3 (Stockholm), Medrar for Contemporary Art (Cairo), UMAM D&R (Beirut), Oberhausen International Short Film Festival (Oberhausen), Belladonna, Index NYC (New York City), imc5533 (Istanbul) and File-Electronic Language International Festival (São Paulo.)

Ivan Zhao is a poet, designer, and web artist interested in nonlinear narratives, forms, and mechanics that reckon with digital, diasporic, and queer identity. His work interrogates individual agency, the notion of time, and our capacity to find meaning in the absurd. Websites as alternative lives. Typefaces as diasporic families. Game making as self discovery. Attention as love.

Mattaniah Aytenfsu is an artist and creative technologist. Her interdisciplinary practice investigates the interplay of computation, consciousness, and expression. Her work seeks to externalize the internal, visualizing both technological processes and emotional states. Using code as her primary medium, Mattaniah develops artifacts and experiences which explore the expressive use of computation and its connection to other fields that range from science, music and design.

Munus & Niktari 

Munus & Niktari is the research, design, and development (R&D&D) practice of Munus Shih and Nikki (Niktari) Makagiansar. In their practice, they recognize code as an agent for augmenting research, communication design, and artistic experiences in new and meaningful ways. They adopt open-source values in their process in pursuit of fostering transparent, equitable, and intentional collaboration. 

Munus co-organizes with SpOnAcT!, a Taiwanese queer art and code collective, and co-hosted the 2023 Processing Community Day in Taiwan. Nikki co-organizes with SPICY, a collective that works in between art, justice, and cultural archival. Together, they teach interaction design and creative coding at Parsons School of Design and The Cooper Union, and contribute to open-source projects at the Processing Foundation.

Naomi Lilly is the founder and CEO of Brij App, a company dedicated to improving representation and opportunities for marginalized groups within the media industry. Located in New York, Naomi has had experience at Viacom, Live Nation Entertainment, Radio One, LinkedIn, Forbes Tate Partners, and Depop.

Naomi was a participant in the Class of '22 Techstars Music program. Lilly’s formal background is in Communications, Marketing, Gender Studies, and African American Studies. Lilly currently serves as the Director of Marketing and Storytelling at Girls for Gender Equity.  Lilly hopes to use these experiences to create an inclusive and engaging environment within entertainment.

Searcy Kwon is an independent publisher, cybersecurity professional, designer, and pilot-in-training. Her work is fueled by a sense of urgency to confront and respond to our loss of security in all forms, reflected in her creative exploration and analysis of threat detection and incident response. She is the co-organizer of Multi-Factor Authentication reading and research group, a collective grounded in cognitive linguistics and critical theory, that investigates the construction and linguistic expression of narrative and memory in the technological age. She also loves hydrangeas, steel guitar, and the experience of being lost.

Spencer Chang is an internet artist and engineer stewarding and making computers as communal environments and creative infrastructure.

Their interdependent practice spans open-source tools, internet playgrounds, and computing-infused objects that offer alternative forms of digital being and invite & empower visitors to make their own technology. Their focus on collective infrastructure embodies a practice of longevity by imagining, realizing, and maintaining technological patterns that nurture agency, intimacy, and solidarity. 

Ultimately, their dream is an internet that feels like a home made for, and tended by, all of us—a patchwork of cozy websites, playful interactions, and communal libraries. 

Their work has been featured and supported by the de Young Museum, Gray Area, CultureHub, MIT Technology Review, and Frieze.

TaraRose Morris is a mixed desi VJ, new media artist, and creative technologist from Toronto, Canada. She creates animated, interactive, and immersive works that explore emerging technology as a medium for connecting more deeply with ourselves and with each other. Her areas of inquiry include generative divination (connecting code and spiritual practice) as well as the digital embodiment of community, culture, and history (visualizing communities through dance, simulations of surveillance, AI as a medium for identity construction).  They are currently developing an onchain tarot web application called NFTarot, leveraging energy exchange with the blockchain to center abundance and presence in a space oriented towards scarcity and distraction.

Trevor Van de Velde is a composer, sound artist, instrument builder, and creative programmer based in NYC. Trevor's work focuses on exploring the relationship between technology, play, materiality, and hybridity through a combination of "hacked" electronics and live performance.

Tuerhong Guliniali (گۈلنىھال) is a Uyghur Chinese designer, researcher, and radio producer from Urumqi, Xinjiang, China, currently based in Brooklyn. Tuerhong applies her critical media studies research interest into the intersection of design and technology. Tuerhong’s design research focuses on technology & machine learning, race as technology, and poetic storytelling in understanding reclamation of self within and beyond digital media. As a radio producer and curator, Tuerhong interviews young emerging artists around the global internet through her show gtalks! radio, a bi-monthly interview show that shares stories to inspire and connect with like minded people, at dublab.

About the Y11 Track Mentor 

Eileen Isagon Skyers is a writer, curator, and artist based in New York. She has nearly a decade of experience contextualizing media art and producing online exhibitions across non-profit and contemporary arts institutions, among them, David Zwirner, Rhizome, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Through her extensive directorial experience at web3 organizations including Foundation, Feral File, and Friends with Benefits, Skyers has facilitated high profile partnerships with distinguished collaborators including bitforms gallery, Almine Rech, the Museum of Modern Art, LVMH, Artist Rights Society, and Uniswap. Her critical writing on digital art and culture has been published in Hyperallergic, Outland, Frieze, Spike, and Dirt, and in printed catalogues including the Net Art Anthology, Pioneer Works' Software for Artist's Day publication, In Poetic Coalition, and Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon. Skyers is currently a mentor for NEW INC's Art and Code cohort, and acted as an advisor for The Kitchen’s L.A.B. Research Residency x Simons Foundation x SFPC.

The latest in a series of interviews with artists who make work that responds to network culture and digital technologies.

Nihaal Faizal: Your work Breaking the Screen (2020) is part video essay, part corporate presentation, but mainly I see it as an artist's statement. It charts the ground for a lot of what your practice has taken as a subject over the last eight years. Loosely, this has been the history of computers, which started, as this work states: “as a woman that computes, to being a large machine, then a small machine, and now is more an idea - a construct which holds many others." What brought you to the computer?

Anisha Baid: That’s really interesting, I don’t think I have thought about the work being an artist statement exactly but you’re not wrong. In making that work, I was contending with the degree of narrative the video essay needed, and how much it could just be a slideshow of these clip art images of women smashing computers that I had been collecting for months. I found the narrative threads in a corporate presentation template I ended up using as a formal structure for the work—which included introductions and credit slides. Essentially I was making a pitch—for and about womanhood and computerhood. My thesis as such, was not that being a woman on the computer is somehow fundamentally different, or that digital experience is particularly gendered—but that the history of gendered labor and performativity had a lot to offer us in understanding our unfolding relationship with computers. I remember reading Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre, during this time, where she foregrounds the theatrical capacity and action oriented set-up of the computer as a medium. I also drew a lot from a brilliant Human Computer Interaction (HCI) studies paper written by Sheryl Brahnam, Marianthe Karanikas, and Margaret Weave that outlined how HCI as an academic and industrial discipline was born from a feminized conception of the computer—that the “interface,” has always been feminine.

This idea is taken to various conclusions in the video piece, which shows these comedic and tragic women stuck in servile roles, doing the organizational and care work of the world. In essence, you can replace the woman there with any kind of dispossessed desk worker under capitalism—but my claim remains that the particular kind of dispossession we suffer is a stifling, feminized labor. I also want to clarify the term feminization that comes from both psychoanalysis and labor studies. It invokes the perception of something as more feminine or related to women, but what this leads to in a patriarchal system is the devaluation of the feminized object and its association with free or cheap labor. Feminization of the computer, creates as its counterpart an entitled masculine user. I’ve also been interested in looking at this difference between the keyboard and the mouse here—where typing contains this long history of feminization and the mouse becomes this managerial pointing tool—these dynamics have continued into other works.

NF: In speaking of feminization, I think of your work Sally’s Helper(2022), in which you perform as Sally, the office secretary who was the "model user" for the first “desktop” interface. The figure that Sally represents, eventually transformed from user to assistant, and forges the line that leads us to characters like Siri and Alexa. How did you figure that transformation in this work? 

AB: I found this “figure” of Sally in a couple of books I was reading about computer history—specifically histories of the graphical user interface (GUI), before which computers were entirely textual and numeric machines. Sally (no last name found) was a secretary at XEROX Parc, where Douglas Engelbart’s “Augmentation Research Lab” was creating the first graphically operated user interface. As they began to think about their expanding consumer base with these more general use computers, they realized the need to understand further, study, and constellate a “user” for whom visual worlds would be designed. Sally, a secretary at the office, was then taken as the first “model user” for what went on to become the interface metaphor of the “desktop.” They created the desktop to retrofit Sally’s desk at the time—files and folders, memos, mail and the like. This was absolutely fascinating to me as a case study, not an exception but an example of how technology happens in the real world. How socio-cultural realities write themselves further into code in ways that seem even harder to locate and, by consequence, change.

In the performance Sally’s Helper, I’m thinking about the cultural specificity of Sally as a white office lady from the 1980s. My imagination of her lines up with a lot of the clip art and stock images I have collected in the previous work, and the goal of the performance is to traverse the distance from “caricature” to complex subjectivity. We are all made in the image of Sally, as “users” of the desktop, and I also think of the performance as an ode to and a lament for her. This is possible because the piece is primarily a piano composition. It takes a lyric-first approach to composition as the sounds are generated through typing on the keyboard, but through the process of performance, I am able to become an embodied user. In the performance, Sally is not an efficient, invisible typist, but an author and a musician using the keyboard as her instrument and pen. 

My first solo exhibition, “MS User” at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust focused on these two figures of the “user” and the “assistant” as figures on either side of the computer screen—both designed to exercise as little agency as possible. Sally is also interesting to me, because she was simultaneously the model “user”, and the model “computer”, as we would see in future versions of the desktop model. Recreating the environment of the ’80s office was not enough, and user interfaces came to be set up as “second person” environments more and more—where an assistant figure like Siri or Alexa or Samantha (from the film Her, 2013) would be needed to personify the increasingly complex functions of the machine. As computers themselves become more advanced and capable, their functions are mediated through a simplified and feminized friendly interface. 

NF: Sally's Helper is also a work about posture, and pain—its presentation but also its disguise. Your work Self Portrait as Tech Support(2022) amplifies these concerns. It consists of a foam mouse pad designed to help prevent carpal-tunnel syndrome, on which a low-resolution webcam photograph of yourself appears. It is a skeuomorph in reverse, where the mousepad becomes a body, providing the user with a perverse sense of comfort.

Ultimately though, the pad is the base and optimal surface for a vital tool in our interaction with computers.  What kind of mouse does such a mouse pad support? 

AB: I think my practice took a major turn through the pandemic when everything really became digital—and all I could think about was the chronic back pain I was experiencing as a result of my computer use. “Work from home” quickly became a labor condition for me to investigate, as I was not alone in feeling this rising occupational pain. The live medium was also a revelation at this time, working with small groups in “guided mediations” and lecture performances led me to becoming Sally. There is a kind of pathos in the circular trap of making work about how much you hate the computer—the computer still ends up occupying a lot of space in your life. Sally’s “helper” in the performance, is in fact the desktop computer that was made after studying her behavior and movement around her desk. The personal computer was an isolation machine, individuating workspaces like nothing before it had succeeded in doing, and eventually would become an obsoletion machine—replacing the “assistant” and making Sally redundant. I’ve tried to construct the performance with this pathos as its rhythmic core—there are long silences, a lot of uncomfortable shifting around in my seat, but most of all it is the restricted sitting position that becomes painful to watch.

I’m really interested in the way bodies orient to the computer, often mindlessly as the visual interface is designed to consume our awareness. The sitting posture that bends the human form along three joints—the knees, the hips and the arms, thus become artifacts of HCI and design.

The mousepads were inspired from similar anime pictures on mousepads designed for gamers and coders. These are the people with the highest risk of carpal-tunnel due to their intensive mouse use. There is a natural overlap in the venn diagrams of internet misogyny and gamer/coder bro culture that led to the rise of these mousepads with simulated women’s (and sometimes animal) breasts as a resting place for the wrist. There is a very interesting and sad story about computer pain in this story, for me, and of course it is also very funny. Inserting myself into the picture did become a way to reverse the skeuomorph and create a kind of void where objectifying desire was supposed to be. I remember you introduced me to Sianne Ngai’s writing on the gimmick as “capitalism’s most successful aesthetic category and its biggest embarrassment and structural problem” which felt very present in this work. 

NF: Another recent work, Relentless Logic (2023) presents an extremely enlarged house of cards, seemingly made up of the deck from the Windows “Solitaire.” Alongside these cards are quotations by Silicon Valley technologists including Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Like all house of cards, this one too is a delicate balance—but what is the balance you see between the ideologies of tech’s founding fathers, and this very commonplace computer game?

AB: Vilem Flusser, in his essay “Why Do Typewriters Go ‘Click’,” reflecting on the haptic nuances of using the typewriter, asks: “Why do machines stutter?” and goes on to answer himself—“Because everything there is in the world (and the whole world itself) stutters.” With this work, I was very invested in bringing to foreground this stuttering and shaky ground on which technological realities establish themselves as muscle memory. 

The quotations in this work are excerpted from product launches, media interviews, or standalone tweets from key technologists from the last four decades, from Douglas Engelbart (inventor of the mouse) to Marc Andreessen (Co-Founder of Netscape browser and present day Venture Capitalist). These quotes present snippets of the personal ideologies and worldviews endorsed by these so-called “founding fathers.”

Microsoft Solitaire, alongside Minesweeper, was the first default game to be built into an operating system. On Windows machines, they were created to teach novice computer users how to use the then-new peripheral device—the “mouse.” Solitaire helped users learn the “click and drag” gesture as the mechanism through which playing cards could be manipulated. The sculpture abstracts these digital playing cards (existing as transparent PNGs), into three dimensional translucent forms, with the pixelated corners on these sculptural cards reflecting the imperfect translation of "rounded corners" in the first solitaire game. On the one side, these cards tell the very specific story of how an interface behavior was encoded into our bodies, on the other, morally ambivalent speech from technologists presents the ideological project under which our interfaces are built. Like you said, there is a delicate balance, and the tension inherent in a “house of cards” is always in the air around this sculpture.

This work, along with Blue Screens (2019) and Desktop Background Paintings (2020) brings an art historical view into the interface—archiving, re-appropriating, and repositioning images from technological history by finding formalist strategies in painting or sculpture for their recirculation. Contemporary interfaces, I think, can be seen as a step in the much-problematized history of Western art—where the frame of a painting transports a silent and solitary viewer into its contents, a (Microsoft) window to another world and the consequent loss of bodily agency in this world. 

Age (if you’d like to share): 27

Location: Pittsburgh

How/when did you begin working creatively with technology?

I come from a family of technologists. My father runs a small electronics business in Kolkata, India and he would sometimes take me to work and give me a selection of nuts, bolts, LEDs and other knick-knacks to keep me occupied… I remember being absorbed in making little abstract sculptures out of those as a kid. When I was a teenager, I also stumbled upon a small community of glitch artists online, they would get into the source code of image files and mess with them to create these cool visual disturbances and I started doing this as well. I must have been 16 or so, and it was the first time it really dawned on me that the computer was really all code, like breaking a kind of fourth wall of the interface. When I entered a more formal creative education, I naturally gravitated towards telling stories about technology with materials from family archives and found video material on the internet. 

What did you study at school or elsewhere?

I got my undergraduate degree at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore where I studied design and media art. It was a fairly small and experimental school and even though it wasn’t a formal art education, watching my professors be artists in the world was really exciting at the time. I have also just finished my MFA at Carnegie Mellon University this year, in a very interdisciplinary studio art program. Before the MFA, I think my practice was situated on the computer almost entirely, but having access to a studio really changed the scope of things and I’ve been making a lot more sculpture and performance work since. 

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously?

I’m currently looking for work as I transition out of grad school and back into the real world. I’ve been teaching in digital media, video art and critical theory as part of my graduate program. Before this, I worked in various arts institutions in India, including as an editorial assistant for PIX journal which is a journal for lens based practices in South Asia. 

What does your desktop or workspace look like? (Pics or screenshots please!)

The latest in a series of interviews with artists who make work that responds to network culture and digital technologies.

Jason Isolini: Comp USA Live was a live desktop performance and livestream series that disregarded various physical and digital boundaries, including browser windows, green screens, and private and public space. Both live and virtual audiences often participated in its shenanigans, becoming artifacts of failed facial recognition and haphazard operations. In a lineage of cyberperformance that includes web-based theater in Second Life, Upstage, and notably Wirefire, Comp USA Live functions more like a cyber-variety show. I can’t help but reminisce on the actual Comp USA retailer and web2’s early shift to the digital storefront, which visually became an ad-based agglomeration of the browser. Can you speak about what led up to this mixture of comedy and live programming; what did Comp USA Live look like in the pre-pandemic days? Is there a term you’d use to describe this work?

Mark Fingerhut: The terms I would use to describe Comp USA Live are "digital slapstick," the "aesthetic of failure," or "a comedy of digital errors." I like "digital slapstick" because it's the inherent comedy of using a computer to get a task done. We glaze over the physical comedy of misclicking, or opening the wrong window; clicking the wrong button, and then a cable gets wrapped around your mouse, and something falls on your keyboard and hits a key wrong, or the speakers get unplugged, et cetera. Just the total mire, the digital muck, the complete disaster that is using a physical desktop computer. As much as we want to pretend that we've been "uploaded" and we're all cybernetic, digital, people who exist only online, it's not the case. It couldn't be farther from the case; we're still sitting at these computers and, fucking clicking around trying to get shit working. I mean, the antagonist of the show was the "Graphic Designer," someone who does it all "correctly."So, that was kind of the impetus of CompUSA Live. We wanted to stage this chaos real-time, in front of a live audience, because everyone relates to the experience of having "technical difficulties;" it resonates and works as theater. It's a nightmare, but it's really funny, is the thing.

In the pre-pandemic days, livestreaming was not as ubiquitous as it is now. Today, it's a totally codified and fully named activity. But pre-pandemic, the idea of streaming what was on your computer live for an audience was novel. It was a new idea to have a performance that takes place simultaneously in the real and digital desktop world, so that was our point of exploration. Content-wise, with CompUSA Live, it was about a team of people trying to do CompUSA, live. So it was self-referential in that way, and we had a lot of room to play around with that story. 

JI: These performances transposed into an “anything goes” attitude towards social media. Your instagram account Gentle_Virus amassed a cult-like following adjacent to what some might identify as a meme renaissance between 2019 and 2020. Although unconfirmed, I imagine you may have been behind some of the multi-user accounts like Incellectuals and Meaningful_Images_Only that flooded feeds and functioned like an algorithmic hack. I remember at the height of all of this you deleted your Instagram, leaving some 20K followers to scroll without you. Was there a pinnacle of social media for you, or an event you felt to be most memorable? I bring this up because your work GOBLIN.exe, a malicious software that arrests a user's PC, has a poetic, but stark tone. The software deletes itself after the Goblin wreaks hallucinatory-havoc on a user's machine. It’s quite fantastical, but viewers are brought back to reality with the presence of familiar Windows error messages that are integrated throughout its performance. Does this relate to a death of platform autonomy?

MF: Posting used to be way more fun. And those 20K followers were mostly bots. It was funny at the time. With incellectuals and meaningful images only, we were in the halcyon days (no pun intended) of posting. Posting was genuinely fun and it was transgressive to post a stream of consciousness to our meme page. It really took off, and developed a life of its own. We were doing something genuinely new, and the guiding principle we gave ourselves was simply: "post anything." There were no rules, post any image you have access to. Just post it. Who cares? Just post. And it was cathartic. It was truly fun. I think the best day on Instagram was the day of the long posts, which was a moment of unfettered joy when people could post long images; when Instagram itself broke and people were posting images that you had to scroll past for like 20 seconds. It was the best day. I was laughing the entire day. It felt like a dream, and watching a platform like that break was an absolute joy, and social media has not been fun since that day. With GOBLIN.exe, it was created in the midst of that super highly digital place I was in, probably the only piece of malware I'll ever actually "need" to make, because of how much the medium and the story are one in the same. That is THE hack story.

JI:Halcyon.exe The Ride is a computer virus turned physical installation that incorporates exposed wiring, timed lighting, scented mist, and rumbling seating—think a Rube Goldberg-esque experiment in immersion. Like GOBLIN.exe, the malware arrests a PC for a 20-minute long desktop performance. Both works are poetic; however, for me the syntax of programming in Halcyon.exe is more apparent as a kind of choreography. In the work, a container ship that “waits” in line is a symbolic word play for the “weight” of code in a command line interface. The malware commences in a romanticism of the “channel”—both a seemingly imperfect network in which communication transpires, and a metaphorical pathway likening the viewer’s life to a container ship’s route. What is so effective about these works is a technique you often use which is adressing the viewer as the protagonist in second-person. As a throughline of your practice, I’m curious where that voice comes from? In a section of Halcyon.exe titled “Riddle Road” you pose the question: “Who am I?” Is this a fluid persona that emerges in various areas of your work? Is this the Goblin? Or is it just another verse, or coda of programming as dance?

MF: I use second person a lot because I want to do VR without doing VR. I see my storytelling positioned in a future-facing context, where, in the future, art is a drug you inject that takes you on a hallucinatory journey that happens to you. The concept of "simstim" In Neuromancer by William Gibson is something I'm influenced by. So second person narration is my way of doing VR without all of the absolute horrid bullshit that comes with actually physically doing VR. With Halcyon.exe, I was composing scenes that felt meaningful. And the overarching story is that Halcyon.exe was composed of individual scenes that I just knew I had to make. It wasn't until probably a year later that I realized I was actually working on one giant piece and not a bunch of smaller pieces. 

The “Ride” element was my attempt at making something truly about physical sensation. Water spraying on you, the wind, the hurricane, the physical bang of thunder, the seat shaking—It's very much to get you back to that point where you're thinking about your body, and the way you exist physically. I'm interested in bringing it back to this offline, very real experience that everybody has, but tries to ignore because it's not vogue to talk about: walking to the bank, or waiting for the train—all of the "nothing" times of our lives which actually constitute, like 95% of our experience. So with Riddle Road, those riddles have answers. I think they are only answers that I would ever know. But I am talking about four very specific ideas in riddle road, which have answers. They're not nonsense riddles—I feel like people know the answers when they watch riddle road. So, I would say not all of my pieces have the same voice, It's very much dependent on the work. In Goblin.exe, it's the hacker; in Halcyon.exe, it's this omniscient narrator.

JI: I once asked you where you get your music from, and your response was “bars.” The soundtracks to your works feel like they're yours, and maybe that’s because some of them are references to online subculture and memes like Halcyon's nod to the Epic Sax Guy. In all of your works you have an acute sense of tempo that’s related to cinematic structure. Can you talk about some of your inspirations in cinema and music? 

MF: With Halcyon.exe, I intentionally brought in the Epic Sax Guy in the beginning to notate that this piece is coming from a place of acknowledgement of the meme world and of digital culture. However, it departs from that world pretty drastically. As I mentioned before, the entire piece is very much not about computers or digital life—It's about physical sensation. It's about patience, mindfulness, life, living unplugged or staring at an empty corner of your house and all of the time that's "in-between" the times that we actually remember, all of the nothing times. Starting with a meme song, and then departing from that into more psychedelic prog rock instrumental pieces from the 70s, was a very intentional transition.

With music, when it hits, it hits. And when I know, I know. I gravitate towards using music that I hear in bars because this kind of music is meant to evoke a certain feeling, or it's from a certain time. Music is the start of everything that I do. I'm a choreographer, really, at the end of the day; a choreographer and a writer. So when the music hits, it hits, and you know it. And I have a vision for the song, and I will see it literally as a vision that clouds everything. I will see what needs to happen, and then I will make it. And it's been happening to me since I was a child, and it's how I've conceptualized all of my videos, and 90% of my art is choreography, choreographed to music. The curation is also a major artistic gesture, as well, because the songs will carry with them all of the weight of their context and meaning, and I intentionally use that "baggage" in my work.

Age (if you’d like to share): 31

Location: NYC

How/when did you begin working creatively with technology?

Probably around 8 years old, I made many many movies with LEGO Studios, a LEGO camera that allowed you to easily make stop motion videos.

What did you study at school or elsewhere?

Interactive Art, Pratt Institute, 2015

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously?

I have a regular software job now, but in the past I did some console cowboy work writing code for all of your favorite artists. I had a brief tenure as a stage manager for theater, a landscaper, a pizza chef, and some food service odd jobs.

What does your desktop or workspace look like? (Pics or screenshots please!)

Happy birthday to Rhizome’s ArtBase, which launched 25 years ago today!

It comes as no surprise that with the advancement of new technologies comes the risk of digital art and culture becoming lost to time. "I thought that artists should have the right to determine the future of their work or lack thereof," recalls artist Mark Tribe, Rhizome’s founder. "I also thought that there should be a safe place where they could put their work for long-term storage and access if they chose to."

Today, ArtBase contains more than 2,000 works, including software, code, websites, moving images, games, and browsers. The archive has become a vital resource for anyone wanting to learn more about the history of digital art. It’s also a vital engine for research about maintaining and sustaining access to legacy digital culture.

To mark the 25th Anniversary of ArtBase, we asked 25 artists, curators, writers, and critics to each reflect on one work from the archive—we’ll be sharing their selections here and on Instagram in coming weeks!

To celebrate the 25th birthday of ArtBase—Rhizome's archive of digital art—we're sharing 25 works selected by 25 artists, curators, writers, and critics here and on Instagram.

Writer and scholar McKenzie Wark looks back on TEKKEN TORTURE TOURNAMENT, a performance by Eddo Stern from 2001:

"Eddo Stern's Tekken Torture is just one of many works in the ArtBase that continue to delight me. It's a version of the fighting game Tekken 3, but with real stakes. When a player gets hit, they receive an electric shock. It's a work that plays with the boundaries of the game, given that a game, unlike war, is not a fight to the death. Tekken Torture isn't that, of course, but the pain it inflicts is described as 'meaningful.'"

Rhizome Receives $750,000 Grant from The Mellon Foundation

Earlier this month, we marked the 25th anniversary of our landmark digital art archive, the ArtBase. Today, we have another significant milestone to share: a $750,000, three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation in support of the archive.

This three-year grant will support the accessioning, preservation, and public presentation of born-digital art, through a redesign as well as curation and content development. This funding supplements crucial support for our archival programs from the Teiger Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Generative Art Fund.

The Mellon grant represents a significant opportunity for Rhizome to transform and redesign the ArtBase, making it more accessible and more inclusive, foregrounding underrepresented histories, and furthering the cause of digital art. Thank you, Mellon Foundation!

Lindsay Howard Named Board Chair; New Members Join the Board

In no less momentous news, Lindsay Howard has been elected as the new Chair of Rhizome’s Board of Directors, succeeding Greg Pass, who was an exemplary steward of the organization for over a decade. Lindsay’s expertise as a curator, writer, and advocate for digital artists makes her ideal to lead Rhizome into our next chapter. Her deep ties to the digital art community and years of leadership at Rhizome—she has served on the Board since 2021—make her appointment an inspiring moment for our organization.

We also welcome two new Board members:

Dorothy Chou is Director of Policy & Public Engagement at DeepMind (Google) & an angel investor. Having spent her career building social justice, ethics, & accountability structures at technology companies, she launched the first Transparency Report—an industry standard that more than 80 technology companies use to show how laws and corporate policies affect free expression and privacy online. Prior to DeepMind, Dorothy was responsible for policy development at Uber on consumer protection, safety, and self-driving cars. She also led corporate communications at Dropbox and worked in communications and public policy for seven years at Google. She is working toward a Master’s in Bioethics at the University of Oxford, serves on the development board of the Young Vic, and is a Venture Partner at Ada Ventures, a leading inclusive VC firm investing in companies across climate equity, economic empowerment, and healthy aging.

Gabriel Whaley is the founder and CEO of MSCHF, the American art collective recognized for its provocative and boundary-pushing work at the intersection of art, technology, and consumer culture. Since 2019, MSCHF has captivated global audiences with viral projects that challenge conventional ideas of art and commerce, cementing its place in both popular culture and the contemporary art world. Gabriel’s team gained widespread attention at Art Basel 2022 with the ATM Leaderboard, an interactive installation that publicly displayed users’ bank balances in real-time, sparking conversations around wealth, privacy, and social dynamics. In early 2023, MSCHF went viral yet again with the Big Red Boot—a surrealist footwear piece that became an internet sensation and a high-demand product. Under Gabriel’s leadership, MSCHF has expanded from these pop-culture moments to serious recognition in the world of fashion, technology, business, as well as the art world, with pieces now held in prominent museums and galleries around the world. In 2023, MSCHF was named to Fast Company's list of World's 50 Most Innovative Companies.

Setting the Stage for Rhizome's Future

With this generous support from the Mellon Foundation and new Board leadership, Rhizome is positioned for a year of growth and impact. In order to do this, we need our community’s support. 

We are launching a new membership program to raise $53,775 for our annual server costs—essential to keep our archive accessible. Membership starts at $25 per year (or pay what you can), and comes free with our limited edition internet hat!

Your support ensures we can continue to innovate in preserving and presenting digital art. Join us as we celebrate these milestones and look ahead to the next 25 years of the ArtBase.

This week for our 25 by 25 series we’re sharing artist Ann Hirsch’s nostalgia-filled pick: Dialtones (A Telesymphony) by Golan Levin, a custom audience-based ringtone symphony from 2001. Recalling her first encounter with Dialtones, Ann remarked: 

“When I came across this work, I was in college and just starting to learn what art could be. I thought this piece was groundbreaking. At that time there was a lot of digital art that was very nerdy and insidery and I thought this work was so joyous and inclusive but also the more you thought about it... there was a tricky hint of insidiousness which of course, I love.”

Up next in our 25 on 25 series we have Cory Arcangel and his pick, World of Awe: The Traveler’s Journal (Chapter 1: Forever) by Yael Kanarek. Salvaged from a laptop in 2000, World of Awe allows its visitors to search for a lost treasure through a series of journals from a traveler. 

"Perhaps counter intuitively, my favorite memories of net art are often centered around the IRL, and the people involved. For example, I will never be able to separate Yael Kanarek's World of Awe—a multi-year multi-media long form masterpiece—from visiting her studio in the early 2000's. Tussled away in her East Village apartment, her studio contained the most impressive artist computer rig I had ever seen up until then. She even had a Windows PC (a computer which was used only by the most serious programmers, gamers, and Manhattan money people)! To see the computer which created the *fictional* desktop in World of Awe was like seeing the scaffolding @ the Sistine Chapel. Luckily World of Awe is part of Art Base, but Yael's rig? In her own words, 'When do we start sending our crap to outer space? The universe is big.'"

—Cory Arcangel

Web 1.0 was built on the promise of a borderless society—a global village (McLuhan 1962) where physical boundaries could be bypassed, allowing us to build communities based on shared interests. It’s no surprise that early net art practices reflected a collective dream of reconfiguring national borders. Yet, this utopian vision soon faded, as the highs and lows of the internet simultaneously showed us glimpses of these promises while watching them evaporate. As the internet entered the new millennium through the dot-com bubble, it began shapeshifting at a faster-than-human pace, shaping a digital landscape far from its original ideals. As we take a sharp turn into the Semantic Web (Berners-Lee, Hendler, Lassila 2001), it's worth asking: how have borders, both online and offline, evolved?

La Web 1.0 se construyó sobre la promesa de una sociedad sin fronteras, una aldea global (McLuhan, 1962) en la que podríamos saltarnos las fronteras físicas, lo que nos permitiría construir comunidades basadas en intereses compartidos. No es de extrañar que las primeras prácticas de net art reflejaran el sueño colectivo de reconfigurar las fronteras nacionales. Sin embargo, esta visión utópica pronto se desvaneció, a medida que los altibajos de internet nos mostraban fragmentos de estas promesas al tiempo que veíamos cómo se evaporaban. Cuando internet entró en el nuevo milenio a través de la burbuja del puntocom, empezó a cambiar de forma a un ritmo más rápido que el humano, configurando un paisaje digital muy alejado de sus ideales originales. Ahora que nos adentramos en la Web Semántica (Berners-Lee, Hendler, Lassila 2001), vale la pena preguntarnos: ¿cómo han evolucionado las fronteras, tanto en línea como fuera de ella?

Postborder (code)pendency builds on the concept of the postborder (Dear, Leclerc 2003) in the context of the Mexico-U.S. borderlands. The idea doesn’t imply the death of the border—especially as it has become increasingly violent, reinforced by the military complex in close collaboration with the technocapitalist forces. Instead, it encourages us to think about the codependent relationships between nations, shaped by ongoing negotiation, adaptation, and transformation. This is particularly relevant to how identity and cultural exchange develop within border communities. In other words, the postborder concept encourages us to connect geopolitics with the everyday social interactions that occur across borders.

(Código)dependencia postfronteriza toma inspiración en el concepto de la postfrontera (Dear, Leclerc 2003) en el contexto de las fronteras entre México y Estados Unidos. La idea no implica la muerte de la frontera, sobre todo cuando sabemos bien que se ha vuelto cada vez más violenta, reforzada por el complejo militar en estrecha colaboración con las fuerzas tecnocapitalistas. Por el contrario, esta propuesta nos propone pensar en las relaciones codependientes entre naciones, conformadas por la negociación, la adaptación y la transformación continuas. Esto es especialmente relevante para el desarrollo de la identidad y el intercambio cultural entre las comunidades fronterizas. En otras palabras, el concepto postfrontera nos invita a conectar la geopolítica con las interacciones sociales cotidianas que se producen a través de las fronteras.

The first part of the exhibition centers on the visionary transborder festival INSITE by revisiting the online exhibition Tijuana Calling (2005). Curated by Mark Tribe as part of inSite_05, this exhibition arose in the aftermath of 9/11 and the first decade of NAFTA. Tribe invited several artists to explore the complexities of border politics during that time. Their works—ranging from interactive net art in Spanglish to long-distance drones—revealed a shared truth: the border has crossed us more than we have crossed it. This exhibition resurrects Dentimundo (2005) by Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga with Kurt Olmstead and Brooke Singer, and LowDrone (2005) by Angel Nevarez and Alex Rivera. Revisiting these pieces gains new significance in light of the recent reversal in migration patterns, with digital nomads moving from the U.S. to Mexico due to the COVID-19 pandemic, rising living costs, inaccessible healthcare, and the shift to remote work.

La primera parte de la exposición se centra en el trabajo del festival transfronterizo INSITE revisitando la exposición en línea Tijuana Calling (2005). Curada por Mark Tribe como parte de inSite_05, esta exposición surgió tras el 11 de septiembre y la primera década del TLCAN. Tribe invitó a varixs artistas a explorar las complejidades de la política fronteriza en aquella época. Sus obras -desde piezas interactivas en spanglish hasta drones activados a larga distancia- revelaron una verdad compartida: la frontera nos ha cruzado más de lo que nosotrxs la hemos cruzado. Esta exposición resucita Dentimundo (2005) de Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga con Kurt Olmstead y Brooke Singer, LowDrone (2005) de Ángel Nevarez y Alex Rivera, y Corridos de Luis Hernández-Galván y Anne-Marie Schleiner. La revisión de estas obras adquiere un nuevo significado a la luz de la reciente inversión de los patrones migratorios, con nómadas digitales que se trasladan de Estados Unidos a México debido a los efectos secundarios de la pandemia del COVID-19, el aumento de los costos de vida, la inaccesibilidad a servicios de salud y el salto hacia el trabajo a distancia.

Scrolling further down, the second half of the exhibition presents two hybrid net art pieces: the tactical multimedia project La Sección Amarilla de la Migración (2022) by Minerva Cuevas, the replicable website and alternative media outlet #ESTONOESINTERNET by Astrovandalistas, and the 2021 online iteration of Transborder Immigrant Tool (2007–2012) by Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab (micha cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez, Elle Mehrmand, and Brett Stalbaum). In the midst of parking in the Web 3.0 era, can the concept of the postborder offer any insights to help us understand and respond to the present moment?

Desplazándose más abajo, la segunda mitad de la exposición presenta dos piezas híbridas de net art: el proyecto multimedia táctico La Sección Amarilla de la Migración (2022) de Minerva Cuevas, el sitio web replicable y medio alternativo #ESTONOESINTERNET de Astrovandalistas y la iteración en línea de Transborder Immigrant Tool (2007-2012) del Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab (micha cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez, Elle Mehrmand y Brett Stalbaum). Mientras nos estacionamos en la era de la Web 3.0, ¿puede el concepto de postfrontera ofrecernos algunas pistas que nos ayuden a entender y responder al momento actual?

Imperialist extractive practices and precarious labor conditions have grown increasingly severe. Amplified by the on- and off-screen spectacle of politicians spreading hate speech, alongside the ongoing, live-streamed genocide and deterritorialization of the Palestinian and Lebanese people. As these forces seem to engulf every aspect of life this exhibition is an invitation to question how borders—both geographical and ideological—can be symbolically dismantled, and how we can resist or hack them in the ongoing struggle for justice and solidarity.

Las prácticas extractivas e imperialistas y las condiciones de precariedad  laboral son cada vez más graves. Amplificadas por el espectáculo, dentro y fuera de la pantalla, de políticxs que difunden discursos de odio, junto con el genocidio y la desterritorialización del pueblo palestino y libanés. Mientras estas fuerzas parecen engullir todos los aspectos de la vida, esta exposición es una invitación a cuestionar cómo pueden desmantelarse simbólicamente las fronteras, tanto geográficas como ideológicas, y cómo podemos resistirlas o hackearlas en la lucha constante por la justicia y la solidaridad.

Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., & Lassila, O. (2001, May). The semantic web. Scientific American.

Dear, M., & Leclerc, G. (Eds.). (2003). Postborder city: Cultural spaces of Bajalta California. Routledge.

McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic man. University of Toronto Press.

Dentimundo (2005) by Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga with Kurt Olmstead and Brooke Singer

Dentimundo investigates the flourishing practice of dentistry along the Mexico-U.S. border, focusing on towns such as Ojinaga, Ciudad Juárez, Nogales, Mexicali, and Tijuana. These locations have developed a symbiotic relationship with the U.S. economy, catering to American citizens seeking affordable dental care and a variety of other services. This net art piece examines the reasons behind the migration of patients to Mexico, where procedures are significantly cheaper—often a fraction of the costs in the U.S. Miranda Zúñiga addresses critical questions about the U.S. healthcare system, including the high number of uninsured individuals, which has remained steady at around 14.7% since 1999. For many Americans, dental care options are limited or non-existent, prompting them to seek treatment across the border.

Dentimundo provides a comprehensive directory of dental clinics, tips for navigating medical tourism, and insights into the relationship between U.S. and Mexican dental professionals—whether as competitors or collaborators. By reframing the discourse around border dentistry, Dentimundo advocates for a practical approach to healthcare that embraces the benefits of medical tourism while addressing underlying systemic issues in U.S. health insurance. Revisiting this artwork in 2024 is especially relevant in the current sociopolitical context, where the issues identified by Miranda Zúñiga nearly 20 years ago have intensified. Health crises—including dental, mental, and physical—have worsened, while the political climate continues to focus on oppressing and repressing those crossing the border into the U.S. Ironically, this approach overlooks the reality that the border is also crossed from North to South by individuals seeking more affordable living conditions, highlighting the complexity and duality of postborder dynamics.

Dentimundo investiga la creciente práctica de la odontología a lo largo de la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos, centrándose en ciudades como Ojinaga, Ciudad Juárez, Nogales, Mexicali y Tijuana. Estos lugares han desarrollado una relación simbiótica con la economía estadounidense, atendiendo a ciudadanxs estadounidenses que buscan atención dental asequible y una variedad de otros servicios. Miranda Zúñiga aborda cuestiones críticas sobre el sistema de salud estadounidense como el elevado número de personas sin seguro, que se ha mantenido estable en un 14,7% desde 1999. Para muchxs estadounidenses, las opciones de atención dental son limitadas o inexistentes, lo que les lleva a buscar tratamiento al otro lado de la frontera.

Dentimundo ofrece un directorio de clínicas dentales, consejos para navegar por el turismo médico y una visión de la relación entre lxs profesionales dentales estadounidenses y mexicanxs, ya sea como competidorxs o como colaboradorxs. Al replantear el discurso en torno a la odontología fronteriza, Dentimundo aboga por un enfoque práctico de la asistencia sanitaria que aproveche las ventajas del turismo médico y aborde al mismo tiempo los problemas sistémicos subyacentes en el seguro médico estadounidense. Revisitar esta pieza en 2024 es especialmente relevante dado el contexto sociopolítico actual en el que los problemas identificados por Miranda Zúñiga hace casi 20 años se han intensificado. Las crisis sanitarias -dentales, mentales y físicas- han empeorado, mientras que el clima político sigue centrándose en oprimir y reprimir a quienes cruzan la frontera con Estados Unidos. Irónicamente, este enfoque pasa por alto la realidad de que la frontera también es cruzada de Norte a Sur por personas que buscan condiciones de vida más asequibles, lo que pone de relieve la complejidad y dualidad de la dinámica postfronteriza.

Transborder Immigrant Tool (2007-2012) by Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. Lab (EDT 2.0)

The Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) is a Geo Poetic System embodied by a mobile application designed to assist migrants crossing the Mexico-U.S. border by providing them with essential survival information. Developed between 2007 and 2012, it repurposed low-cost GPS-enabled phones to guide users to water caches placed by humanitarian groups in the desert. Beyond navigation, TBT integrated poetry in English, Spanish, and Náhuatl, offering emotional support and reflecting on themes of survival, hope, and displacement.The tool aimed to address the dangers migrants face due to harsh desert conditions and restrictive border policies. Its functionality was simple, but its goals were deep: to challenge political control over borders and offer an alternative means of survival.

The project was seen as a form of performance art, or tactical poetics as proposed by Aria Dean, that makes space for it to act outside the art circuit. While political opposition and the growing influence of criminal organizations at the border prevented wide distribution, as well as worries about the GPS coordinates being co opted and used against individuals, TBT drew international attention, fueling debates on migration, class inequality, and the role of art in confronting urgent social issues. EDT 2.0 speculated about the creation of a potential life-saving device that also carries a critique of the conditions that force migrants into dangerous crossings, using technology and poetry as tools of resistance. This online version, designed by the digital studio territorio indefinido led by Ian Alan Paul, gathers TBT’s audio files and poems and is presented as a digital archive.

La Herramienta Transfronteriza para Inmigrantes (TBT, por sus siglas en inglés) es un sistema geopoético plasmado en una aplicación móvil diseñada para ayudar a lxs migrantes que cruzan la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos proporcionándoles información esencial para su supervivencia. Desarrollada entre 2007 y 2012, reutilizaba teléfonos de bajo costo con GPS para guiar a lxs usuarixs hasta los depósitos de agua colocados por grupos humanitarios en el desierto. Más allá de la navegación, TBT integraba poesía en inglés, español y náhuatl, ofreciendo apoyo emocional y reflexionando sobre temas de supervivencia, esperanza y desplazamiento. La herramienta pretendía abordar los peligros a los que se enfrentan lxs migrantes debido a las duras condiciones del desierto y a las violentas políticas fronterizas. Su funcionalidad era sencilla, pero sus objetivos eran profundos: desafiar el control político de las fronteras y ofrecer un medio alternativo de supervivencia.

El proyecto se consideraba una forma de arte performático, o poética táctica, como propone Aria Dean, que deja espacio para actuar fuera del circuito artístico. Aunque la oposición política y la creciente influencia de las organizaciones criminales en la frontera impidieron una amplia distribución, así como la preocupación por que las coordenadas GPS fueran cooptadas y utilizadas contra individuos, TBT atrajo la atención internacional, alimentando debates sobre la migración, la desigualdad de clases y el papel del arte a la hora de enfrentarse a problemas sociales urgentes. EDT 2.0 especuló sobre la creación de un dispositivo potencialmente salvavidas que también conlleva una crítica de las condiciones que obligan a lxs migrantes a cruzar peligrosamente, utilizando la tecnología y la poesía como herramientas de resistencia. Esta versión en línea, diseñada por el estudio digital territorio indefinido dirigido por Ian Alan Paul, reúne los archivos de audio y los poemas de TBT y se presenta como un archivo digital.

La Sección Amarilla de la Migración [Migratory Yellow Pages] (2022) by Minerva Cuevas

La Sección Amarilla de la Migración is a transnational project conceived by Minerva Cuevas in collaboration with the Rubin Center at the University of Texas-El Paso. It aims to serve as both a practical and cultural guide for migrants navigating the US-Mexico border, framing migration as a natural phenomenon that connects humans and non-human species through their shared movement across ecosystems.

At the heart of the project is a bilingual, two-hundred-page publication, developed through an open call for contributions from artists, writers, activists, and organizations on both sides of the border. The book puts together a mixture of visual and literary art alongside practical resources, providing solidarity, guidance, and comfort for migrants in transit serving as both a cultural intervention and a practical resource. Distributed for free at key locations across the Americas and online, the publication seeks to build a sense of community while offering travelers essential information and a cultural connection to the ecosystems they move through.

This project places at the forefront of the conversation the necessity of recognizing migration as part of broader social and environmental systems, inviting ongoing dialogue between regional and international contributors. The project emerges as a form of resisting the artificial borders imposed by human policies. It acknowledges that borders are continually redefined by natural forces, with the Chihuahua desert symbolizing a place where human-imposed divisions are reshaped by the movements of both human and non-human life seeking survival.

La Sección Amarilla de la Migración es un proyecto transnacional ideado por Minerva Cuevas en colaboración con el Rubin Center de la Universidad de Texas-El Paso. Su objetivo es servir de guía práctica y cultural para lxs migrantes que atraviesan la frontera entre Estados Unidos y México, enmarcando la migración como un fenómeno natural que conecta a lxs seres humanxs y a las especies no humanas a través de su movimiento compartido a través de los ecosistemas.

El núcleo del proyecto es una publicación bilingüe de doscientas páginas, elaborada mediante una convocatoria abierta de contribuciones de artistas, escritorxs, activistas y organizaciones de ambos lados de la frontera. El libro reúne una mezcla de arte visual y literario junto con recursos prácticos, proporcionando solidaridad, orientación y consuelo a lxs migrantes en tránsito, sirviendo tanto de intervención cultural como de recurso práctico. Distribuida gratuitamente en puntos clave del continente y en línea, la publicación pretende crear un sentimiento de comunidad y simultáneamente ofrecer a lxs viajeros información esencial y una conexión cultural con los ecosistemas por los que transitan.

Este proyecto sitúa en el primer plano de la conversación la necesidad de reconocer la migración como parte de sistemas sociales y medioambientales más amplios, invitando al diálogo permanente entre colaboradorxs regionales e internacionales. El proyecto emerge como una forma de resistencia a las fronteras artificiales impuestas por las políticas humanas. El desierto de Chihuahua simboliza un lugar en el que las divisiones impuestas por nosotrxs son remodeladas por los movimientos de la vida humana y no humana en busca de la supervivencia.

LowDrone (2005) by Angel Nevarez and Alex Rivera

LowDrone is a hybrid net art piece that remixes the cultural significance of lowriders with the surveillance capabilities of drones, allowing users to remotely pilot a virtual vehicle that embodies both technologies. At LowDrone.com, participants control a customized lowrider—a car outfitted with hydraulics that enable it to "hop"—over one of the most surveilled regions in the world: the U.S./Mexico border between Tijuana and San Diego. This project critiques the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) along the border, where they have become central to surveillance and even attack operations.

Originally designed for military purposes, drones are now deployed by the U.S. Border Patrol and groups like the American Border Patrol, which first used drones to monitor for "illegal invaders." These UAVs represent a growing presence of state surveillance in Latino neighborhoods, where residents often find themselves under constant observation. Through LowDrone, users confront the notion that the skies belong solely to military and border enforcement agencies. By transforming a drone into a lowrider, the artwork honors the history of aesthetic resistance in Latino communities and advocates for a future where technology serves diverse populations. Nevarez and Rivera seek to introduce a murky transaction between the observer and the observed which connects to other long-distance operations that have arised as these devices (UAVs and others) have become more elusive to the point where their presence has almost become invisible.

LowDrone es una pieza híbrida de net art que combina el significado cultural de los lowriders con las capacidades de vigilancia de los drones, permitiendo a lxs usuarixs pilotear a distancia un vehículo virtual que incorpora ambas tecnologías. En LowDrone.com, lxs participantes controlan un lowrider personalizado -un coche equipado con un sistema hidráulico que le permite «saltar»- sobre una de las regiones más vigiladas del mundo: la frontera entre Estados Unidos y México, entre Tijuana y San Diego. Este proyecto critica el uso de vehículos aéreos no tripulados (UAV) en la frontera, donde se han convertido en un elemento central de las operaciones de vigilancia e incluso de ataque.

Originalmente diseñados para fines militares, los drones son ahora desplegados por la Patrulla Fronteriza de EE.UU. y grupos como la Patrulla Fronteriza Americana, que utilizó por primera vez drones para vigilar a lxs invasorxs ilegales. Estos vehículos aéreos no tripulados representan una presencia cada vez mayor de la vigilancia estatal en los barrios latinos, donde lxs residentes a menudo se encuentran bajo observación constante. A través de LowDrone, lxs usuarixs confrontan la noción de que los cielos pertenecen únicamente a las agencias militares y de control fronterizo. Al transformar un dron en un lowrider, la obra rinde homenaje a la historia de resistencia estética de las comunidades latinas y apuesta por un futuro en el que la tecnología esté al servicio de la sociedad. Nevarez y Rivera pretenden introducir una transacción turbulenta entre observadorx y observadx que conecta con otras operaciones a larga distancia que han surgido a medida que estos dispositivos (UAV y otros) se han vuelto más escurridizos hasta el punto de que su presencia se ha vuelto casi invisible.

#ESTONOESINTERNET by Astrovandalistas

#ESTONOESINTERNET (2014) by the collective Astrovandalistas is a project that critiques the state of telecommunications in Mexico, exploring how political and economic control over media affects public access to information. The work invites reflection on technological dependency and proposes ways to repurpose obsolete devices to serve new functions.

As part of the exhibition Acciones Territoriales, curated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar, the project manifested both online and physically in hacked routers distributed across Mexico City. These routers, altered to replace their original operating systems, hosted a local network where users could access content generated collaboratively by artists, writers, and activists. Participants could connect through hotspots named ESTO NO ES INTERNET in public spaces, offering an alternative media platform that functioned outside traditional internet infrastructure.

The first content batch was developed during a workshop at Ex Teresa Arte Actual with 12 participants who engaged in collective dialogue to shape the topics addressed in the digital publication. The project aimed to distribute this content without relying on conventional internet channels, thus circumventing corporate and governmental control, presenting itself as an immaterial publication distributed via hacked technology.

#ESTONOESINTERNET (2014) del colectivo Astrovandalistas es un proyecto que critica el estado de las telecomunicaciones en México, explorando cómo el control político y económico sobre los medios afecta el acceso público a la información. La obra invita a reflexionar sobre la dependencia tecnológica y propone formas de reutilizar dispositivos obsoletos para que cumplan nuevas funciones.

Como parte de la exposición Acciones Territoriales, curada por Daniela Lieja Quintanar, el proyecto se manifestó tanto en línea como físicamente en routers hackeados distribuidos por la Ciudad de México. Estos routers, modificados para sustituir sus sistemas operativos originales, albergaban una red local en la que lxs usuarixs podían acceder a contenidos generados de forma colaborativa por artistas, escritorxs y activistas. Lxs participantes podían conectarse a través de hotspots denominados ESTO NO ES INTERNET en espacios públicos, ofreciendo una plataforma mediática alternativa que funcionaba al margen de la infraestructura tradicional de internet.

La primera tanda de contenidos se desarrolló durante un taller en Ex Teresa Arte Actual con 12 participantes que entablaron un diálogo colectivo para dar forma a los temas abordados en la publicación digital. El proyecto prete distribuir estos contenidos sin depender de los canales convencionales de internet, eludiendo así el control corporativo y gubernamental, presentándose como una publicación inmaterial distribuida a través de tecnología pirateada.

Credits for Transborder Immigrant Tool:

Postborder (code)pendency

Curation: Doreen Ríos
Preservation: Dragan Espenschied, Preservation Director, Rhizome 
Site Development: Mark Beasley, Lead developer, Rhizome 

This project was made possible by a grant from Teiger Foundation.

This week for our 25 on 25 series we’re sharing the pick of fellow software manipulator, Herdimas Anggara. GOBLIN.exe by Mark Fingerhut is software that uses real malware techniques to take over the user’s desktop temporarily, only to delete itself upon completion, minutes later. 

This pick comes at a perfect timing since we've recently published an incredible artist profile on Mark and his work, if you're intrerested in diving a bit deeper!

"I first encountered Mark Fingerhut’s GOBLIN.exe (2020) through artist Todd Anderson, who had downloaded this unassuming malware program onto his computer. I was delightfully caught off guard by the jocular intimacy the piece offers; it’s not just a passive video to watch, you actually have to "execute" it, which feels like placing a certain trust in Mark himself. He describes it as a "one-act desktop play," an apt description for an unpredictable, mischievous ride where you surrender control and rely on his assurance. Agreeing to "execute" it feels like consenting to his terms and conditions, trusting that the risky experience will be worth it."

- Herdimas Anggara

Dentimundo is on view now as part of ArtBase Anthologies 003: Post(border)codependency

During the final part of the introductory video to Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga’s online artwork Dentimundo [World of Teeth, 2005], we see a middle-aged man in a blue suit, pointing to the sky, while a speech balloon appears, welcoming us to a “cybernetic tour of the Mexican border!"

As a Chilean, I recognized him immediately. It’s Don Francisco, a fellow countryman who successfully hosted the variety show Sábado Gigante [Giant Saturday] on Univision for 39 years, continuing the original show he had in Chile since 1962. What was he doing here, in an internet artwork developed 20 years ago by an American artist of Nicaraguan descent?

Originally, Dentimundo's main goal was to offer a critical perspective on dental tourism, providing valuable—though now outdated—information for those seeking dental treatment in Mexico. Using the tools of the internet of its time – basic HTML coding, left-aligned menus, MP3 music, static images, frames, and Adobe Flash animations – the work evokes a time when the Web felt like a new horizon, filled with creative and forward-looking possibilities. Today, it serves as a reminder not only of the mid-2000s internet, with its slow loading times, broken links, and low-resolution content, but also of the urgent need to preserve early web-based artworks in their original form, especially as many have already been lost forever. As someone who began using the Internet in 1994, Dentimundo makes me nostalgic for an era when we accessed the net exclusively from computers, encountering simple webpages adorned with pre-Instagram graphics.

Dentimundo welcomes us with the unsettling sound of a dental drill and images of tiny figures quickly migrating between the U.S. and Mexico. Then, these humanoids transform into teeth to form the Dentimundo logo, all while the Corrido del Dentista [Dentist's Corrido] plays—a rhythmic tune narrating the story of a dentist who chases the American Dream without ever leaving Mexico. On the left side, under the "Resources" title, a menu offers links to the pages that structure the website: “Home,” “Interviews,” “Directory of Dentists,” “Suggest a Dentist,” “U.S. Health Insurance,” “Links,” “Credits,” and “Download MP3.”

Since Zúñiga created Dentimundo, dental tourism has only grown more popular with Americans. In response, border cities in Mexico have developed a thriving market for this type of medical tourismn, a trend that began with pioneers like Dr. Bernardo Magaña, In 1969 he migrated to the town of Los Algodonesn, discovering a niche in US dental tourists. Furthermore, in 1980 he became the municipal delegate, influencing the shift of Los Algodones from sexual tourism, to the medical one. During the 20th Century, migration within Latin America was rural-to-urban. However, Magaña was a part of an emerging and still ongoing trend where medical professionals move from major cities like Mexico City or Monterrey to less urbanized border areas. 

Similarly, in the previous model of medical migration, individuals from less privileged regions traveled to wealthier areas for treatment, mirroring the broader issue of individuals moving from economically struggling regions to wealthier ones. 

In medical tourism, relatively high-income individuals also travel to more affordable economiesn, facilitated by digital information and favorable exchange rates, while enjoying the chance to vacation. Beyond the cost of dental treatment, there are benefits such as the concentration of dental providers, the experience of the professionals, and the comparative quality of Mexican dental care. This counters stereotypes about Mexico being unsafe for American tourists. Thus, the artwork critiques misinformation and simplistic views about Mexico, symbolized in the Dentimundo logo—a circle of arrows around a molar crossed by a red line, possibly representing declining exchange rates, Mexican mountains, or the border itself.

This brings us back to Don Francisco. I grew up with a local, more intimate version of the star, who filled the TV every Saturday afternoon, dressed and speaking like any middle-class Chilean of the 1980s. It still surprises me how he became not only the most well-known Chilean in Latin America and among the U.S. Latinx communityn, but also a symbol of the American Dream for millions of them. He arrived in Miami alone in the mid-1980s carrying a taping of his work, with the goal of selling his show to the then-emerging Spanish-speaking U.S. television. After finding an opportunity with Channel 23, a relatively small station, he started to build his entertainment empire from scratch. In his farewell show in 2015, he was even celebrated by then president Barack Obama and his wife Michelle. This narrative not only illustrates how the U.S. Latinx community has expanded his influence, but it is also reinforced by the history of his German Jewish parents who arrived in Chile escaping from World War II, and by his perfect, bright, and flawless smile.

In Dentimundo he symbolizes the American Dream, the pursuit of perfect dentition, and a friendly Latinidad that blends seamlessly with American culture. Curiously, while Don Francisco’s figure in the U.S. is highly romanticized, in Chile he has been questioned – especially since he abandoned his local audience to favor the international one. From accusations of corruption to questioning the migration narrative of his parentsn, he is not as well-regarded in his home country as he is in the U.S.

This discussion requires us to talk about Latinidad. Aparicion describes Latinidad as an experience involving the shared cultural and economic challenges of Latin American groups in the U.S. Corridos—a type of Mexican folk music that is also a literary and social phenomenonn—and figures like Don Francisco are integral to this idea and both are elements of Dentimundo. But while Corridos connect local and historical themes with contemporary issues, Don Francisco embodies a more porous and globalized Latinidad. In fact, the rise of digital media now allows for quicker, organic and dynamic creation and dissemination of new Latinidad representations. Consider how many viral videos not only have helped to import regional terms and practices to other territories in Latin America, but also have become part of the Latinx experience in the U.S.

While evoking an important moment in early digital art, Dentimundo also offers a critical look at economic and cultural exchanges, globalization, and the evolution of Latinidad. It serves as a reminder of the relevance of preserving digital art as historical and cultural artifacts, but also of the dynamic physical and digital implications involved in the lives of Latin American migrants in the United States and their descendants.