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Makayla Bailey and Michael Connor Appointed Co-Directors of Rhizome

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After an extensive international search, Makayla Bailey (formerly Development Director at Rhizome) and Michael Connor (formerly Artistic Director) have been newly appointed to the joint role of Co-Executive Directors of Rhizome, the premier digital arts organization in the country and affiliate of the New Museum.

Rhizome is the leading organization for digital art. Founded in 1996 by artist Mark Tribe, the 501c3 organization has been an independent affiliate of the New Museum of Contemporary Art since the early 2000s. Rhizome’s work includes public programs as well as new commissions, art/tech collaborations, and digital preservation, making the organization a unique bridge between the past and future of digital art. The majority of its programs have taken place online or in NYC, and Rhizome will be housed in the new OMA-designed expansion of the New Museum.

“This appointment marks a bold shift towards a joint leadership model at Rhizome, reflecting the organization’s egalitarian and collaborative ethos,” notes Rhizome Board Chair Greg Pass. “It also represents both continuity and change: Connor has been with Rhizome for almost ten years, while Bailey joined late last year. The model of shared leadership they bring provides a meaningful alternative to traditional ways of distributing power and influence within arts organizations.”

Bailey maintains a practice as a curator and writer, and has held positions at MoMA, LAXART, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Her background in the museum world gives her a strong sense of the importance of curatorial stewardship. “As interest in the field of digital culture continues to expand following the recent NFT boom, there is a real need for curatorial perspectives on and an equitable historical accounting of digital art,” Bailey notes. “Rhizome is ideally positioned to provide this kind of framing for the field. It’s worth noting that we even had a hand in creating this moment; Kevin McCoy minted the first NFT artwork as part of a collaboration with Anil Dash at Rhizome’s 7x7 program in 2014.”

Connor began at Rhizome as Editor and Curator in 2013 and was appointed Artistic Director in 2015. His past work includes co-curating the Net Art Anthology initiative, which retold a history of net art through 100 works, resulting in an online exhibition, gallery exhibition, and book. “Over the last decade, Rhizome’s research has had an important impact on the direction of digital art and culture,” Connor notes, “Our aim now is to broaden our reach, and become more of a mature public institution—Makayla and I developed the motto ‘Going Public’ as a way of describing what we want to achieve. That includes more dialogue with our community, and it means putting tools, skills, and infrastructure into the hands of more people in the field.”

Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum, notes that, “The New Museum’s partnership with Rhizome has been a unique and successful model for how large and small institutions can work together. It’s allowed Rhizome to think about its role creatively, and it has done so, with incredible programs such as the 7x7 platform and its 2019 exhibition ‘The Art Happens Here.’ With this new chapter, Rhizome will have a stellar directorial team that is another unique model, and I feel it uniquely positions them to continue to grow their public and establish the organization in a dynamic field as we lead up to the opening of the New Museum expansion.”

In 2021 Rhizome relaunched its renowned ArtBase as a new kind of archive for born-digital art, based on Linked Open Data. The organization also received monumental support from both the Mellon Foundation Change Capital grant and a gift resulting from the sale of “EndlessNameless,” an NFT series by pioneering net artist Rafaël Rozendaal.

ABOUT RHIZOME

Rhizome champions born-digital art and culture through artist-centered programs that commission, present, and preserve art made with and through digital networks and tools. Online since 1996, the organization is an affiliate of the iconic New Museum in New York City. For more information, visit rhizome.org.  

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.

 

Image: Photo by Christine Rivera

Image description: 3/4 portrait of Makayla Bailey and Michael Connor at New Inc, wearing black suits and standing near a window in a white office environment on an overcast day.


First Look: The Longest Whistlegraph Ever (so far)

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This text accompanies the video documentation of  The Longest Whistlegraph Ever (so far) as part of First Look, the ongoing series of digital projects co-curated and copresented by Rhizome and the New Museum. The Longest Whistlegraph Ever (so far), is an audio-visual performance by the Whistlegraph Trio. 

VISIT PROJECT WEBSITE

Commissioned by the New Museum’s digital art affiliate Rhizome, the new composition was performed at the museum in May. For First Look, the artists made video documentation of a subsequent performance in their studio, displayed alongside materials from their composition process including manuscripts, ephemera, and a final score for The Longest Whistlegraph Ever (so far). Whistlegraphs are audio-visual digital artworks performed manually by drawing and singing. Every whistlegraph results in a poetic image through the performance of a reproducible score.

Alex Freundlich, Camille Klein, and Jeffrey Scudder draw, sing, and make videos together as Whistlegraph. Whistlegraph formed during the pandemic in 2020 in a cabin in Ashland, Oregon, which remains their creative base. Over the past few years, they have honed a distinctive style and practice that speaks to embodied cognition, art education, and experimental composition for live performance. They regularly share their work on their TikTok account, @whistlegraph, where they have over 2.3 million followers.

 

Cover Image: Alex Freundlich, Camille Klein, and Jeffrey Scudder draw on a chalkboard for "The Longest Whistlegraph Ever (so far)"  Photo: Marsha Lebedev Bernstein

 

Sponsors

Commissions

The Rhizome Commissions Program is supported by Jerome Foundation, American Chai Trust, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York legislature.

First Look

Major support for First Look is provided by the Neeson / Edlis Artist Commissions Fund.

New Museum Digital Initiatives are generously supported by Hermine and David B. Heller.

Public Events

Rhizome's public programs are supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York legislature.

 

Join Us for Office Hours

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Join us on Twitter Spaces today at 2pm EST for Office Hours with preservation director Dragan Espenschied!

Last Wednesday, Rhizome held our first ‘Office Hours’, a new series of informal online conversations about our work and digital art at large. 

We hope to open up more dialogue with our communities, learning and directly responding to questions and topics of interest. As we try this out, we’ll experiment with different platforms and environments, from Twitter spaces to Instagram live, to the fediverse—and beyond!

 

An announcement introducing Rhizome’s new conversation series “Office Hours”, a pilot program of informal conversations about Rhizome’s work and digital culture at large. The webpage “flickr” shows a post of Kloee, a web-surfing kitten, with a comment “Pretty Kitty! Smart Kitty! :)”. 

Our first Office Hours, a conversation with incoming Co-Directors Makayla Bailey and Michael Connor, is available as a recording. Next up, on Wednesday, September 28th, Rhizome’s Preservation Director Dragan Espenschied will answer all of your questions about archiving digital culture. This episode will also be held on Twitter spaces.

Art & Code Online Exhibition is Live!

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The online exhibition of Art & Code 8 is now live, designed by Art & Code member Yehwan Song. 

Opening today, September 30th at 6 pm, Rhizome and NEW INC present Art & Code 8, an exhibition featuring works by Carrie Sijia Wang, Cassie Tarakajian, Lai Yi Ohlsen, Roopa Vasudevan, Rosalie Yu, Stephen  Kwok, Woody Sullender, and Yehwan Song. The artists have been practicing together, in community, over the past year as a part of Rhizome and NEW INC’s partnership residency track, Art & Code. The cohort has culminated their term with this exhibition at Public Works Administration organized by Rhizome Curator, Celine Wong Katzman who served as the track’s mentor this past year. 

Learn more about the 2021-22 Art & Code cohort below and view their work at the online exhibition:

Carrie Sijia Wang conducted a series of Zoom experiments with friends, acquaintances, and strangers using an AI-driven speech coaching tool and live language translation program to observe the effects of feedback and computer interpretation on human connection.

Cassie Tarakajian’s Furby has been reprogrammed to cycle through all of its pre-programmed actions in numerical order regardless of its “personality” or viewer behavior. It will perform in perpetuity until the interconnected electronics break down.

Taking inspiration from the narrative diagrams of neo-conceptual artist Mark Lombardi, Lai Yi Ohlsen connects various actors, concepts, and institutions who are all known to have an influence over the Internet. She places them on the same plane to consider: How does power flow between these nodes and who do we need to involve if we want to reimagine its shape?  

Roopa Vasudevan’s Slow Response II (Motion) is a triptych of lenticular prints that animate into scannable codes—but only when viewed from very specific angles. When scanned, the codes lead to websites containing poetic reflections on the finicky nature of the renderings, and the annoyances we feel with them as a result. 

Rosalie Yu’s grandfather picked up the intensely laborious work of repairing, painting, repainting, and transporting kiddie ride machines, and collecting the coins for a living. The machines he kept alive also outlived him. Candy-Glazed Eyes of Haunted Machines is a study in family history, class, and the postcolonial artifact in Taiwan.

Held on Zoom across continents and time zones, Stephen Kwok’s Recreational Meetings invite participants to use their mobile devices to simultaneously capture their surroundings in response to a series of creative prompts. The resulting recording is cut by Zoom in response to the environmental noise of the participants, revealing poetics embedded within emergent yet banal communication platforms. 

Play with me is an application featuring an avatar of Woody Sullender, formerly a noted banjoist and recording artist. Using a midi keyboard, visitors can control the artist’s avatar. This functions as an irreverent inversion of the power dynamics in passive listening.

Yehwan Song’s Fountain is made using a web-based sculpting tool that records input errors that appear when water falls onto a touchscreen. Each touch is transmitted into a virtual droplet on the website and 3D printed droplet sculpture.

 

Special thank you to Sam Black for exhibition production, and Dragan Espenschied for open source exhibition support for software-based artworks.

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 in New York City. 

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. 

PUBLIC WORKS ADMINISTRATION (PWA) is a digital art gallery in the 50th Street subway in Times Square. PWA spotlights underground artists who use digital tools to drive culture forward. 

Write a Whistlegraph Workshop Documentation

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Write a Whistlegraph: Wrap Up

For three weeks in spring 2022, at Rhizome’s invitation, we held a series of workshops in which participants ages 13–18 could learn to write their own whistlegraphs. 

Whistlegraphs are digital artworks that are performed manually by drawing and singing. Every whistlegraph starts with a blank page, eventually resulting in a poetic image through the performance of a reproducible score.

We held the first workshops over Zoom, working with small groups.Together we braved the latency of FigJam; navigating rehearsals, lectures, and thoughtful critiques of each other's work in our weekly sandboxes. By the end of the workshop, each student composed their own unique whistlegraph, which we learned and performed as one big cursor choir.

Next, with the support of Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, we brought the workshop curriculum to two educators in Queens, Danny Fisher and Alanis Vulpis, who used it as part of a four-week residency with approximately 20 participants at an after-school program at Rockaway Development & Revitalization Corporation (RDRC) in Far Rockaway, Queens.

Here's what got made, what we learned, and what we think is next!

✒️🎶 Featured Whistlegraphs

⭐️ I Love Jim by Hades 

Jim is a whistlegraph for dads, about dads B-) Jim came to me while thinking about the dads that wear "Kiss the cook" aprons while working the grill. I <3 Jim!

⭐️Third Eye by Lane 

My piece is called "third eye" and its about an eye ball and stuff like that xx xoxxo xxox also i Love anteaters xoxxooox xo😋😋😋😋😍😍😍🥳🥳🥳🥳 EYE BALL. Also my signature lookz like "lame" But my name is Lane i swear !!!!

📄 Collaborative Whiteboards

A finished workshop board for Day 3

Learning “Factory” on Day 1

Getting Some Art History on Day 2

Playing Exquisite Corpse on Day 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

View All Boards

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

 

 

 

 

🌐 What We Learned

These workshops flew by, and we’re already looking forward to our next ones! In the meantime, we’ve reflected on lessons learned from this experience. 

The small size of the online workshops allowed a group intimacy to emerge, which was difficult to replicate with a larger in-person group.

The workshop format gave us a rare chance to engage with people in-depth around the whistlegraph format. Most of our interaction thus far has occurred over TikTok Live, where sincere questions and reflections often get lost in the comment stream.

The educators, Fisher and Vulpis, struggled to convey the whistlegraph activities to students until we visited the program in person. From this we learned that we need to provide much more structured prompts and tools for busy educators to incorporate into demanding in-class situations.

The whistlegraph format is a great point of departure for discussions about artistic composition, computer software, digital technology, social media, storytelling, and art history. It’s also a great way for people to express themselves individually and collaboratively.

⭐️What’s Next for the Whistlegraph Workshop?

Mobile, Web Based Educational Units for Physical Classrooms

After a great experience doing online workshops using the collaborative whiteboard software FigJam and visiting with some students in Queens we have come up with a new invention for classrooms!
  • Recently, we’ve made online, interactive versions of 10 of our most popular whistlegraphs using a skeuomorphic card deck design pattern. 🃏
  • We’d like to develop this software further into an interactive, flash-card-like activity. 🎓
  • One stack of cards would be for instructors to learn and teach whistlegraphs from! 👩‍🏫
  • And a second would be for participants to learn, draw, and record videos of their whistlegraphs, all on a phone, via their web browser! ✒️🎶 📲
  • We’d love to use this software to teach and extend our workshop to as many people as possible, starting in public NYC classrooms!🗽 

First Look: Mezzanine

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Mezzanine, a game by Inpatient Interactive, is a psychotronic multimedia office adventure set on the eve of the new millennium. Make coffee, send layoff notices, and confront the digital demiurge in this exploratory point-and-click critique of the California Ideology and the false promises of our networked future. Mezzanine is presented as a part of First Look, the ongoing series of digital projects copresented by Rhizome and the New Museum. Inpatient Interactive will perform a special IRL playthrough of the game on October 15 at the New Museum. 

Play Mezzanine.

From the artists’ statement: 

Mezzanine is a first-person point-and-click adventure that traces the origin of the modern web and takes you into the heart of San Francisco’s Multimedia Gulch on the eve of Y2K. The player assumes the mantle of HR admin working late into the night at Zentropy, a buzzy up-and-coming multimedia startup. The game is ostensibly an office simulator; you can read emails, send layoff notices, drop off reports, and make coffee. In the process, you may encounter hidden puzzles and uncover sordid details about the company and its operations. But beyond this ludic veneer, Mezzanine is a reification, a summoning of the fallen world of the Gulch, an era where there was still, apparently, a future. Now, the promises of multimedia and the internet have resulted in widespread alienation, anxiety, dissociation, severe wealth inequality, and colossal levels of psychiatric medication prescriptions. As a forged artifact, whose very form evokes Myst and what was once considered the bleeding edge, Mezzanine explores the lost potential of multimedia and how our current societal psychosis may have always been by design.

In the late 1990s, Multimedia Gulch was the site of a revolution. Or, perhaps more accurately, a coup. From warehouses and garages across a bayside swath of San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, a bizarre menagerie of artists, coders, venture capitalists, hypertext theorists, and techno-lysergic mystics sought to topple the Mass Media regime and immanentize an Aquarian information age. For netizens of the Gulch in those heady days, the solution to the end of history was an interconnected global village fueled by an infinite stream of Multimedia content, a community where enlightenment could be achieved via interactive CD-ROM experiences, video clip sharing sites, binaural beat generators, nootropic smart drinks, and web-based alternate-reality raves all proffered by a legion of startups funded by obscure backers vying to own the next means of digital expression and determine the discourse of the new millennium. 

The Gulch itself is, of course, gone but in the ashes of the dot-bomb implosion we can scry its prophecies. All media is now multi; a bewildering combination of interactive text, video, and sound is the baseline online experience and the normative mode of information consumption. Content is king and the converted loft spaces have been exchanged for collaborative creator mansions, but the spirit is the same: a distraction economy predicated on the monetization of interaction, a rent extracted on the intensity of our desire to be connected. Community is promised as a product, attention is arbitraged, and atomization is the externality. Decades after its demise, the political ghosts of Gulch ideology—a miasma of free market libertarian ideals emphasizing the empowerment of the individual above all else—still haunt us, stalking the contours of a world hollowed out by NAFTA and trillion-dollar Bay Area tech behemoths: their Global Village was always a company town. The Gulch may be gone as a place, but it lurks on every screen.  

—Mitch Anzuoni and Peter Christian

This First Look exhibition premieres the first chapter of Mezzanine, now available on Steam. Inpatient Interactive is an independent game development studio founded by Mitch Anzuoni and Peter Christian that builds alternative multimedia experiences to inspire players to find inner peace and new perspectives.

Cover Image: The view from your desk as the HR Administrator of Zentropy, screencapture of Mezzanine by Inpatient Interactive. 

Glass doors that lead to the entrance of the Zentropy multimedia Startup.

A view of the office at Zentropy HQ.

A view of the cubicles at Zentropy HQ.

A view of the Lounge in the Zentropy HQ.

A computer screen in the game has text that says: "migraines, and mental illnesses coinciding with the rise of mass multimedia. Multimedia enables new possibilities for the world to come."

the digital profile of Chloe Spiegel, an employee at Zentropy.

An overhead view within the Zentropy HQ, with a mural in the background that reads "Digitize the narrative".Images: screencaptures of Mezzanine by Inpatient Interactive.

Sponsors

The Rhizome Commissions Program is supported by Jerome Foundation, American Chai Trust, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York legislature.

Major support for First Look is provided by the Neeson / Edlis Artist Commissions Fund. New Museum Digital Initiatives are generously supported by Hermine and David B. Heller. 

From Rhizome 2 U: Thank you!

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Guests at Rhizome Benefit 2022, The Bowery Hotel, NYC. Photo by Marsha Lebedev Bernstein.

As we begin our tenure as Co-Executive Directors of Rhizome, we would like to gratefully acknowledge the meaningful support we have received in recent months from artists, foundations, institutions, public agencies, and individuals in our immediate community. We are a small organization with a big mission, and we have to raise our entire budget every year. This support is incredibly meaningful, strengthening our work and the field of digital art as a whole. 

Thank you to Rafaël Rozendaal and Legowelt 

On August 26, 2022, artist Rafaël Rozendaal and musician Legowelt droppedPolychrome Music, a generative audiovisual NFT on the Art Blocks platform. With 25% of proceeds going to benefit Rhizome, the auction resulted in a gift of more than $56,000. This support is especially meaningful following Rozendaal’s 2021 donation of the largest gift in Rhizome’s history as a result of his Endless Nameless Art Blocks auction. Rozendaal’s gifts helped to support a much-needed Program Assistant position as well as a new website, designed by Laura Coombs and Mindy Seu, which will launch in the coming months. 

Rhizome Patrons’ Council

Aria Dean, Michael Connor, Brian Droitcour, Joel Ferree, and Peter Wu in conversation at Rhizome event co-presented with Friends with Benefits & Outland, at NeueHouse Hollywood, Los Angeles. Photo by Nilo Goldfarb.

Rhizome Presents: Ryan C. Clarke's Shirley Sound & Further Processions with Friends with Benefits & Outland, Los Angeles. Photo by Nilo Goldfarb.

Rhizome recently inaugurated a new invitation-only supporters group, the Patrons' Council. This group includes supporters with backgrounds in art, tech, and crypto who gather on a Telegram chat and at quarterly events to offer advice and support for Rhizome. The group will also support a jointly determined NFT edition to benefit Rhizome’s future. Current members include Tarun Chitra, Priyanka Desai, Tracy Chou*, Justin Gilanyi, Lindsay Howard*, Hernan Lopez, Trevor McFedries*, Greg & Yukari Pass*, Jack Pitney, Yana Sosnovskaya, and Alex Zhang. 

(For inquiries about Patrons’ Council, please contact makayla.bailey@rhizome.org)

Foundation Support 

The April 2021 relaunch of the ArtBase marked a new chapter in the continued technical work undergone to improve access to Rhizome’s ArtBase as a collection. We are pleased to have been awarded a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation that supports this multi-year technical effort, and contributed to our hire of a curator who researches the archive, accessions new works, contributes to data improvement, and expands the visibility of the archive through publications and public programs. 

This fall, Rhizome received an Explorer Award, a new grant from Filecoin Foundation and Unfinishedfor projects increasing outreach and engagement around decentralized internet technologies. The outcome of the supported project will make a case for cultural institutions to make use of PeerTube, a mature, sophisticated, peer-to-peer, open source video hosting framework and social media platform. The grant will support advocacy for PeerTube at the No Time to Wait conference this fall in The Hague, in collaboration with the Preserving Immersive Media initiative. It will also support a forthcoming online presentation that highlights artists’ works that have been censored by corporate platforms, hosted on Rhizome’s own PeerTube instance.

Earlier this year, Rhizome was awarded a grant from The Algorand Foundation for “In Contract,” a series of commissioned artworks that use the blockchain to organize social and economic relations toward artistic ends. Drawing on conceptual, poetic, and socially engaged practices, the commissions involve pairing artists with developers to realize custom contract-based works on the Algorand blockchain. 

Rhizome Benefit 2022

From left to right at Rhizome’s 2022 Benefit: Makayla Bailey, honorees Rachel Rossin and Julie Martin, and Michael Connor. Photo by Marsha Lebedev Bernstein.

On May 31, for Rhizome’s 2022 Benefit (in partnership with Zora) we chose to salute Julie Martin and Rachel Rossin, both key members of our community of differing generations. Julie Martin’s stewardship of Experiments in Art & Technology (E.A.T.) has informed important Rhizome programs, including our art-tech collaboration platform 7x7, which cited E.A.T. as a source of inspiration. Rachel Rossin took part in Rhizome’s first experiment in Artists’ VR and created a major new commission as part of the 2021 touring exhibition “World on a Wire,” in partnership with Hyundai Motor. 

Thank you again to our Benefit Host Committee:

Bolt*, Hilary Nève*, Greg & Yukari Pass*, e•a•t•}works, Alice Lloyd George, Outland, Voice NFT, Tarun Chitra, Priyanka Desai, Lindsay Howard*, Hernan Lopez, Trevor McFedries*, Jack Pitney, Lisa Roumell*, Karen Wong*,and Alex Zhang.

*Member of Rhizome's Board of Directors

Rhizome has also received recent program support from Hyundai Motor, Ernst & Young, Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, Taipei Cultural Center in New York, American Chai Trust, Jacques Louis Vidal, Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, National Endowment for the Arts, the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. 

Our community of supporters make the work we do possible. We look forward to strengthening Rhizome for the years to come through our mission and program, continuing to foster community and increase access to new media art in a context of relevant information and critical discourse.

By donating to Rhizome you fund the work of artists and writers, support field-defining public programs and exhibitions, and underwrite direly-needed digital preservation efforts. To make a tax-deductible contribution to Rhizome, please visit ourdonation page, or contact Makayla Bailey, Co-Executive Director, at makayla.bailey@rhizome.org. 

Artist Profile: Collin Leitch

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Installation view, “Camera Rider” at Team Gallery, New York, 2019. Courtesy of Team Gallery.

The latest in a series of interviews with artists who have a significant body of work that makes use of or responds to network culture and digital technologies. 

Elizaveta Shneyderman: I’ve been a fan of your work for quite some time. From your entertainment centers to your current work—what you refer to as “Relief Drawings”—a continuous thread I see is a fidelity to technical operations in order to eke out what potential sculpture has for digital intervention. How has this evolved over time for you?

Collin Leitch: I started working on the entertainment centers in 2018 when 4K TVs more or less became standard. I would mount these TVs at odd angles in boxy wooden housings so that I could take advantage of their diagonal dimensions. The diagonal of a 4K TV has a resolution somewhere in the neighborhood of 4500 pixels, and configuring the TVs in this way allowed me to extract the maximum resolution possible, even if only for a small sliver at the center of the composition. 

The way I work with video usually involves compositing several different sources and registers of cinema into a single frame, often combining scanned film formats and generative animations, so filling this tall dimension became a unique proposition. In the animations for the 2019 entertainment centers, I turned to media like film negatives that don’t have fixed digital resolution and are meant for projecting or enlarging. With the 2021 entertainment centers, I began to rely less on film and started to scan in more drawing and painting to serve a similar purpose. In particular, there were some hand-painted backgrounds of cel animations that I used as the backgrounds of my own animations. In the way they were originally used, you were never meant to see the edge of the background painting—often they would just roughly end, leaving blank cardstock at the edge, so it was naturally suited to the frame of the entertainment centers which typically omitted edges. The compositions displayed on the tilted monitors maintain a level relationship to the eyes of the viewer and the walls/ceiling/floor of the gallery, and perpendicular elements in the wooden frames, which would also contribute to “fixing” the horizon in the compositions. In displaying a photograph in this way, for example, you can only see a relatively small area of the image, and the monitors almost felt like windows onto some larger corpus of cinema that’s always sitting just outside the frame.

Collin Leitch, Tonick, 2021. 4K video, polylactic acid, walnut. Courtesy of the Artist. 

I felt like these works sat within this furniture-sculpture tension that was a condition of showing early video art in galleries. Once I had one of these pieces returned to me from a gallery and I stored it in my living room. I didn’t have a TV in my apartment at the time, so I ended up watching all these seasons of streaming shows on my sculpture for a year while laying on the couch in this one position that wouldn’t hurt my neck. That’s where the entertainment center name came in—the piece of furniture that contains the TV in a home. TVs used to be designed as furniture but now they’re not. When artists first started working with video, they often had to enlist this piece of furniture into a gallery setting to display their work. To me, this seems like a highly charged gesture tied to the American home and American politics.

ESDid you play with, subvert, or otherwise tropify the limitations of the hardware or playback resolution (pixel limits, resolution, aspect ratio, playback speed, etc.) in the “entertainment center” works?

CL: I think these pieces present the resolution of digital video as a surface for a materials-based or apparatus-based inquiry into the nature of cinema. By pushing resolution to it’s limit—not in a glitch way, but by achieving the maximum possible resolution of these screens—I hope a viewer could experience some kind of mental activation toward what resolution is meant to do in the first place, or negotiate their own feelings about the consumer television resolution arms race. If this drive to increase resolution becomes a trope, then I picked it up in a  tongue-in-cheek way, by increasing resolution by rotating vision and interrupting the TV’s original function. But there is a meaningful increase in resolution in viewing along the diagonal! Up close with these pieces you can get a sense of looking at a lot of visual information. 

Especially with film assets scanned into these pieces, where there is dust and scratches and grain, you can really look at photochemical film—not as a stylistic choice, like in an ad that has scanned film with sprocket holes, but as a material subsumed into a larger continuum of moving image technologies. Hollis Frampton wrote about this idea that photography, film, video, and CGI all sit inside each other without a hierarchy, and that has remained for me a very useful framework to think through.

Collin Leitch, Memories of Uplift, 2021. 4K video, polylactic acid, walnut. Courtesy of the Artist. 

As for hardware, I’ve tried to reinscribe the TV’s status as hardware or as furniture, as if to say, “This is a TV from BestBuy. This decidedly is not a sleek, anonymous surface for displaying a piece of immaterial media art that could live anywhere.” I started making these pieces when there was a lull in interest between the first and second generations of dedicated digital art displays, like Electric Objects and others. In pieces like Arck (Cusanus) or Memories of Uplift, I realized I was including images of drywall and electrical outlets in the animations. The way these pieces are wired, everything terminates in a single cable that is visibly plugged in, and everything runs automatically when it’s plugged in. It was important to me that this cable have a graphic quality and be part of the piece, to treat the piece as a kind of appliance. The onscreen outlet and onscreen wall become a mise-en-abyme framed by the real outlet and the real wall the piece is hanging on.

 

Collin Leitch, Arck (Cusanus), 2021. 4K video, polylactic acid, walnut. Courtesy of the Artist. 

ES:  My own interest in software and 3D-manipulation derives from a trope I’ve noticed in contemporary visual culture. The anagrammatic, recombinant features of software toolkits and libraries, which you use in your own work, create a novel form of realism—what I call a “parameterized real” in my own research—characterized, for spectators, by a familiarization with the uncanny and by a sense of “already-seenness.” 

These sub-perceptual processes are evident in your most recent show World Edit, which utilizes what you call “plausible volumes”—extruded vector shapes which are 3D printed—that are then reassembled into a uniform surface. I’m thinking of Genesis Invitational in particular. Can you speak to the tension here between the 3D imaging software towards the final drawing, which actually produces a sculpture with more fidelity to 2D rather than 3D space?

CL: I first started using the 3D printer when I was working on the entertainment centers as a way to generate broad swaths of plastic to serve as relief adornments on the wooden consoles. All these prints had a 2D footprint that slotted right into a cavity in the console, and I tried to keep in mind that I was primarily using the printer to precisely deposit plastic to correspond to a fixed outline. I was emphasizing flatness and a drawn outline even as I included discrete 3D assets in these reliefs. As the entertainment centers began to privilege drawing more and more in the animations, the reliefs also started to mostly feature extruded drawings. 

Collin Leitch, Vieiwing, 2021 (detail). 4K video, polylactic acid, walnut. Courtesy of the Artist. 

I was using the 3D printer like a plotter, making drawings in plastic that took advantage of the relatively low resolution of extrusion printing. To deposit plastic layer by layer to produce a volume that was composed with an eye toward the limits and properties of this tool—I came to feel that this was the operation the 3D printer was best at, and needed to be kept in mind while attempting to use it to produce artworks.The drawings felt like they were within the same order of magnitude of the incremental layer heights and lines that are a material hallmark of this type of printing. The drawings also had a relationship to these units of resolution that is similar to scan lines in analog video. 

I am not really interested in using the 3D printer to produce specific volumes that are on their own representational, either as a replica/clone of a thing in the world, or as an attempt to “just it print out” or transpose to sculptural space a scene or figure that was modeled on the computer. Also, to reiterate, a lot of this argument is really specific to extrusion printing. There are resin printers that can whole-cloth beam extremely elaborate forms out of a vat of material and do so with tremendous detail, but taking that process at face value doesn’t feel like the most exciting starting point for making sculptures, to me, right now. 

From this understanding [about 3D printing], a lot of my lingering sympathies to structural film came back to me. The software I use to make these pieces is more or less the same suite of apps that I used to make videos. The relief drawings are very cinematic pieces, not in the sense that they are epic or are of tremendous scale but in that they are born of a process of thinking materially through a tool and what its essential function might be. I also have an inclination to think through the media and some of the tools of cinema by looking at them at their limits or through a mode of negation, at the point in which a tool or format is no longer broadly relevant.

With Genesis Invitational, I wanted to push the automotive motif of the other works in the show to a limit that would reveal something about the printing process. When that piece was in the drawing stage, I was looking at a lot of reference images of car wrecks. I was trying to think through the “insideness” of 3D printing and how to depict some of the interior components of cars that are brought to the outside in this catastrophic event.

Collin Leitch, Genesis Invitational, 2022. Polylactic acid, mahogany and danish oil. Courtesy of Shoot The Lobster.

ESI’m curious about your wielding of 3D printing technology against itself as a vector for the high-fidelity translation of verisimilitude. How is the process of working with 3D assets different for you, given that your end result is nonetheless a (representational) image?

CL: The end result is a representational image in the way a drawing could be a representational image; it’s less like the tendency to use 3D printing in a similar way to the common historical understanding of a photograph as a representational image of reality. There is an emphasis in these pieces on a graphic experience, and on withholding detail in an inverse relationship to the scale of the individual print (the prints are very large and have limited detail). Conventionally, a 3D print is representational by having a well-rendered, high-detail, 360-degree-relationship to the thing it references, whether that is a toy, a figure, or a car part. That’s why I called these plausible volumes, because in 3D space they maintain a more general relationship to their subject matter.

I also tried to imbue these pieces with something drawing can’t have, which is significant depth and thickness. The process of working with these assets begins with a complete vector drawing of all the constituent pieces and then is extruded up from there. Any particularities of those strokes or the non-uniform spaces between shapes get preserved through the process of printing, aligning, and gluing each piece to the wood backing. In the final relief drawing, a viewer can look perpendicularly at it and sort of step to the side of vision for a moment.

 

Collin Leitch, Genesis Invitational, 2022 (detail). Polylactic acid, mahogany and danish oil. Courtesy of Shoot The Lobster.

ES: When we did a studio visit last September, we spoke at length about car designs as vectors for stored design imperatives and cultural wishes. I’ve always been fascinated by their design history: cars started as trompe l'oeil horse wagons or stagecoaches and have evolved to hyper-realized curvatures, increasingly molded to look like 1:1 extrusions from 3D software, with curves, indents, and concave spaces only possible via that software. Do you see these cultural, paradigmatic, and visual shifts, especially where manufacturing is concerned, as relevant to what you’re doing sculpturally?

CL: Yes! I think we were riffing on how so much car design looks like CAD [computer-aided design] now, or that you can see back through it to a 3D design workspace. One of those pieces, Life, Car Thief, combines the tail of two different cars — one is a luxury SUV and the other is a common sedan that would be one of the cheapest used cars you could buy. They both inhabit the same visual language with very little distinction in how they hold these CAD curves in their exterior bodywork. When cars have been designed to inhabit a more maverick or referential design milieu like the Pontiac Aztec or the PT Cruiser, they are met with near-universal scorn and viewed by the public as a grotesque aberration. 

Collin Leitch, Life, Car Thief, 2021. Polylactic acid, mahogany and danish oil. Courtesy of Shoot The Lobster.

The subject of cars became a useful idiom for manufacturing, or a way to to think through a technology evolving alongside people’s expectations of it. To go back to these pieces being cinematic, I found it really useful to look back to the period of proto-cinema, to stereographs, zoetropes, and panoramas, all these efforts to try to realize cinema through a resemblance to photography, drawing, or the experience of train travel, and find in there some impulse that feels latent in cars looking like stagecoaches, or CAD. 

Collin Leitch, The Small Back Room (Berkey Bomb), 2022. Polylactic acid, mahogany, danish oil, steel, aluminum. Courtesy of Shoot The Lobster.

ES: Is there a metaphor here for this hyper-design epoch we find ourselves in—or at least emerging media within it? After all, the design principles, or structural qualities underneath every image, are a self-serving fiction invented by designers themselves.

CL: I’m a bit averse to hot takes here as I admittedly struggle with design. I have to text all my friends for advice if I am trying to buy furniture on Craigslist. And dressing myself, man, my ability to do that has been volatile, to say the least. Design is like…making all the things that enclose humans, and doing so from some kind of implicit worldview, right? 

In my most recent show World Edit at Shoot The Lobster, there was a sculpture that was meant to, at least in part, evoke an armament or some kind of explosive. It’s actually just a regular 3D print, not in relief. I was thinking about the Cosima Von Bonin rocket pieces, sometimes rendered as plush toys, and this tendency of 3D prints in PLA [plastic] with bright filaments to look toy-like. In fact, it seems like the two killer applications for this type of extrusion printer have been either making toys or making guns. I was thinking about these rockets, and was looking at my sculpture, and a friend pointed out that these ordnance have never fallen into any of the design imperatives we’ve talked about. They have always just looked like themselves.

Age28

Location: Ridgewood, Queens, NY

How/when did you begin working creatively with technology?

I remember using my parents’ VHS-C camera to make stop-motion films when I was very young. I played with MS paint a ton as well as Adobe CS stuff on the school computers. However, I didn’t have real chops for anything until I started making rude photoshops of my friends.

What did you study at school or elsewhere?

I studied in the Film & Electronic Arts Department of Bard College. 

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

After school, I started working as an assistant for a few different video artists. I also did AV installation at galleries and museums.

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

Photograph of Collin’s workspace, 2022, Courtesy of the artist. 


Watch us Enter the Mezz!

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Documentation from Mezzanine at the New Museum is now available!

On October 15, 2022, Rhizome presented Mezzanine, a point and click computer game by Inpatient Interactive (Mitch Anzuoni and Peter Christian) at the New Museum. Anzuoni and Christian performed a live playthrough of the game—they roamed the halls of Zentropy HQ, laid off employees, signed up for a wellness retreat, learned about DJBirdCage’s unjust imprisonment, and more...we all had a blast! Following the Q&A with Rhizome Curator Celine Wong Katzman, audience members were lining up to ask questions about parts of the game they couldn’t get past (Zak’s password is ZEN419, btw). True fans of the game even got to take home their very own copies of “Mymik,” a magazine that exists virtually in Zentropy HQ, and Mezzanine CD-ROMs. We learned that Mezzanine is porous and “multimedia” is kind of a funny word! 

This event accompanies First Look: Mezzanine, the latest in the ongoing series of digital projects copresented by Rhizome and the New Museum.

Watch the video below! 

 

Rhizome Presents: CyberPowWow

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Rhizome is proud to announce the first major U.S. museum presentation of CyberPowWowon December 10, 2022 at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

First launched in 1997 by the Nation to Nation collective—Skawennati, Ryan Rice, and Eric Robertson—CyberPowWowwas one of the first major online art exhibitions. Described as “an Aboriginally determined territory in cyberspace,” 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. These environments will be made available online in legacy computer environments as part of a permanent exhibition space for born-digital artwork supported by Rhizome’s acclaimed digital preservation department. 

Organized by Rhizome Curator Celine Wong Katzman, the one-day pop-up exhibition, panel discussion, and an ongoing online exhibition will be the first major museum presentation of CyberPowWow in the United States. This is particularly significant given the historic exclusion of Indigenous artists from cultural institutions; Rhizome’s own initial research for its Net Art Anthology even omitted CyberPowWow. To address this, Rhizome is centering the presentation of CyberPowWow as its main focus for this season’s programming. Nevertheless, this initiative is intended to build interest in CyberPowWow, opening the way for future exhibition, research, and publishing efforts about this landmark project. 

“CyberPowWow is a groundbreaking platform that warrants deep critical engagement, and demonstrates the radical possibilities of self-determined communities, both online and offline. Under Rhizome’s new leadership team, we are thrilled to prioritize a continued, urgent commitment to amplifying the crucial voices of underrepresented contributors to digital culture.” —Makayla Bailey, Co-Executive Director of Rhizome

“I am thrilled to be working with Rhizome on the restoration and presentation of CyberPowWow because they really get it. Indigenous people were present at the beginning of this digital revolution that we are living and it is good that that history is being written, even better that it's happening while the artists are still around to comment.” —Skawennati

The online exhibition will open on December 10, 2022in conjunction with the one-day pop-up exhibition and a panel discussion in the New Museum theater with presentations by artist Skawennati, artist Jason Lewis, and scholar Mikhel Proulx, and Rhizome’s Preservation Director Dragan Espenschied. Alongside this, four computer terminals will be made available in the Sky Room for members of the public to engage with CyberPowWow in a legacy computer environment throughout the day. Rhizome staff, including its new Co-Executive Directors Makayla Bailey and Michael Connor, will be on hand to discuss the project with members of the public. 

Greg A. Hill, Buffalo Wood, Kanata Boutique, 2004. CyberPowWow 1997–2005.Palace, Windows XP. Screenshot 2022.

CyberPowWow took place in an online, graphical chat environment known as “The Palace,” with works by artists displayed in various virtual rooms, where users could also interact with one another. The online project also included networked, real-space activations—dubbed “Gathering Sites”—in which members of the public could access CyberPowWow at more than twenty artist-run centers across North America. For many visitors, this would be their first encounter with the internet or digital art. 

CyberPowWow invites the user to explore virtual artist-made environments, encountering works that are often emotional and funny. The unique aesthetic and powerful affect of the exhibition mark it as an important and overlooked chapter in early net art history. The project is an engaging interactive environment that will resonate with the public, while holding specific appeal in the context of contemporary discussions about Indigeneity and sovereignty, and anticolonial positions within the museum.

SKAWENNATI
Skawennati makes art that addresses history, the future, and change from her perspective as an urban Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. Her early adoption of cyberspace as both a location and a medium for her practice has produced groundbreaking projects such as CyberPowWow and TimeTraveller™. She is best known for her machinimas—movies made in virtual environments—but also produces still images, textiles and sculpture.

Her works have been presented in Europe, Oceania, China and across North America in exhibitions such as “Uchronia I What if?”, in the HyperPavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale; “Now? Now!” at the Biennale of the Americas; and “Looking Forward (L’Avenir)” at the Montreal Biennale. They are included in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, among others. She was honored to receive the 2019 Salt Spring National Art Prize Jurors’ Choice Award, a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship and a Visiting Artist Fellowship at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. She is represented by ELLEPHANT.

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

JASON LEWIS
Jason Edward Lewis is a digital media theorist, poet, and software designer. He founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he conducts research/creation projects exploring computation as a creative and cultural material. Lewis is deeply committed to developing intriguing new forms of expression by working on conceptual, critical, creative and technical levels simultaneously. He is the University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary as well as Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University. Lewis was born and raised in northern California, and currently lives in Montreal. 

Lewis directs the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, and co-directs the Indigenous Futures Research Centre, the Indigenous Protocol and AI Workshops, the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace research network, and the Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling and Video Game Design.

MIKHEL PROULX
Mikhel Proulx researches contemporary art and network culture. He holds a PhD from the Department of Art History at Concordia University, and has other degrees in drawing, media design and art history. He researches queer and feminist studies, participatory art, network culture, and Indigenous and settler-colonial histories of Canada. 

DRAGAN ESPENSCHIED
Dragan Espenschied is the director of Rhizome’s Digital Preservation program, stewarding ArtBase, a collection 2200+ works of digital art and net art. With a background in net activism, net art, and electronic music, Espenschied has mostly focused on infrastructure and field-wide action concerning web archiving, emulation, and linked open data, rather than singular artworks.

 

Image: Poster for CyberPowWow, design by Laura Coombs.  

 

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

The Power of Spreadsheets: Watch the Cyberfeminism Index Book Launch

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McKenzie Wark, Prema Murthy, Tega Brain, E. Jane, and Mindy Seu in coversation at the Cyberfeminism Index Book Launch, November 14 at the New Museum. Photo by Shina Peng. 

Documentation from The Cyberfeminism Index Book Launch at the New Museum is available online!

On November 14, 7 pm, Rhizome hosted the sold-out book launch for designer and editor Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index at the New Museum. The event began with a performative reading (featuring an AR component) of the “hypertext” book by Seu—it was a page-turner! Some memorable projects featured were Tabita Rezaire's Afro Cyber Resistance,Klau Kinky’s Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey,and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s Black Trans Archive, to name a few. 

Following the reading, panelists each gave a talk about their contributions to the book—Prema Murthy talked about her projectsBindigirl and Mythic Hybrid, Tega Brain discussedsolar powered web servers, E. Jane reflected on MHYSA and being online in the club, and McKenzie Wark reminded us that tech companies are making money off of us everyday! There were lots of cool people in the audience—Tamiko Thiel (whose work Totem Projectis in the book) even stopped by to express her admiration for the project. We learned about the power of spreadsheets, 3D printed speculum, slime consciousness, the origins of Skene’s gland, and that you can stillpre-order the Cyberfeminism Index online! 

The event was also livestreamed to an audience of over 100 people 😳 The Zoom chat was lively, with audience members trying to determine the most ‘cyberfeminist’ emojis (💚🌱❇️ were popular options). Rhizome Community Designer and moderator Briana Griffin held it down 👏.

Launched in 2020 with support from the Rhizome Commissions program, Cyberfeminism Index began as a website featuring projects in a wide range of modes and media relating expansively to the productively complicated portmanteau from which it drew its name. The website was conceptualized and facilitated by Seu, who also “gathered” the entries, and developed by Angeline Meitzler, with frontend support from Janine Rosen and PDF support from Charles Broskoski. Welcoming submissions from the public, the always-incomplete project featured links, descriptions, and images that represented a long history of experimentation with and critical thought about “how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology.”

 Watch the Video below!  

Photos by Shina Peng. 

Artist Profile: Pete Jiadong Qiang

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Pete Jiadong Qiang, Queer Maximalism HyperBody (2020). Game level Pinkray, Pinkray plush dolls, VR gameplay screenshot. Courtesy of the artist and CheeseTalk.

The latest in a series of interviews with artists who have a significant body of work that makes use of or responds to network culture and digital technologies. 

Banyi Huang: I love the conceptual framework you’ve developed around gamespace, architectural space, and online fandom as they intersect with queer identity: it’s speculative, but it’s also personal and tender. Your VR game Queer Maximalism HyperBody, for me, is a performative declaration of being unapologetically queer, maximalist, and body-centric. 

It makes me think of scholar Yuk Hui’s definition of cosmotechnics as the unification between cosmic order and moral order through technical activities, which has been instrumental in conceptualizing a non-Western philosophy of technology. Can you talk about how you developed your framework of game fandom as a form of cosmotechnics?

Pete Jiadong Qiang, Queer Maximalism HyperBody (2020). Game level Pinkray, Making the mod of Parallel Neo Home in the cosmotechnics of multi-fandoms, Isometric screenshot of Unity editor of the VR game.

Pete Jiadong Qiang: I regard developing my VR game Queer Maximalism HyperBody as an architectural practice. When I was at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London, I was heavily influenced by my tutors David Greene and Samantha Hardingham, and visiting tutor and artist John Walter taught me how to negotiate architectural-pictorial space with a maximalist approach. Since my architectural project Health Aficionado Experimentation (HAEXP), I started to test the intermediations between pictorial space, architectural space, and gamespace through animation, exploring a physical-virtual space that is incomplete, imperfect, and picturesque. This speculative and experimental architectural approach allows me to design and make from the perspective of an acafan (an academic who identifies as a fan). 

For HAEXP, I did a digital anthropological study in World of Warcraft as a female Night Elf druid, and studied forms and animations from druid shapeshifting. I then remixed sounds from Dota 2 and StarCraft into my animation. With a fluid and amateur approach, I hope to bridge the gap between the academic and personal. At the AA, I was always asked things like: What are the speed, time, and interval of your architecture? How much does your architecture weigh? Is your architecture designed only for humans but not horses or cows? Through my experimental architectural practice, I think about how I can design a physical-virtual space with a soft, feminized aesthetic that encompasses human and nonhuman, built environment and natural, agricultural and urban, civil and technological. During the graduation ceremony at the AA in 2016, David suggested, “Pete, why don’t you do something inside VR next?”

Shifting from speculative and experimental design to a practice-based PhD, I audited Hui’s philosophy course at the City University of Hong Kong in 2021. As a Chinese acafan, I think Hui’s ideas around cosmotechnics are very helpful to rethink the technics/technologies behind ACGN (anime, comic, game, and novel) fandoms and communities in mainland China, particularly when dealing with game engines and VR devices. For example, I studied a Chinese BL (Boys’ Love) cultivation novel with my friends Tianqi and Linn titled C Programming Language Cultivating Immortals by Yi Shi Si Zhou, in which the technological and mythical events and male/male character pairings are entangled between C programming and Daoist cultivation, as China and the West engage in a technological and affective conversation during the development of a VR world system. I was interested in the way the main character cultivates immortality by programming himself through infinite loops, object-oriented programming, and networks constantly shifting between real-life and VR environments.

Based on my interviews and collaborations with various fandom members, I generate sounds, texts, 3D paintings, body characters, 3D scanned environments, and architectural mods in the VR gamespace. I always seek to create a multi-fandom cosmotechnics intermediated between culture, technology, and affection. 

Pete Jiadong Qiang, HAEXP (Health Aficionado Experimentation) (2016). Making the life-size architectural drawing, Screenshot of animation.

BH: As my diasporic sentiment grew, I have grown to appreciate the Xianxia 仙侠 or cultivation genre. Xianxia is a genre of Chinese fantasy heavily inspired by Daoism, referencing Chinese mythology, folklore, Chinese medicine, and other aspects of a larger system of cosmotechnics; characters usually revolve around “cultivators” who seek to become immortal beings by cultivating Qi. Science fiction writing that taps into the Xianxia fantasy genre can be so arresting—for example, Liu Cixin’s VR game that advances through stages of civilization and technological and scientific discovery, or Xia Jia’s A Hundred Ghost Parade, where immortal monsters are revealed to be AI-powered robots. 

For me, the potential for worlding unites Xianxia and science fiction: they are interested in collectively bringing forth something that does not yet exist. It resonates with what Jose Esteban Munoz calls queer futurity—a warm horizon imbued with potentiality. Against the normative, territorializing forces of the metaverse worlding, what does queer worlding mean for you? And how does that manifest in your work? 

PJQ: During my research into Chinese BL novels, I was addicted to everything related to Daoist cultivation. BL novels are really inclusive and fluid in blending with any possible genres. Notions of myth, technics, and technology in Chinese science fiction, fantasy and specifically immortality-cultivation texts provide me with down-to-earth materials to fantasize a worlding of multi-fandom cosmotechnics. For example, for my VR game Queer Maximalism HyperBody, I engaged in digital ethnography and autoethnography with many interviewees and collaborators. I interviewed fandom member Emma on her male/male shipping videos of Pinkray/Katto within the real-life C-Pop boys group ONER; I collaborated with my friends Tianqi and Linn to investigate the Chinese BL novel context; and I worked with my architectural fellows Jingzhi and Aristo to modify their architectural projects in VR gamespace. I also had conversations with another fandom member CheeseTalk on her fanart depicting a male/male ship1 between characters Luo Ji and Shi Qiang in Liu Cixin’s The Dark Forest, the sequel to the acclaimed sci-fi novel, The Three-Body Problem. Concurrently, I interviewed my friend, Chinese female science fiction writer Tang Fei, and modified her novels into a visual novel game level called "HyperBody: Seventeen/Sixty-One" within Queer Maximalism HyperBody. Through iterative conversations and collaborative practices in the VR game, a worlding of cosmotechnic multi-fandoms is established in the VR gamespace.

Pete Jiadong Qiang, Queer Maximalism HyperBody (2020). Game level Pinkray, Worlding of cosmotechnics of multi-fandoms, Isometric screenshot of Unity editor of the VR game. Courtesy of the Artist and Emma, Tianqi, Linn, Jingzhi, Aristo, and CheeseTalk.

Pete Jiadong Qiang, Queer Maximalism HyperBody (2020).Game level Seventeen/Sixty-One, screenshot of VR game. Courtesy of the Artist and Tang Fei.

BH: Combined with state censorship and consumerism, the Chinese online fandom community is highly politicized and is a hotbed for both mass mobilization and control. I find that fandom practices like modding (making user-determined enhancements), crossover (bridging characters from different fictional words), and shipping (desiring romantic connection between fictional characters) are imbued with radical, liberating potentials. They bring about connections that don’t yet exist, mixing genres and creating new ones. The Untamed (a Chinese fantasy TV series based on Boys' Love novel Mo Dao Zu Shi) and its fandom was what got me through the start of the pandemic. For a period of time, I was consumed by the love and yearning between the main characters, who are beautiful men, and obsessed over the shipping of the actors themselves, scrutinizing their every interaction for signs of affection. I’m curious about how you approach and incorporate fan-generated content. Do you see it as inherently queer and transformative? 

PJQ: I’m indifferent to famous fandoms like The Untamed; I tend to look for small and minor communities in which you might be able to experience their fan dynamics and the triangulation between culture, technology, and affection without too much politics and volatile censorship. With the Pinkray/Katto shipping in C-Pop boys group ONER, Emma helped me dive into the “posthumous” communities (In the fandom, if a ship or character pair has a bad end, the dedicated shipping community is announced dead and archived) with less politics and censorship and substantially explore the fandom’s archives to understand the narrative behind their practices. For the Luo Ji/Shi Qiang ship in Liu Cixin’s The Dark Forest, CheeseTalk approached me first because we met at my VR game workshop at Goldsmiths and she really liked my VR gamespace.

Both Emma and CheeseTalk are Chinese and belong to Generation Z. Because they are so young and feel passionate about remixing characters, personas, and affections, they can envision creative and alternative affect-assets within their shipping practices. For Pinkray/Katto and Luo Ji/Shi Qiang, they share sincere feelings in both their real-life and fictional relationships. For Emma and CheeseTalk, the more important part is how to blur and remix both physical and virtual personas to create new, genderfluid combinations. They also hope to share their ships with the general public on mainstream online platforms like Weibo and LOFTER (a Chinese microblogging platform for fanart). I think it might be a matter of what I call queer tuning—a soft, passive way to seek healing regarding identity, gender, and sexuality without a conscious structure of resistance. Most mainland Chinese fandoms retain a young constituency without too many historical, cultural, political, and moral burdens. Just like how the sea receives all rivers flowing into it, the tuning of fandom expects and welcomes new cultural, technological and affective turns.

Pete Jiadong Qiang, Queer Maximalism HyperBody (2020). Game level Pinkray, Pinkray plush dolls, VR gameplay screenshot. Courtesy of the artist and CheeseTalk.

Pete Jiadong Qiang, Queer Maximalism HyperBody (2020).Game level Pinkray, Luo Ji/Shi Qiang ship, screenshot of VR game. Courtesy of the artist and CheeseTalk.

BH: Over our WeChat conversation, you talked about your background in architecture, and how that training makes you think in environmental terms; coming from art history, I tend to think in a more artifact and object-driven way, and I find that difference very interesting. In one of the public events for World on A Wire, an online and in-person exhibition presented by Rhizome and Hyundai, Michael Connor pointed out that you employ gestural painting as a visual strategy in building digital space. The gesture declares the presence of the body and its messiness. In Dungeon: Maximalism HyperBody (2021), cascading AR texts that bear in traces of your handwriting float on top of geometric planes, and meshes with handpainted textures exist alongside 3D scans of physical archives you have worked in. Can you talk more about your process with visual strategies when you are building VR gamespace? How do the environmental and the gestural relate to one another? 

PJQ: Back to my architectural project HAEXP at the AA, I was very lucky to borrow Bruce McLean’s studio in Ealing, West London to paint an 26.2 feet by 8.2 feet architectural drawing on the back of poster papers with pencil, watercolor, crayon, and acrylic. Between pictorial and architectural space, I love to test the notions of body, form, aesthetics, and scale. After getting into VR practices, I continued to paint with software like Tilt Brush, Quill, and Gravity Sketch. For physical installation, I use the foaming agent to negotiate the form and aesthetic of VR paintings in physical space. 

When painting in VR, I engage with the negative spaces and voids between brushes, meshes, textures, and materials. Painting within such a non-collision space, I question the limits and bounds of bodies, embodiments, and objects, which are constantly reconfiguring. Through painting, I develop the methods of modding, crossover, and shipping (character pairing) to try to create an affective cosmotechnics of multi-fandoms. As an architectural maximalist, I think my Queer Maximalism Manifesto for the Hypertired in 2019 can be a starting point to interrogate bodies, 3D paintings, 3D scans, and architectures.

BH: Project Search (繼續追尋) is a recent visual novel game that you have been working on. Can you talk more about how it came about, and what direction you want to take it in? 

PJQ: Project Search is technically a series of scenes and rooms based on Mozilla Hubs. Unlike my VR game, the Mozilla Hub version is lightweight, multi-player, and you can play it from most PCs and laptops. The game was made in Linhai, a county-level city in Taizhou, Zhejiang Province, in southeastern China. It came out of practice-based research conducted at an art residency initiated by With in/out Linhai, a cultural group supported by the local government and the China Academy of Art. From site analysis, cultivation novel writing, 3D scanning, and scene design, I created a cultivation gamespace in the context of Linhai to allow local residents, tourists, students, and researchers to reconsider the Daoist culture of cultivation and potential re-materializations of physical and virtual space.

Although the story of this visual novel game is original compared to my multi-fandom works, it tinkers with my personal experiences of eating traditional food, browsing old districts, and meeting Daoist cultivators in Linhai. My imagination of this technology-cultivation story remixes the narrative in Chen Kuo-fu’s film Double Vision (2002), which I love a lot! On the other hand, I tried to prioritize sound work first in Project Search instead of visuals. Under the current COVID policy in mainland China, Project Search’s physical installations were delayed by four months. It was finally exhibited by the end of September this year in Linhai. The installation, located in a derelict 1950s worker’s club, is made with site-specific materials and pays tribute to a new Hong Kong film Drifting (2021). Emphasizing a real-life urban context, Project Search tried to establish a unique online/offline community by developing an audio-visual gamespace, in order to re-materialize cultivation, technology, and affect. 

Pete Jiadong Qiang, Project Search(2022).Game scene Syncing, Gameplay screenshot. Courtesy of the artist and With in/out Linhai.

Pete Jiadong Qiang, Project Search (2022). Game scene Syncing, Mixed media installation: plastic sheet, spray foam, paint, dodecahedron mold, bean bag chair inner liner, audio cassette player, tapes and computer, Dimension variable, Linhai.Courtesy of the artist, Fengyuan Tian, Ziyi Xu, Yurui Dong, and With in/out Linhai.

Age: 31 

Location: Exeter, Devon, UK

How, and when did you begin working creatively with technology?

I was addicted to Britpop in high school and started to make and design an alternative rock BBS. I also made a fanzine as an EXE for free download in my BBS. 

What did you study at school or elsewhere?

I studied AA Diploma (ARB/RIBA Part 2) in the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA).

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

I am currently working as a virtual space curator at X Museum.

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

Screenshot of Pete's Desktop, 2022, Courtesy of the artist.  

Photograph of Pete's workspace, 2022, Courtesy of the artist. 

______________

1In fan communities, "shipping,"(which is derived from "Relationship") refers to the wish that 2 or more characters will enter a romantic or sexual relationship.

Continuing the Preservation of CyberPowWow

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Michelle Nahanee, onguard, 2001. Screenshot, 2022, The Palace 3.5.0 on Windows XP SP2. Courtesy of the artist and Rhizome. 

On December 10, 2022 Rhizome will present the first major U.S. museum presentation of CyberPowWow at the New Museum. First launched in 1997 by the Nation to Nation collective—Skawennati, Ryan Rice, and Eric Robertson—CyberPowWow was one of the first major online art exhibitions which took place on the web and in The Palace, a multi-user, graphical chat environment, now obsolete. CyberPowWow was also activated by in-person gatherings where community members would access the exhibition together. Rhizome's exhibition will take place in the New Museum Sky Room and will feature CyberPowWow presented in legacy computer environments together with ephemera from the Indigenous Digital Art Archive. Alongside the exhibition, artist Skawennati, scholar Mikhel Proulx, and Rhizome’s Preservation Director, Dragan Espenschied will participate in a panel discussion at 3pm in the theater.

Rhizome's staging of CyberPowWow for this exhibition is based on the “canned version” created in 2011 by Jason Edward Lewis, one of the participating artists. Rhizome’s digital preservation department created an index of all of the components of CyberPowWow, making the canned version available in a more robust and portable software environment using the “Emulation as a Service” framework, and re-enabling links to preserved web resources.

Âhasiw Maskêgon-Iskwêw, Mom_and _Me, 2001. Screenshot, 2022, The Palace 3.5.0 on Windows XP SP2. Courtesy of the artist and Rhizome.

CyberPowWow took place in two online environments: the web, and a proprietary, multi-user, graphical chat environment called The Palace, first released in 1996, and now obsolete. Both environments were interlinked. The canned version contains installable executable files from a 2000 version of The Palace server and client, and files originally found on several servers for artworks located on the web. Today, The Palace software package can be installed on legacy versions of Windows in an emulator, but it contains links pointing to live web URLs that cannot be accessed by software from the early 2000’s, as most web traffic has become encrypted with algorithms that were introduced much later. This breaks the connection between artworks presented in The Palace and on the web. 

Using the framework “Emulation as a Service,” which manages online access to legacy software environments, Rhizome’s preservation team expanded the canned version of CyberPowWow to include a fully working instance of Windows XP with The Palace, Internet Explorer 6, and the required browser plugins. This package is easily portable and can be presented on local computers in a gallery space as well as on the web, allowing users to bypass the requirement to install a local emulator in order to access CyberPowWow. Websites linked from The Palace were reconstructed from files contained in the canned version and data found in public web archives, and included in the emulation setup. 

r e a, room5, 2001. Screenshot, 2022, The Palace 3.5.0 on Windows XP SP2. Courtesy of the artist and Rhizome. 

It is important to note CyberPowWow was originally created with the multi-user capabilities of The Palace in mind, which allowed users to explore the different “rooms” together and chat. However, the version presented in this exhibition does not support multi-user functionality due to technical challenges. Rhizome is currently evaluating possible strategies that would allow a multi-user version to be made available in the future.

Exploring the treasure of digital art history that is CyberPowWow in depth and contributing to its continued longevity has been incredibly rewarding. We hope this presentation is merely the first step in a long rediscovery of CyberPowWow and the possibility it represents for expressive online communities.

Trevor Van Weeren, black_whit, 2001. Screenshot, 2022, The Palace 3.5.0 on Windows XP SP2. Courtesy of the artist and Rhizome. 

Digital conservation was led by Dragan Espenschied, Preservation Director at Rhizome, with the support of Lyndesy Jane Moulds and Yushien Chen. The "canned version" of CyberPowWow was made by Skawennati and Jason Edward Lewis.

All Screenshots created in 2022 by Yuhsien Chen, with The Palace 3.5.0 on Windows XP SP2. 

Skawennati AFK: CyberPowWow panel discussion now online!

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Skawennati, Dragan Espenschied, and Mikhel Proulx enjoy a laugh after an audience member verifies that they were able to watch “Peacemaker Returns” in the bathroom at the New Museum during A CyberPowWow panel discussion, December 10 2022. Photo: Cameron Kelly McKleod. Courtesy of Rhizome.

Video documentation from the CyberPowWow panel discussion is available online

On December 10, 2022 at 3pm, Rhizome hosted a panel discussion at the New Museum, featuring artist Skawennati, scholar Mikhel Proulx, and Rhizome’s Preservation Director, Dragan Espenschied. Launched in 1997 by the Nation to Nation Collective (Skawennati, Ryan Rice, Eric Robertson) CyberPowWow was one of the first major online exhibitions. The panel accompanied Rhizome Presents: CyberPowWow, a one-day pop up exhibition, in the New Museum Sky Room, where members of the public could interact with CyberPowWow in legacy computer environments, and browse ephemera from the Indigenous Digital Art Archive (which featured the original CyberPowWow floppy and zip discs from 1994 💾). 

Skawennati, Dragan Espenschied, and Mikhel Proulx answering audience questions at the New Museum during A CyberPowWow Panel Discussion, December 10, 2022. Photo: Cameron Kelly McLeod. Courtesy of Rhizome.

Mikhel Proulx began by giving us an overview of CyberPowWow—Proulx illustrated the “idiosyncratic” interface design integral to CyberPowWow with work by Archer Pechawis (a participating artist and co-curator of CyberPowWow), and touched on the troubling history of the net being tied to eurocentric perspectives and the language of conquest, misappropriated by settler technologists (examples mentioned included: the web server software “Apache,” the “Inktomi” search engine, and John McAfee’s multimedia chat software “PowWow”). Mikhel argued that despite the prevailing racist mischaracterization of Indigenous people as technologically inept and their exclusion from the overall narrative of net art history, Indigenous artists have occupied central roles in the cultural history of the web. 

Mikhel Proulx discusses </allworksampled.> by Archer Pechawis at the New Museum for A CyberPowWow Panel Discussion, December 10, 2022. Photo:Cameron Kelly McLeod. Courtesy of Rhizome.

Skawennati spoke about being Indigenous in cyberspace and her work as co-founder of AbTec, an Aboriginally determined research-creation network and daphne—an Indigenous artist-run center in Montreal. She recalled her foray into Second Life (first introduced to her by game designer and researcher Celia Pearce) which set the stage for her nine-part machinima series, Time TravellerTM, a humorous exploration of Indigenous futurism in the year 2121. She also presented xox’s homage to Moriko Mori, and highlighted student projects from Skins, AbTec’s machinima and character design workshops for Kahnawake youth. Skawennati has a very fun website (sound on)!

Skawennati having a moment with her avatar, xox at the New Museum during A CyberPowWow Panel Discussion, December 10, 2022. Photo:Cameron Kelly McLeod. Courtesy of Rhizome. 

Dragan Espenschied provided important context and a behind-the-scenes look at Rhizome’s preservation strategy for CyberPowWow, even revealing that he installed a pirated version of Windows XP from “somewhere.” Dragan noted Rhizome’s preservation of CyberPowWow was made possible by former Rhizome Software Curator Lyndsey Jane Moulds, who ran her own Palace Server as a teen, and researcher Yuhsien Chen, who created a map of the connections between over one hundred rooms in CyberPowWow!

Dragan Espenschied illustrates how to install the PalaceServer at the New Museum during A CyberPowWow Panel Discussion,December 10, 2022. Image courtesy of Cameron Kelly McLeod and Rhizome.

The virtual and IRL audience was invited to ask questions following the discussion; we learned about the Met’s exhibitionon Indigineous Futurism (open until January 3, 2023!) which features Skawennati’s work, as well as Apsáalooke multimedia artist Wendy Red Star. Important considerations regarding chat moderation were raised (“moderation wasn’t even a thing yet in the 90s”—Skawennati). Much to our dismay, there is not (yet) a book on Skawennati’s life and work… Perhaps the greatest lesson we learned from CyberPowWow is to document, record, photograph, preserve, archive your memories (digital and IRL)— they are precious 🫶, and could be quite valuable someday! 

Skawennati, Dragan Espenschied, and Mikhel Proulx answering audience questions at the New Museum during A CyberPowWow Panel Discussion, December 10, 2022. Photo: Cameron Kelly McLeod. Courtesy of Rhizome. 

 

Welcome to our New Chapter

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Digital culture changes daily. Yet time and time again, artists reveal the potentials & breaking points of new technologies. 

Rhizome fosters artistic experimentation and digital cultural memory through major cultural moments like “The Art Happens Here” or the minting of the first NFT. Thanks to the support of our community, we were able to continue that work through a memorable transition year for Rhizome, which included Zachary Kaplan's departure after a successful tenure, an international search ably coordinated by the Board, and a new directorial model with a joint leadership team heading up the organization, with a mission to build Rhizome into a broader public platform. 

Along the way, we've had considerable success–a new Patrons’ Council, a memorable Benefit and party at the Bowery Hotel, a sold-out launch for the book based on Mindy Seu’s Rhizome-commissioned website Cyberfeminism Index, and a truly landmark event this December in which we presented the first major US museum presentation of CyberPowWow, a groundbreaking Indigenous-led digital art project from the 1990s. We've welcomed new staff, including Community Designer Briana Griffin and Program Assistant Kayla Drzewicki, and hosted interns and researchers including members of the CUNY Cultural Corps and fellows from Taipei and Bern. 

But the real news lies ahead–2023 will bring a brand new website, the relaunch of 7x7 with deeper and more adventurous collaborations; a new Discord for Rhizome’s community; and an ongoing online exhibition series that builds on Net Art Anthology

It’s shaping up to be a great year, but we cannot do this work without your support. As the end of the year approaches, it’s an excellent time to make a tax-deductible donation. Your donation allows us to continue to invest in radical, risk-taking work that shapes the complex past, present & future of digital art & culture.

𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓃𝓀 𝓎𝑜𝓊 & 𝒽𝒶𝓅𝓅𝓎 𝒽𝑜𝓁𝒾𝒹𝒶𝓎𝓈

Alex Freundlich, Camille Klein, and Jeffrey Scudder of Whistlegraph draw on a chalkboard for "The Longest Whistlegraph Ever (so far)"  at Rhizome's Benefit, May 31 2022. Photo: Marsha Lebedev Bernstein.

Makayla Bailey, Rachel Rossin, Julie Martin, and Michael Connor at Rhizome's Benefit, May 31 2022. Photo: Marsha Lebedev Bernstein.

McKenzie Wark, Prema Murthy, Tega Brain, E.Jane and Mindy Seu in conversation at the New Museum during The Cyberfeminism Index Book Launch, November 14 2022. Photo: Shina Peng. 

Celine Wong Katzman at the New Museum during A CyberPowWow panel discussion, December 10 2022. Photo: Cameron Kelly McKleod. Courtesy of Rhizome.

Mikhel Proulx, Dragan Espenschied, Skawennati, Celine Wong Katzman, Makayla Bailey and Michael Connor at the New Museum Sky Room during the CyberPowWow reception, December 10 2022. Photo: Cameron Kelly McKleod. Courtesy of Rhizome.

Cover Image by Briana Griffin, Community Designer, Rhizome. 


Welcome Kayla Drzewicki as Program Assistant!

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I am writing to share the fantastic news that Kayla Drzewicki will be joining Rhizome in a full-time, permanent capacity as Program Assistant! In her new role, Kayla will support curatorial research, ArtBase accessions, communications, live event production, and other key initiatives.

Kayla brings valuable experience to Rhizome—previously, she has worked as a media educator in Baltimore, teaching basic computer science at the Enoch Pratt Free library and at public schools throughout the city. In 2020, she was a co-programmer and designer for QuaranTV, a 24/7 public access live stream project, which streamed non-stop for the first 1800 hours of the pandemic and was included in The Wire Magazine’s 2020 Rewind.

Over the past few months in her temporary position, Kayla has brought careful attention, positive energy, and a passion for Rhizome's program to her work with us. She's already made impactful contributions with her engaging and funny event recaps, emoji mastery 🦋, and expert community listing selections for the newsletter. I am confident that she will help us take Rhizome’s Artistic Program to the next level.

Welcome to Rhizome, Kayla!

Join Rhizome's Discord!

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Image by Briana Griffin, Community Designer, Rhizome. 

🐬 SIGN UP

Keep up with conversations in digital culture with a pay-what-you-wish membership to our new and improved discord community!

Members have advanced access to an ongoing calendar of community events (irl + online), exclusive workshops & activities, Q&A with artists/participants from select programming, the ability to pitch ideas for community-led events, and a space for sharing internet discoveries, current work, and inspirations.

We've also scheduled some exciting, online-only discord events for this month to get us started.

  • Jan 12 - 12pm EST ~ Cem-A, of freeze_magazine discusses ‘situated’ memes and placement of internet artifacts within physical environments.
  • Jan 19 - 5pm EST ~ An interview with Helga Tawil-Souri on the Internet Pigeon Network, a speculative, community-organized, affordable, and resilient internet infrastructure for the Gaza Strip
  • Jan 26 - 5pm EST ~ Todd Anderson will present an interactive walkthrough of the SFPC Malware Anthology for it’s launch (as well as a few quick tricks for aspiring software art enjoyers) !
  • Feb 2 - 2pm EST ~Ryan Kuo will discuss his web-based piece, Puzzle, a piece that rebuilds conversations from his personal history as a first-generation Taiwanese American growing up in rural America.

Events & Opportunities from Rhizome’s Community—January 11, 2023

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Image: View of Canyon Flats Video Wall with artist Emilie Crewe's video, Orinthonics, 2021

Rhizome's Community Forum is an online bulletin board where members of the community can share events and opportunties relating to digital art and culture. Here are a few of this week's listings:

1. Are you a teaching artist 👩‍🎨 who’s fantasized about living in Allendale, Michigan for a year with a project budget of 20K?💰 Apply to be a Padnos Artist in Residence at Grand Valley State University by January 31. 🗓

2. Are you an artist seeking financial support to finish a conceptual-based project📈? Consider applying to Prospect Art’s Open Call to receive a mini-grant of $1000 twice a year! Apply by January 31.

3. Have thoughts about Plateaus? Open to visiting Flachau, Austria for 6 days in the Winter and creating a controversial installation somewhere outside? 🤯 🗾 Apply to minus20degree's Open Call, Deadline January 31. 

4. Have you always wanted to exhibit your work on Virginia Street in downtown Reno? 🏔 submit your video works to The City of Reno Arts & Culture Commission’s Canyon Flats Video Wall Open Call by January 31 for a chance to win a $250 honorarium.

5. Have an hour to kill in Oakland, CA ⏳? Check out In the Flesh, a solo exhibition of works by Andrew Catanese on view at Johansson Projects until February 25. 

🫶🫵 Visit the Community Forum to post your own events or opportunities! 
☑️ Sign up for the Rhizome newsletter to stay up to date with Rhizome News. 

 

Announcing: Some Tumblrs!

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Cover image: Dominic Quagliozzi, Wreath OR Cockring?, 2012. Screenshot, 2023, Firefox 108.0.1 on MacOS 12.4, https://wreathorcockring.tumblr.com.

Following an open call and selection process, Rhizome has added nearly two dozen artist-made Tumblrs to the Rhizome ArtBase, our archive of more than 2000 born-digital artworks. Selected with a jury via a public open call, these artworks mark the second formal accessions since the ArtBase relaunched in April 2021, following the Executable Poetry open call in December 2021. 

Artists were invited to submit Tumblrs that were relevant to three categories:

 🎭Performance and portraiture, selected with artist Molly Soda, 

🖌3D graphics, selected with internet culture expert Ari Spool, and 

🤡Memes & Macros, selected with artist RaFia Santana.

Works were evaluated based on artistic excellence (as the jurors define it), relevance to the ArtBase collection, and adherence to the theme. Selected works were then archived using Conifer, Rhizome’s hosted service for archiving the dynamic web. (Note to other would-be Tumblr archivists: Conifer is free to use, with up to 5GB of storage offered at no cost).  

These selections represent just a few traces of the many past 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. Our hope is that these archived works will be complemented by additional writing, interviews, and other kinds of contextualization in the future.

Without further ado, the new accessions are as follows:

animated text, animatedtext, 2012—Present. 

For this Tumblr, the artist utilized the 3D graphics and animation software Xara 3D Maker to render sassy, often viral phrases and sayings into rebloggable, colorful text GIFs and graphics.

LaTurbo Avedon, new sculpt, 2012—2015. 

newsculpt is an aggregation of Avedon’s original 3D rendered objects.

Andrew Benson, Wolf + Unicorn, 2014—2018. 
Wolf + Unicorn was a project that I produced anonymously—inspired by the kind of listless and self-destructive memes and the kinds of sexual identity politics that were popular with teens on Tumblr at the time. I don't normally work in this kind of narrative or cartoon-driven way, but I was interested in how a loose story could be told, and characters/relationships/archetypes developed through a series of looping vignettes. It was a project really made to exist in its own time in the social space of Tumblr where young people were exploring and establishing new kinds of relationships online. It had a pretty short run all considered, and came late in the Tumblr life-cycle, but it remains as a strange side project that had some potential.”

Biarritzzz, 314rritzzz, 2016—Present. 

Experiments in online self-portraiture and self-representation are compiled on this Tumblr, which features custom-coded backgrounds and collaged and processed GIFs. The Tumblr was previously private, and some of the projects it includes were originally published on other accounts that were taken down due to limits on “pornographic” content. It also acts as a repository for the performance, reblogada (it’s not me, it’s the internet.), which revolved around a self-portrait that was circulated on porn and fetish Tumblrs.

Carl Burton, carlburton, 2011—Present.  

Artist Carl Burton uses their Tumblr as a portfolio site to document finished and in-progress original works, including 3D renderings, GIFs, screenshots of itch.io games, and video stills. 

Vincent Charlebois, dailywiki, 2009—2019. 
"I am an artist working with networks and nature. dailywiki was a place on tumblr where I listed links to wikipedia pages. A directory of places, ideas and artworks. An archive of distant towns, opposing worldviews and forgotten masterpieces. As you scroll through the page, you might be able to guess where I was, what I was reading, or the stories I heard. Since then, I have planted over a million trees and continue to experiment with recursive world containers."

Cole Chickering, womans-day, 2010—Present. 
womans-day is a Tumblr loosely inspired by “Woman’s Day”, a monthly print magazine that covers topics such as homemaking, nutrition, and fashion, targeted at female readers. In this project, Chickering collects commercial print images and other found/archival images (sourced from textbooks, magazines, catalogs) and aggregates them to showcase out-of-context media interpretations of late 20th century womanhood.

Christopher Clary, FkN JPGs on Tumblr, 2016—2017. 
FkN JPGs is a series where the artist becomes what he desires. Every week in 2016, Christopher Clary recreated and performed an image from his porn collection live on Cam4, an adult streaming website. Afterwards, he archived each performance to Tumblr. The blog theme overlays videos, photos, and chat to create a massive texture, an infinite scroll of becoming. Much was lost in 2018 when Tumblr banned pornography and offending posts were hidden and labeled in “violation of our Community Guidelines,” yet the algorithms didn't catch everything. Then in 2022 Tumblr changed their ban and promised a more welcoming “home for art and artists who publish mature content.” In actuality, the moderators were back at it—picking at FkN JPGs and eventually redirecting the blog to a dashboard view-only, without a trace of prior flagged content. Currently, Clary is working with Rhizome to appeal Tumblr's decision so the blog can be archived in its original form on ArtBase. Until then, experience what's left on Tumblr. In addition, the poetry collective TROLL THREAD published documentation of the deplatforming of FkN JPGs.”

Pamela Council, blaxidermy, 2010—2017.

“This Tumblr was the origin of my current artistic practice, which centers (what I now call) my Afro-Americana Camp Aesthetic, BLAXIDERMY. But 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.”

Cybertwee, cybertwee, 2015—2019

“We were specifically interested in creating a visual aesthetic to contrast the gritty dystopian aggressive depictions of the future in science fiction. We used Tumblr to moodboard and curate art, movies, anime, culture, design and fashion that we felt shared a thematic similarity that always existed, but didn’t have a name.”

Vivian Fu, vivian-fu, 2012—2020. 

This Tumblr served as a personal photo diary for photographer Vivian Fu. Over the course of eight years, Fu documented intimate moments from her life—self-portraits, moments with her friends and partner Tim, travel photos—and shared them on her public Tumblr page.

Julian Glander, glanderco, 2012—Present. 

3D artist Julian Glander uses their Tumblr as a portfolio site to share original 3D animated GIFs, graphics and videos.

Penny Goring, pgorig, 2009—Present. 

Portfolio site of artist Penny Goring which features drawings, paintings, sculpture, personal photographs, GIFs, image macros, videos, documentation of her art gallery installations, works in progress, poetry, and text posts.

Celine Lassus, Neighborly-Action, 2020. 
“Navigate the stench of white passive aggression as you sort through the different web pages of Neighborly Action—complete with Karens and their disturbing Internet searches.” 

Jack Madden, SlurpeeBlog, 2014—Present. 

This Tumblr is an ongoing visual record of slurpees and icees consumed by Jack Madden, created in 2014. All photos are time stamped and appear in many different scenarios, alongside a wide variety of objects, including a Christmas tree, two-way EMS radio, and pumpkin, to name a few.

 

Chiara Moioli, REAL_DANCING_GIRL, 2013. 

“I’ve been dancing ever since I was created back in the days. With the rise of the internet I became a vernacular symbol of freedom among the net, and a source of inspiration for countless users in the pre-history of the web. The advent of social networks brought a severe change in the aesthetic of the internet; that's why I felt the need to renew my look, giving myself a more “topical” appearance. But don't be fooled by this: my 'hula' remains the same ;-) Feel free—as you’ve always been—to make me dance among your web universe!”

Dominic Quagliozzi, Wreath OR Cockring?, 2012. 

“Blurring the line between wreath and cockring.”

Mario Santamaría, the-camera-in-the-mirror, 2014—Present. 

This Tumblr shows behind-the-scenes documentation of a camera capturing an interior space, subsequently revealing itself in a mirrored reflection in the process.The interiors typically belong to that of royal, prestigious institutions—the Hungarian Opera and the Teatro della Pergola are both pictured. In some photos, the presence of the camera is jarring and intrusive, in others, it camouflages itself into its surroundings.

Solo Jazz, solojazz, 2012—2016.
This Tumblr documents the origins of the 2012 “Solo Jazz” meme, which employs the instantly recognizable Jazz design, found on widely used wax paper Solo cups throughout the 1990s.  Early one morning in February 2012, user arjununcle logged in to the image chatroom dump.fm and posted some image "altars" incorporating the cup. These posts inspired a multi-day image editing session, where users enthusiastically remixed the Jazz design onto a wide array of everyday objects. Over the next few months, the meme spread across Tumblr, Facebook, and the broader Internet, culminating in a crowd-sourced effort in 2015 to identify the design’s previously anonymous author, Gina Ekiss. In 2016, the Dart corporation, which had acquired Solo a few years before, sent a complaint to Tumblr over this blog, claiming trademark infringement. Tumblr, which had just been acquired by Yahoo, de-listed the blog's URL in response.

Twee Whistler, twee whistler, 2016—2019. 

“I often find myself analyzing fan communities; I am fascinated by how their social hierarchy is based on knowledge rather than economic power or by how their productivity is capable of overcoming and stratifying above that of the original product. I was wondering what it would mean to place in the same economic system fan art that was, in turn, the same product (an artwork) offered by another artist. Besides questioning the meaning of authorship, quotationism, copyright, production and post-production I want to play on the limits of privacy and emotional attachment in a fan vs celebrity dimension. I have therefore developed a complex fan-fiction where I am the girlfriend of an esteemed artist, Jon Rafman, who now becomes a meme, now a “senpai” (a name often used in manga by shy girls referring to a boy, perhaps barely known, which they have fallen in love with), now a sort of contemporary art Justin Bieber.”

Nikos Voyiatzis, facebookafterfacebook, 2013. 

This Tumblr considers the role that spam plays within popular social networking sites, using a Greek and English Facebook feed to illustrate how spam transcends its 2D bounds to inhabit physical, animated noise on your screen. Voyiatzis removes all traces that this Facebook feed is still a Tumblr, and distorts and animates its “posts” to enhance the psychedelic and all-encompassing interference spam can have on one’s social media and web experience.

Madeline Zappala, gif face, 2014—2018. 
In gif face, the artist built continuous, longform compositions out of short GIFs of themselves performing actions in front of their webcam. Resembling a digital flipbook, this Tumblr was organized into a grid, and the artist notes that the intended order of certain compositions was disrupted in December of 2018, when some posts were flagged and removed.

 

SFPC_Malware_Anthology.zip

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Poster by Herdimas Anggara

On January 26, Rhizome hosted the launch event for SFPC_Malware_Anthology.zip, a collection of work created during An Artist’s History of Computer Viruses and Malware, an online class at School For Poetic Computation taught by Todd Anderson and Herdimas Anggara. The event took place as a part of Office Hours, a weekly casual program where we cycle through different areas of interest within Rhizome. Anderson hosted the event and was joined by participating artists who presented their projects in the anthology. Video documentation is available.

Download SFPC_Malware_Anthology.zip.

Congratulations! You are the 111,111th visitor to this page which means you are eligible for a unique opportunity to learn more about SFPC_Malware_Anthology.zip. This collection of boundary-pushing software art gathers projects created by participants in An Artist’s History of Computer Viruses and Malware.

In this class we looked at the history of “malicious software” from the first viruses of the 1970s, to the graphical MS-DOS trojans of the 1980s and’90s, to the experimental ransomware of today with an eye toward projects that felt more motivated by creativity than profit or vandalism. We also brought in a number of digital artworks that felt dangerous or broke outside of their expected boundaries. Our goal was to understand the unique aesthetics of malware and apply them to our own software art practices. In what ways could a computer virus be considered a work of art? How can malware interrogate our desire for absolute control over our machines? And most importantly: how can a viewer engage with such pieces safely and with informed consent?

To create this anthology, we learned a number of techniques from the playbook of malware and hacking: terminal scripting and SSH connections into remote machines, encryption and decryption (as employed by ransomware), and the creation of browser extensions as a cross-platform way to manipulate the operating system of the internet. 

SFPC_Malware_Anthology.zip contains projects from eleven participants in the class. Inside you will find a browser extension that covers unsecure webpages with Furbies, a demon that possesses a folder, a worm that eats files off of your desktop, a rare opportunity to explore the web on foot, and more. However, none of these programs will do anything unless you explicitly install them. Each project comes with a README.txt file containing detailed installation and removal instructions, and what access the program will have to the rest of your computer. Our goal is to provide a slightly riskier and more invasive art-viewing experience, but with enough information for each viewer to make an informed decision as to whether they want to participate. 

A detailed list of projects is included below:

Antonela De, spamawake, 2022. Screenshot of Gmail Inbox, 2023, Firefox 109.0.1 on MacOS 12.4, https://mail.google.com.

spamawake by Antonela De

This PHP spam server allows you to plug in an email address which will then receive a short poem in the subject lines of a flurry of emails sent over the next few seconds. Perfect for friends and enemies!

Rush Johnstone, First Person Browser, 2022. Screenshot of Google Chrome Browser Extension in Youtube, 2023, Google Chrome 109 on macOS 12.4, https://www.youtube.com.

First Person Browser by Rush Johnstone

Have you ever wanted to explore a web page on foot? First Person Browser is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to walk around the internet and click on links by shooting them with your finger gun.

Josephina Kirkland, __Political Bias__, 2022. Screenshot of Google Chrome Browser Extension, 2023, Google Chrome 109 on macOS 12.4, https://www.nationalreview.com.

__Political Bias__ by Josephina Kirkland

Designed for article-sharing extended families, this Google Chrome extension changes the text color of news outlets with a strong political bias.

Mitch Kucia, Rearview, 2022. Screenshot of Google Chrome Browser Extension, 2023, Google Chrome 109 on macOS 12.4.

Rearview by Mitch Kucia

Rearview is a Google Chrome extension that lets you explore your browsing history in new ways. See 100 websites you visited on this day last month or last year. Like an old journal, prepare to be shocked and ashamed at the way your mind actually works.

Audrey Lindemann, esoteric newtab, 2022. Screenshot of Google Chrome Browser Extension, 2023, Google Chrome 109 on macOS 12.4.

esoteric newtab by Audrey Lindemann
This chrome extension takes over the default Google search page that shows up when you open a new tab and instead shows you a number of mystical texts and images including a tarot, a poem for the day of the way, and an I Ching hexagram reading.

Mariana Marangoni, Titivillus, 2022. Screenshot in Git Bash, 2023, Windows 11. 

Titivillus by Mariana Marangoni

Titivillus, the patron demon of scribes, is a Bash script1 that will possess a sacrificial folder and rewrite its contents in demonic script.

Terkel Gjervig Nielsen, Desktop Worm, 2022. Screenshot of MacOS Desktop, 2023.

Desktop Worm by Terkel Gjervig Nielsen

In the proud tradition of ambiguously malicious desktop assistants like BonziBuddy, Desktop Worm is here to help keep your desktop tidy by crawling around and eating (deleting) any files it finds. Careful, if you don’t feed it regularly it will die!

Jessica Stringham, Unsay, 2022. Screenshot of Google Chrome Browser Extension in Gmail Inbox, 2023, Google Chrome 109 on macOS 12.4.

Unsay by Jessica Stringham

Unsay is a Google Chrome extension that works on Gmail. It takes the text you delete from emails as you’re writing them and makes those unsaid thoughts appear elsewhere in the Gmail interface.

Alejandra Trejo, Pegajosa, 2022. Screenshot of VLC media player and browser window, 2023, Google Chrome on Windows 11. https://www.gmail.com.

Pegajosa by Alejandra Trejo

This PC-only AutoHotkey malware plays on the idea of ‘“earworm” songs by having iconic audio clips play whenever you type certain words, whether in a Microsoft Word document, an email, or search engine. Try “poker,” “vip,” and “juicy.” 

Yarasita, Furbies Everywhere, 2022. Screenshot of Google Chrome Browser Extension, 2023, Google Chrome 109 on macOS 12.4, http://www.spfc.io.

Furbies Everywhere by Yararasita

Famed for their cybersecurity knowledge, these Furbies are here to protect you from unsafe browsing by taking over any webpage you visit without HTTPS in this Google Chrome Extension.

Yufeng Zhao, Malendar: The Calendar Guardian, 2022. Screenshot of Google Chrome Browser Extension, 2023, Google Chrome 109 on macOS 12.4, https://www.malendar.online.

Malendar: The Calendar Guardian by Yufeng Zhao

Malendar is a helpful web service that replaces those sketchy video call links in Google Calendar with secure redirect links that safely bring your attendees to the meeting, after they’ve signed up for Malendar of course.

 ______________

1 A Bash Script is a text file that contains commands to be used in the command line. It is often used by System Administrators and Linux users. 

We have a new website

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Today, we are proud to unveil the new rhizome.org. 

Designed by Laura Coombs and Mindy Seu, and developed by Mark Beasley, our new home on the web serves as an interface to Rhizome’s many activities, past and present, and debuts a new identity for the organization. Where our 2015 website heavily emphasized Rhizome as a curated online publication, the new site acts as a flexible navigation tool for a wide range of activities, not only articles. These are expressed in our nav bar, which describes our activities and offerings:

Rhizome is the home of born-digital art and culture since 1996. Learn about us and our #preservation, #commissions, and #7x7 programs. Explore #artworks, #publishing, community, and events, online and IRL.

Mindy and Laura drew considerable inspiration from Rhizome’s history. One key reference was a 2001 logo designed by Markus Weisbeck and Frank Hauschild of Surface.de and introduced by Rhizome in 2001. 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. 

The new rhizome.org elevates tags—previously appended at the end of Rhizome articles, and underutilized across the site—as a central design feature and organizing principle. The design team did a deep dive into the history of tagging, considering their uses on websites such as del.icio.us, and considering longstanding questions about the language we use to talk about born-digital art. The goal was to use tags to create connections among new and old content, encouraging both rapid searching and casual wandering. With this new focus on tags, we spent time cleaning up, merging, and fixing typos in tags, but tagging is a process – we plan to continue using tags to offer new journeys through our archives in the future.

The redesign also considers Rhizome’s history as an online community, and gives new focus to the ongoing activity at rhizome.org/community. For years, as social media empires have risen and fallen, Rhizome’s users have continued to visit this board to share and find out about jobs, events, and opportunities in the field of born-digital art. In this revamped section of the site, we’re testing out a calendar function, which we hope will only make this a more valuable resource. 

“This new site offers a powerful foundation for our next chapter,” Co-Executive Director Makayla Bailey observes. “When Michael Connor and I began our tenure last fall as joint leadership team, we had a goal of making Rhizome more legible. We wanted to find ways to tell the story of our deep connection to digital culture, while looking ahead to continue supporting new kinds of artistic practice and experimentation. Our new site and logo allows us to do just that.” 

Laura and Mindy are both longtime collaborators of Rhizome. Laura is the Senior Designer at the New Museum and teaches Graphic Design at Princeton University. She has led on branding and design for many Rhizome events in her role at our affiliate. Mindy is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art. We’ve been thrilled to support Mindy’s Cyberfeminism Index by presenting it as part of our First Look exhibition series, as well as hosting a recent book launch.

What you see today is just the beginning. And with that in mind, if you’d like to support Rhizome as it embarks on filling this new site with art and ideas, while caring for a rich history of art and ideas, please make a contribution today. 

This website redesign was made possible with funds from Rafaël Rozendaal's 2021 Endless Nameless gift.

Apply to NEW INC's Year 10 Open Call!

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NEW INC, the New Museum's incubator for people working at the intersection of art, design, and technology, has announced its Year 10 Open Call, accepting applications through March 10, 2023. 

Rhizome is pleased to partner with NEW INC on the Art & Code Track, which supports creative practitioners redefining cultural and digital landscapes through artist-led research and projects. Celine Wong Katzman, Curator at Rhizome, will act as mentor for the 2023-2024 Art & Code cohort. 

To learn more about Art & Code, meet our Year 9 cohort, and check out Year 8’s exhibition at Public Works Administration which included projects such as a haunted kiddie ride video installation, poetic experiments with Zoom, a hand-drawn map of the internet, and more.

The application is available via Submittable, and there will be a virtual conversation series with alumni and members hosted on Instagram Live, beginning this Friday at 12pm ET, as well as a virtual open house on February 23, 6pm ET. Who Should Apply: We seek artists, creative technologists, game designers, digital preservation researchers, interaction designers, sound artists and musicians, and others making and researching born-digital art to apply to be part of this track. Members on this track work in a variety of media, with a special emphasis on artistic practice. Track members in this cohort are working in a variety of media, with a special emphasis on artistic practice. 

NEW INC is offering memberships of $150/month, with a subsidized rate of $60/month to Black, Indigenous, and people of color, queer, trans, nonbinary, and people with disabilities.


Access Quality Metrics for Net Art

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Researcher Dr. Xiao Ma (Maximal Margin), Rhizome Preservation Director Dragan Espenschied, and former Rhizome Software Curator Lyndsey Jane Moulds contributed a short paper on computing access quality values for works of net art in archives for the iPres2022 conference on digital preservation in Glasgow.

The access quality value for a work of art can be expressed as a star rating or traffic light, indicating if users can expect a fully working, incomplete, or dysfunctional copy of that artwork, helping them choose which works to access and managing their expectations. The paper is now publicly available, and Rhizome is currently developing an access quality feature to be implemented in ArtBase, our archive of more than 2000 born-digital artworks dating back to the 1980s.

Read Access Quality Metrics for Net Art (PDF), or watch a video recording of the remote presentation.

The access quality indicator for ArtBase was originally proposed by former Rhizome Director Heather Corcoran, and later expanded on with research and design drafts by Dr. Lozana Rossenova.

 

Puzzle on video.rhizome.org

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On February 2, artist Ryan Kuo and programmer Tommy Martinez joined Celine Wong Katzman, Curator at Rhizome, to discuss Kuo’s browser-based work, Puzzle. Documentation from the Discord event is now available.

Puzzle is commissioned by M+
Artist: Ryan Kuo
Programming: Tommy Martinez
Curators: Kerry Doran and Kate Gu.
Translation: Yuling Zhong

Open Call: Rhizome Microgrants 2023

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At long last the Rhizome Microgrants are back! Since 2014, the Rhizome Microgrant Program has awarded small grants ($500 - $1500) for the creation of new artworks, online exhibitions, and other web-based projects. The goal of this program is to empower anyone who has an idea for a creative project that responds to network culture and digital technologies to make it. The application is short, and proposed projects should be scoped according to the support provided by a “micro” grant. Select projects may receive additional support and/or have the opportunity to be included in the Rhizome ArtBase.

This year, we invite submissions in the following categories: articles about works in the Rhizome ArtBase and browser-based projects. The submissions will be juried by Rhizome staff. Please see below for more information and examples.

If you aren’t sure if your project qualifies, please apply. We are considering these categories expansively and we would rather hear from you than not! We encourage proposals from people who are historically underrepresented in art and technology spaces. We welcome applications from people based in all locations; at least four microgrants will be awarded to New York City-based applicants. Feel free to email info@rhizome.org with any questions.

The deadline to apply is 11:59pm ET, April 10, 2023. Responses will be sent out in mid May.

Articles about works in the Rhizome ArtBase

We are accepting pitches for 1000-1500 word articles that offer new research and perspective on works in ArtBase. These articles may discuss a single artwork, several artworks, a particular medium, or theme. 

Examples:

“What Up Internet” by Alexander Iadarola

Twine Could Be Your Life by Grace Converse

Christmas as a Service by Lyndsey Jane Moulds 

Browser-based projects

We are accepting proposals for browser-based projects. We are defining this category broadly: any creative project that happens in a web browser qualifies! If you want to provide more context to explain, please use the additional info field in the application.

Previous Rhizome Microgrant awardees have included the following browser-based projects, some of which received additional support:

Cassie McQuarter, Black Room, 2018. Screenshot, 2023, Firefox 110.0 on Mac OS 12.5, http://hgjfkdhskjdgturrgehdsbjkfhdsjkahturaytklfdjjfjfff.net/banshee.html.

Black Room by Cassie McQuarter, a browser-based game that weaves a dreamlike personal narrative populated by iconic female characters from video game history.

Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, The Good Life (Enron Simulator), 2017. Screenshot, 2023, Firefox 110.0 on Mac OS 12.5, https://enron.email/.

The Good Life (Enron Simulator) by Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain, an artwork that recreates the experience of receiving all 500,000 emails from the Enron email archive via a chronological timescale of the viewer's choosing.

Rafia Santana, RAFiA’s WORLD, 2015. Screenshot, 2023, Firefox 110.0 on Mac OS 12.5, https://rafiasworld.com/.

RAFiA's WORLD by Rafia Santana, an interactive archive of digitized childhood drawings, journal entries, and classwork assignments made by the artist between 1992 and the early 2000s.

The Rhizome Commissions Program is supported by Jerome Foundation, American Chai Trust, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York legislature.

Artist Profile: Rimbawan Gerilya

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

Herdimas Anggara: I first saw your work at the 2021 CTM Festival in Berlin which featured your collaborative video mixtape with electronic music act Gabber Modus Operandi and dancer Siko Setyanto entitled MBELEDOSSS!. What draws me into the video is your use of cultural signifiers that we normally see in Indonesia: crowded flea markets (which remind me of Pasar Senen), buskers with their huge boombox speakers, clothes draped on exposed drying racks. You mention the term “Third World Futurism” in this interview with Clara Peh; can you elaborate on that term in relation to MBELEDOSSS!?

Rimbawan Gerilya: I’ve been having second thoughts about the term “Third World Futurism” because the West coined the term third world to describe countries like Indonesia which face the daily reality of colonization. In my work, I try to showcase or highlight the struggles related to colonization, while also acknowledging the nuanced, resilient, and imperfect behavior of our own people.

In MBELEDOSSS! Gabber Modus Operandi is having a party on a boat similar to the type that transports discarded garments from countries like the U.S. to countries like Indonesia where this first world trash is considered a commodity. Sometimes these garments are intended for disaster relief use, but they never make it to their destination because some locals intercept the shipment and sell the clothes. This black market exists because new clothing is prohibitively expensive. So, that’s what I mean by criticizing ourselves and also showing our resilience as Indonesian working class people.

Still, Rimbawan Gerilya, Gabber Modus Operandi and Siko Setyanto, MBELEDOSSS! (2020). 3D animated video mixtape, 45 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

HA: I don’t know if you’re familiar with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001); it’s the first CGI feature film that tries to emulate photorealism. I remember there was a lot of backlash from critics when it was first released due to how robotic and cold the characters looked. They also felt that its near perfect human simulation had an eerie presence to it. In contrast, your work embraces and exaggerates the imperfection of animation.

RG: It’s because I don’t want to conform to industry standards. When you see CGI in cinema from major studios, that type of production quality is unattainable for one person or small group from the third world. If we aspire to achieve that type of production we are often met with disappointment. I guess my philosophy is: do whatever is achievable.

Most of my works are made with simple animation. Even if there’s a dance movement, it’s just three or four looped keyframes, kind of like an 1980s anime or older cartoon where only the mouth is animated when the character is talking. So, I thought: if they can convey the same level of storytelling without sophisticated animations, then it’s possible for me too. But because I did it, it gets made, then at the very least, there’s something to talk about. The product exists even if it’s low quality.

Still, Rimbawan Gerilya, Loud and Clear (2021). 3D animated video, 19 seconds. Courtesy of the artist.

Still, Rimbawan Gerilya, Sacred Border (Batas Suci)(2021). 3D animated video, 36 seconds. Courtesy of the artist. 

HA: In your works Loud and Clear and Sacred Border (Batas Suci), you 3D render typical sights near urban mosques, and there’s this intentional tackiness and subtle culturally-specific (to Jakartans) humor related to the low production quality and your portrayal of the seemingly mundane phenomena for people who live in the region. Growing up in a Muslim household in Indonesia, all these depictions feel immediate: the abundance of mosques’ loudspeakers, people leaving their sandals in the batas suci.

RG: Exactly that. There’s some slight humor imbued in it, but for example, in MBELEDOSS!, the characters are not smiling because they are a class with limited options. The entertainment they experience is imposed by others with more power, represented in MBELEDOSS! by Siko the Angel and Ican the Prophet. I don't know if the people portrayed actually derive joy from dancing, they just do it to conform, as it might be their only source of safety.

Another local reference that recurs in my work is the bumper sticker proverb, encountered frequently in angkot (shared taxis/minibuses). For example, “Do'a Ibu” (Mother's Prayer) is very popular and most people don't really pay attention to it. I like to think it might reveal the unexpected vulnerability of the commonly tough minibus driver who might actually wish for his mother's blessings. I hope to elevate the status of this kitschy object alongside the people who put these stickers up.

I’ve titled a number of my works after these bumper sticker proverbs, which are personally meaningful. Mother's Prayer refers to the meaning I derive from losing my mother at the start of the pandemic; Sacred Border refers to how my atheism/agnosticism can empathize with the religious culture/beliefs of my loved ones; Fortune's Door refers to my struggle to find income with digital means after losing my job as a VJ during the pandemic.

Excerpt, Rimbawan Gerilya, Mother’s Prayer (Do’a Ibu) (2021). 3D animated video, 45 seconds. Courtesy of the artist.

 

HA: I can’t help but make connections between your works and the paintings of Indonesian artist, Zico Albaiquni. His use of fluorescent color stems from his observation of vibrant colors that are prevalent in urban slums as opposed to white, which is more associated with affluent or wealthy neighborhoods. In an interview, he stated that the reason he used neon palettes is so the viewers can decolonize our sense of taste. I was also recently reading about these anthropological findings from this place called Kampung Pelangi (Rainbow Village) in Malang, where local college students were trying to revitalize the area by painting the houses with bright colors (there’s a whole conversation about saviorism that we can have another time). Because vibrant colors are imbued with optimism, there’s this hopeful, speculative idea that one might escape poverty if they're surrounded by colors like shocking pink or gold.

RG: I think I get what Zico meant by decolonizing our sense of taste. But I don’t know, in Indonesian tradition, it’s always like red or gold or mixed, and I don’t think these colors are unique to us. I think the reason why I’m drawn to these bold colors is simply because I used to be a Visual Jockey (VJ). When I first started VJing in 2008, we only had low brightness projectors. Muted colors wouldn’t translate well on the projection surface, so bold colors were the only option, maximum RGB. I feel like that represents what I do with the technical limitations that I am challenged with. There are some indirect correlations with what Zico meant, but we approach it differently. It converges somewhere, but I can’t really pinpoint it.

Also, If you pay attention to suburban well-off areas, most of the colors are muted, but if you go to the lower income area, Pantura, the residents tend to choose more vibrant, pronounced colors. I think it’s because of frugality. Why choose muted colors when you can buy something vibrant for the same price?

One of the mosques that’s near my house, maybe they got some funding or something, decided to paint the paving blocks with yellow, green, blue, and red. The minaret (the place where they put the loudspeaker) now even has disco lights on it for some reason. It’s so antithetical to the idea of a mosque itself. If you see it at night, it glows in different colors. The mosque is no longer sacred because of these affinities. It’s so weird, but that’s the uniqueness of the third world. 

Still, Rimbawan Gerilya, Lunar Wedding (Nikah di Bulan) (2022). 3D animated video, 57 seconds. Courtesy of the artist. 

 

HA: Can you talk about your 3D production process? In my own artistic practice, I’ve always been afraid to do 3D production due to how long the files take to render, especially when I was still using my seven-year-old Windows laptop. What sort of workarounds do you use?

RG: I choose real-time rendering because I don’t have to wait for the result for too long and therefore have more time to polish the ideas. I also take advantage of the widespread modding culture in Southeast Asia. Indonesia has a flourishing Grand Theft Auto (GTA) free modding community and we also have a Euro Trucks Simulator community. GTA is the more prominent one because it can be played on mobile and there’s this idea of trying to recreate our reality/our world into the game. So, sometimes you can see the main character is doing salat (the ritual prayer of Muslims) in the musalla (praying space) near the Pertamina gas station.

So one way that I streamline my workflow is trying not to create from scratch. If I need a bicycle, I find it somewhere that has plenty of free 3D assets on the web and use it as the base. There’s a white limousine in MBELEDOSS! that I created by stretching a sedan model I found, which produced a much funnier result than if I had tried to create a new car, and refers to the regional modding aesthetic.

Still, Rimbawan Gerilya, Gabber Modus Operandi and Siko Setyanto, MBELEDOSSS! (2020). 3D animated video mixtape, 45 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

 

HA: Last question, where does the stage name “Rimbawan Gerilya” come from?

RG: Rimbawan Gerilya is a rough Indonesian translation of "Guerilla Junglist." Junglist is a term for people who are into Jungle Drum and Bass music. I started showcasing my personal work to the public through VJing for underground Drum and Bass gigs without pay. The guerilla part comes from that experience: underground, idealistic, and no pay. I like the fast, syncopated beats of Jungle Drum and Bass because it's a multi-cultural product that fits the working class urban life.

Age: I’m pretty old, 41.

Location: Jakarta. I live in Kayu Putih, Pulo Gadung. When people hear Kayu Putih, they think it’s the well-off area, but my home is in between the well-off and the poorer areas. People often refer to the area as Kampung Ambon, because there used to be a lot of Ambonese people here, but it’s no longer called that (since the Ambonese population has been moved to Cengkareng). So, yeah, I live in the eastern part of Jakarta, but not too far east.

 How/when did you begin working creatively with technology?

I started VJing in 2008. I think I was part of the people who adopted VJing early. My friend, Mehdi, introduced me to this book “VJ: Audio-Visual Art and VJ Culture” by D-Fuse. I started VJing in Drum and Bass gigs because the promoters were friends with us. They sometimes allowed us to VJ (without pay), but they provided the venue, the hardware, and the projectors for us, so we could experiment there.

What did you study at school or elsewhere?

Visual communication design at Trisakti University.

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

I was a professional VJ. I did major events, like the Jakarta Warehouse Projects and plenty of international gigs. But mostly not under my name—I was part of a team led by Isha Hening.

What does your desktop or workspace look like?

Photograph of Rimbawan Gerilya’s workstation, 2022, Courtesy of the artist.

 

We're getting Teiger Funding!

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We are thrilled to announce that Rhizome has received a Teiger Foundation grant! Rhizome is one of 39 curators and curatorial teams throughout the United States to receive a grant as part of the Foundation’s inaugural Call for Proposals. Rhizome plans to use these funds to continue growing the Rhizome ArtBase—our archive of over 2000 born-digital artworks, relaunch our Seven on Seven program, which pairs artists with technologists for short-term collaborations, continue to disperse grants to emerging artists through our Microgrants initiative, and present ArtBase Anthologies, a new online exhibition series modeled after Net Art Anthology.

Rhizome’s curatorial program supports the past, present, and future of born-digital art. Founded by artist Mark Tribe in 1996 as a listserv including some of the first artists to work online, Rhizome has played an integral role in the history of art and technology. Since 2003, Rhizome has been a partner of the New Museum in New York City, where it remains an independent organization. 

ArtBase is Rhizome’s archive of more than 2000 born-digital works. ArtBase Anthologies will be an ongoing series of curated presentations of archived born-digital works from the1980s to today. Works will be archived, restored and preserved as part of ArtBase, and re-performed and shared online with curatorial context, including social media packages, curatorial texts, artist interviews, and archival materials, all designed to bring the stories of the people and communities behind these works to life. The initiative aims to support an equitable historical accounting in the field of digital art. 

One important work that will be presented under this initiative is CyberPowWow, an Indigenous-determined online biennial that was first launched in 1997 by the Nation to Nation collective—Skawennati, Ryan Rice, and Eric Robertson. Last December, Rhizome presented the first U.S. museum presentation of CyberPowWow in an event at the New Museum, which featured computer terminals where participants could engage with CyberPowWow in a legacy computer environment, and a panel discussion with artist and organizer Skawennati, historian Mikhel Proulx, and Rhizome Preservation Director Dragan Espenschied

The series will also include artworks such as American Artist’s Sandy Speaks, an AI chat platform that “speaks” as Sandra Bland. 

On October 28, 2023, Rhizome will also relaunch its Seven on Seven (7x7) initiative, which pairs artists with technologists for short-term collaborations and asks them to “make something new,” presenting the results at a public conference at the New Museum in New York. The conference, which has previously featured artists such as Jayson Musson, Mendi + Keith Obadike, and DIS, will be co-curated and produced by Xinran Yuan.

Finally, each year, Rhizome‘s Microgrants will support at least ten artists in the creation of new works for online presentation, prioritizing participation by early career artists and artists from underrepresented communities. 

The new grantmaking program addresses gaps in funding for contemporary art curators with awards addressing the full sweep of curatorial activities, including community integration of traveling exhibitions, climate-conscious curatorial practices, multi-year programming, research and the development of major exhibitions, coalition-building, and more. 

In addition, Rhizome has been invited to take part in the Foundation’s Climate Action Pilot, which will help us develop and implement a unique climate plan for our web and digital preservation services. Rhizome is among the seven grantees additionally selected to take part in the Climate Action Pilot. 

Committed to experimentation, community building, and positive structural change within the field of contemporary art, the Foundation awarded a total of $3.3 million through its inaugural Call for Proposals. The full list of grantees can be found at teigerfoundation.org.

Makayla Bailey is the Co-Executive Director of Rhizome at the New Museum. Bailey has held curatorial positions at MoMA and The Studio Museum in Harlem, where she co-organized the institution's first digital exhibition, titled “Hearts in Isolation.” Bailey’s work has been featured in Artforum, ArtNews, Frieze, Harper’s Bazaar, Hyperallergic, PIN-UP, Essence, and i-D Magazine. Her current research spans environment, ethical stewardship of emerging technologies, and the creation of an equitable historical accounting of born-digital art.

Michael Connor is Co-Executive Director of Rhizome where he oversaw the Net Art Anthology initiative, an effort to retell the history of net art through 100 works, presented as an online exhibition, gallery exhibition, and book. He is also curatorial advisor for Kadist, a non-profit contemporary art organization, and ArtBlocks, an NFT platform. His first online curatorial project took place in 2003 at FACT, Liverpool, where he organized an edition of the traveling exhibition Kingdom of Piracy with Shu Lea Cheang, Yukiko Shikata, and Armin Medosch. Connor is currently editing a book by Gene Youngblood about the work of Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz.

Celine Wong Katzman is Curator at Rhizome where she organizes exhibitions, artistic commissions, ArtBase accessions, publishing, and live programs. Her recent projects include Rhizome Presents: CyberPowWow (2022), The Longest Whistlegraph Ever (so far) (2022), Wet Networks (2021-22), and Shirley Sound (2021). Since 2021, Celine has been Mentor-in-Residence for the Art & Code residency track at the New Museum's incubator, NEW INC. She also serves as one of seven Co-Directors at the School for Poetic Computation, a cooperatively organized, experimental school exploring code, design, hardware, and theory through the lenses of artistic intervention and equity.

Artist Profile: American Artist

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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?

American Artist, Master-Slave Flip-Flop, 2021. Neon. Courtesy of Labor, Mexico City.

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.

American Artist, Mother of All Demos II, 2021. Dirt, monochrome CRT monitor, computer parts, Linux operating system, wood, asphalt. Courtesy of Labor, Mexico City.

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.” 

American Artist, Looted, 2020. Online project. Courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art.

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!)

Screenshot of American Artist’s desktop, 2023. Courtesy of the artist. 

 

In between performance and documentation

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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. 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 Objects 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.

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. 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. 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.

Illustration created by the author in 2018.

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. 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. 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. 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.

A setup in the New Museum's ground floor gallery with a small computer running an emulator with Entrop8Zuper!'s work skinonskinonskin connected to a period adeqaute CRT screen.

Entropy8Zuper!, skinonskinonskin, 1999. Exhibition view: The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics, 2019 at New Museum, New York. Photo: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio.

Entropy8Zuper!, ‘freezing’ from skinonskinonskin, 1999. Screenshot, 2017, Netscape Communicator 4.79 on Windows 98.

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, 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.

An exhibition audience is interacting with four installations of the artwork onewordmovie, four running movies are pojected on the gallery wall.

Beat Brogle & Philippe Zimmermann, onewordmovie, 2003–2018. Installation view: JIFF Festival, Jeonjou, Korea, 2004.

Beat Brogle & Philippe Zimmermann, onewordmovie, 2003–2018. Screenshot, 2021, Firefox 90 on Linux.

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.

An OKI dot matrix printer placed on a table is printing news items on continuous paper.

Hans Haacke, News, 1969/2008/2019. Exhibition view: Hans Haacke: All Connected, 2019, New Museum, New York. © Hans Haacke/Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS), London. Photo: Dario Lasagni

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.

Olia Lialina, Hosted, 2020 – ongoing. Exhibition view: Best Effort Network, 2020, arebyte gallery, London.

Screenshot of a browser showing 70 open tabs with images of the artist swimming.

Olia Lialina, Hosted, 2020 – ongoing. Screenshot, 2020, Firefox 74, Linux.

Screenshot of a database listing image URLs, hosting platforms, and presentation size

Olia Lialina, Hosted, 2020 – ongoing. Internal resource management via selfhosted SeaTable. Screenshot, 2021. Courtesy the artist.

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, 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’, 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. 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). 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. 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.


Aura of an Era

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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.  

Dominic Quagliozzi, Wreath OR Cockring?, 2012. Screenshot, 2023, Firefox 108.0.1 on MacOS 12.4, https://wreathorcockring.tumblr.com.

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.

Pamela Council, blaxidermy, 2010. Screenshot, 2023, Firefox 108.0.1 on MacOS 12.4, https://blaxidermy.tumblr.com.

 

“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.

cybertwee, cybertwee, 2015. Screenshot, 2023, Firefox 108.0.1 on MacOS 12.4, https://cybertwee.tumblr.com/.

 

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.

biarritzzz, 314rritzzz, 2016. Screenshot, 2023, Firefox 108.0.1 on MacOS 12.4, https://314rritzzz.tumblr.com.

 

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.

Vivian Fu, vivian fu, 2012. Screenshot, 2023, Brave 1.46.144 on MacOS 12.4, https://vivian-fu.tumblr.com.

 

Madeline Zappala, giffaces, 2014. Screen Recording, 2023, Firefox 108.0.1 on MacOS 12.4, https://giffaces.tumblr.com.

 

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.

Christopher Clary, fknjpgs, 2016. Screenshot, 2023, Firefox 108.0.1 on MacOS 12.4, https://fknjpgs.tumblr.com/tagged/episode36.

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?

Rhizome pivots to video: Welcome to video.rhizome.org

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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 Museum Director Lisa Phillips and Rhizome founder Mark Tribe to be Recognized at Rhizome’s Anniversary Benefit this June 28, along with artist honorees Rafaël Rozendaal, Lillian Schwartz, and Itzel Yard

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(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 

Artist Profile: Tomi Faison

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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.

Still, Tomi Faison, Phase Change: Act III (2019). Film. Courtesy of the artist. 

 

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. 

Installation view, “Do Not Research” at lower_cavity, Holyoke, Massachusetts, 2022. Courtesy of Joshua Citarella.

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. 

Still, Tomi Faison, First As Tragedy, Then As LARP (2022). Film. Courtesy of the artist. 

 

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. 

Installation view, “The Manic American Humanist Show” at Public Works Administration, New York City, 2023. Pictured: Tomi Faison, Lack Loop (2021), seven channel video.

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.

Pictured: Tomi Faison, Carousel #1 (2023), 35mm slide projection. Installation view, Tomi Faison: “First as Tragedy, Then As LARP” at Smack Mellon, New York City, 2023. Courtesy of E Frossard.

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.

Still, Tomi Faison, Lack Loop, (2023). Courtesy of the Artist. 

 

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.

Still, Tomi Faison and Miles Engel-Hawbecker, Transformers Terminal, (2023). Feature length film, Courtesy of Nick Gorey.

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!)

“Because I live in Baltimore, I'm fortunate to have both a studio, where I mostly stage work or build out installs, and an office at home for editing and “researching.” Pictured is the workspace in my Charles Village apartment featuring a print by Holly Oliver, a sticker from the gallery Blade Study, and a side table where I can do my makeup while waiting for renders.”

Postcards from StarryNight

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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. 

celebration.obj

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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!! 

AR trophy for Ix Shells at the Rhizome Benefit, June 28 2023. Photo: Alexey Kim. 

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:

Rafaël Rozendaal and Ix Shells pose with their AR trophies at the Rhizome Benefit, June 28 2023. Photo: Alexey Kim. 

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.

SEED: Stories of Rhizome and Generative Art

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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. 

Screenshot of rows of white text one a grey background.

Screenshot of a post by Mark Tribe in 1996 on Rhizome’s email list. Courtesy of Rhizome.

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. 

White, yellow, orange, and red dotted lines swirling on a dark grey background.

Still, Marius Watz, System_C, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

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?

Rhizome’s 2001 logo, designed by Markus Weisbeck and Frank Hauschild of Surface.de. Courtesy of Rhizome.

Rhizome’s 2023 logo, designed by Mindy Seu and Laura Coombs. Courtesy of Rhizome.
Change

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

Screenshot of Rhizome.org spash page artwork by Entropy8Zuper! duo, Aureia Harvery & Michaël Samyn. Image courtesy of Rhizome.

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.

Multiple screens mounted on white museum walls showing various digital artworks.

Installation view, “ArtBase 101” at New Museum, 2005. Foreground, MTAA (M. River & T. Whid), 1 year performance video (aka samHsiehUpdate), 2004, website with Flash.

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).

Screenshot of brower window displaying website with black background and white text.

Amy Alexander, TheBot, 2000. Courtesy of the Artist.

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.

Screenshot of brower window displaying website with white background and black text and cell grid.

John F. Simon, Every Icon, 1997. Courtesy of the Artist.

Soft greyscale geometry moving across a white background.

Casey Reas, Software Structures, 2004.

5. The Demoscene 

Silhoette of human figure dancing against multicolor background.

Spaceballs, State of the Art, December 29, 1992. Demo for Amiga.

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 

Photograph of notes writtten with black ink on a white paper notebook.

Notes in Casey Reas’s sketchbook in 2001 from the first conversation about the project that would become 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

Distorted human face in purple gradients on black background.

Rosa Menkman, The Collapse of PAL, 2010.  

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.

Blue sphere gradient on black background.

Image: Kevin McCoy, Quantum, 2014.

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.

Gridded notebook with filled in cells of letters and title "MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY COMPUTING MACHINE".

The list of adjectives in Strachey's love letter generator. Photograph: Jacob Gaboury.

Photograph of printed love letter.

Poem generated using Strachey’s love letter generator. Photograph: Jacob Gaboury.

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.

Photograph of Lilliam Schwartz using a computer.

Image from the Collections of The Henry Ford. Gift of the Lillian F. Schwartz & Laurens R. Schwartz Collection

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.

Screenshot of multicolor gradient covering time.com homepage.

Rafaël Rozendaal, Into Time.com, 2010.

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

Screenshot of brower window displaying website with black and white points glowing like starts connected by lines to produce "constellations."

Screenshot from Alex Galloway, Mark Tribe, and Martin Wattenberg, StarryNight, 1999. Courtesy of Rhizome.

 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.


Announcing the 2023 Microgrant Awardees!

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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. 

Skawennati Joins the Rhizome Board

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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

Cinema of Transmission

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Rhizome recently organized a screening series as a part of the 2023 FWB Festival, an event described by the festival's manifesto as "a destination gathering of new-internet communities, and a temporary network city for creating culture and exploring new ideas." The festival featured friends of the Rhizome community, including Mindy Seu and Joshua Citarella, as well as an incredible array of talented musicians (Caroline Polachek, The Dare, and Yves Tumor to name a few). For Rhizome's contribution, we sought to explore artists' varying relationships to an evolving internet.

The name of this screening series, "Cinema of Transmission," references the NYC-based undeground film movement of the 1980s, "Cinema of Transgression". A manifesto regarding the movement, written by Nick Zedd directs us to "pass beyond and go over boundaries of millimeters, screens and projectors" and this collection of works does just that. 

"Cinema of Transmission" was initially used for a rhizome event in 2022.

The past and futures of transmission technologies will always reflect our humanity back at us. From playful, gesture-based performances of the computer mouse to the pseudo-anonymous assemblage of collective cognitive labor, each screening is a conversation between our material realities and the internet.

Below, you'll find links to videos we gathered for this screening series!


Part 1 : Performing Internet 
To stare into a webcam and demand it stare back at you, the choreographer of pointed, white cursors that dance across the browser. What makes typography scream "read me now !?" What rests between hardware, software, artist, mind, and body? "Performing Internet" is a showcase of work that demonstrates ways in which we’ve performed through, on, and around the browser.

Part 1 : Performing Internet

Welcome to My Homeypage - Paper Rad, 2002

This work was to be found on the "Pick a Winner" DVD, an exciting compilation of electronic noise music and experimental animation released by Load Records in 2004.

Screenshot from "Welcome to My Homepage" on Youtube

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.

Screenshot from "Hello Ana Voog" on Youtube

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.

Screenshot from "Jawpan"

Screenshot from "Jawpan"

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.

Screenshot from "SAMSUNG"

Smashmouth Recreated From Windows XP Sounds - James Nielssen, 2017

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

Screenshot from "Smashmouth Recreated from Windows XP Sounds" on Youtube

 - Sebastian Schmieg, 2014

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

Screenshot 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."

Screenshot from video documentation of 'DESCENT'

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 

Screenshot from "Money2" on Vimeo

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.

Screenshot taken by Artist

Read Timofeev's Artist Profile

Part 2: Living Internet
Proliferation of ourselves into a mess of content. Yet - there are stories to be told if you know where to look. The circulation of a commentary that’s been felt a million times, reflected in metrics, likes, and reposts. What are the stories to be told of the internet? What shouldn't have to be loud? A moment of silence.

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.

Screenshot from "Deep Down Tidal"

Screenshot from "Deep Down Tidal"

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.

Screenshot from "Computers are Fun" Taken from Artists' website

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

Screenshot from "Rejected or Unused Clips in Order of Importance" on Vimeo

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.

Screenshot from 'Eulogy for a Black Mass' from 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

Screenshot from "Breaking Bad: The BitTorrent Edition"

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.

Screenshot from "User Unfriendly Interface"

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

Sculpture from Artist Website

Watch the trailer

Part 3: Being Internet
What are the things we must do online now to be heard? To listen is to define together what must be told. Shared aesthetic codes wrap around ourselves inside the safety of gated communities—yet onlookers recontextualize our words. A leak of the self. Content. Your words as building blocks for the meta commentary they substack about. Part 3 is an attempt to ride the wave.

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." 

Screenshot from "Anti Social Media" on Youtube

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. 

Screenshot from Coincellpro7 post

Screenshot from Coincellpro7 post

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.

Image from 'Bed PC 2 (2022)', Installation view at Scherben Gallery by Filip Kostic

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."

Screenshot from "Adversalife" on Youtube

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“.

Image from artist website

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."

Screenshot from "Party on the CAPS"

Watch the trailer.

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

Meet NEW INC's 2023-24 Art & Code Track Members

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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.

Works from the 2022-23 Art & Code cohort

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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

Herdimas Anggara, RASUK, 2023. Dunkunsthalle’s tiles, GOOgle DOcs, GOOgle Spreadsheet, GOOgle Slides, GOOgle ChrOme, YOuTube, macOS fOlders, macOS files, macOS Preview. Photo: Isaiah Winters.

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

xtine burrough, Paying it Forward, 2023. Video, parchment paper, colored pencil, transfer prints on gessoed hardboard. Photo: Isaiah Winters.

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

Jaehoon Choi, 4:00 - 12:00, 2023. Video, desk, piezo microphone, Max 8, mechanical watch, watch maintenance tools. Photo: Isaiah Winters.

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

Jackie Liu, Chao Bing: A Read-Only Memory Experience, 2023. Web-based game (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, p5.js), Raspberry Pi, monitor, keyboard, mouse, bedroom furniture and objects. Photo: Isaiah Winters.

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

80mm ∞, thermal receipt print

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

Chelsea Thompto, Fog Lights, 2023. 3” x 4” x 1.5” (3 objects) Raspberry Pi computers, LCD screens, code (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), glass panels, and 3D printed cases. Photo: Isaiah Winters.

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)

Roopa Vasudevan, Intrusive Order (v1), 2023. Single-channel video. Photo: Isaiah Winters.  

 

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

Or Zublasky, Merge Conflicts, 2022. Four channel video and digital interface. Photo: Isaiah Winters. 

Time Travels: Building a State in the Middle East, 2022. Israeli high school history textbooks.

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.

Rhizome Discord - "Season 2" Update

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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!

Image courtesy of Bri Griffin, Rhizome Community Designer. 

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

2023 Microgrants Community Program #1 - Recap

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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. 


Artist Profile: Rosalie Yu

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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.

Rosalie Yu, Candy Glazed Eyes of Haunted Machines, 2021. Photography, augmented sculpture. Courtesy of the Artist.

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.

Rosalie Yu, Knowing Together, 2019. Acrylic resin, LED panel, plexiglass, inkjet on paper. Photo Courtesy of Roy Rochlin.

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. 

Rosalie Yu, Knowing Together, 2019. Acrylic resin, LED panel, plexiglass, inkjet on paper. Photo Courtesy of Roy Rochlin.

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.

Rosalie Yu, Candy Glazed Eyes of Haunted Machines, 2022. Courtesy of the Artist.

 

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?

Rosalie Yu, Untitled, 2023. Projection, air dry clay, durable resin, disco ball, LED, spray paint, wax, plastic, wood panel, light bulb. Courtesy of the Artist.

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!)

Photo of Rosalie Yu’s workspace, 2022. Courtesy of the Artist. 

Documentation from Neural Net Aesthetics is online

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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 Announce Participants for 7x7 2024 Presented by Hyundai Motor

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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.

Limited quantity reduced price ticket, including post-conference reception. Full price $225 when Early Bird sells out.

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.

Presenting Partner
Research Partner
Project Partner

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.

GIFs are a flat circle

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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 January 27, 2024

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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

 

Dr. Stephon Alexander

Quantum physicist

Reggie Watts

Comedian, Artist, and Musician
  • 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. 

Eugenia Kuyda

Founder and CEO, Replika AI

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Artist
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

Director of Human-Robot Interaction at Boston Dynamics

Miriam Simun

Artist
  • 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

CEO and Co-Founder, Nym Technologies

Tomás Saraceno

Artist
  • 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

Head of Creative at Ginkgo Bioworks

Xin Liu

Artist
  • 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

CEO and Co-Founder, Runway

Ana Fabrega

Comedian, Writer, and Actor
  • 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

Engineer and Entrepreneur

Rindon Johnson

Artist
  • 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.

Thank you to everyone who made Seven on Seven possible!

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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,

Michael Connor, Lynn Hershman Leeson and Eugenia Kuyda share a laugh at Seven on Seven, January 27, 2024 at the New Museum. Photo by OWLEY Studios, Courtesy of Rhizome. 

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.

Rin Johnson and Alan Steremberg are interviewed at Water Street Projects for Seven on Seven Collaboration Day, January 26 2024. Photo by OWLEY Studios, Courtesy of Rhizome. 

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. 

Ana Fabrega and Cristobal Valenzuela rehearse at WSA for Seven on Seven Collaboration Day, January 26, 2024. Photo by OWLEY Studios courtesy of Rhizome. 

Harry Halpin speaks at Seven on Seven at the New Museum on January 27, 2024. Photo by OWLEY Studios, Courtesy of Rhizome. 

Stephon Alexander plays saxophone at Seven on Seven at the New Museum, January 27, 2024. Photo by OWLEY Studios, Courtesy of Rhizome. 

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,

Audience members make history as they enact the first ever human Mixnet as part of Harry Halpin and Tomás Saraceno's presentation at Seven on Seven, January 27, 2024. Photo by Mettie Ostrowski, Courtesy of Rhizome.

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.

Qasim Naqvi, Xin Liu, Christina Agapakis, and Josh Dunn present at Seven on Seven at the New Museum, January 27, 2024. Photo by OWLEY Studios, Courtesy of Rhizome. 

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. 

Michael Connor speaks at Seven on Seven, January 27, 2024 at the New Museum. Photo by OWLEY Studios, Courtesy of Rhizome. Video projection by Transcendence Creative. 

 

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. 

Ben Shirken, Reggie Watts and Stephon Alexander jam at Seven on Seven, January 27, 2024 at the New Museum. Photo by Mettie Ostrowski, Courtesy of Rhizome.

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,

Mor Mendel as seen through Spot's camera perform together for Seven on Seven, January 27, 2024 at the New Museum. Photo by OWLEY Studios, Courtesy of Rhizome.

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.

Reggie Watts takes a picture of Michael Connor at the Pre-conference dinner on January 26, 2024 at the New Museum. Photo by Alexey Kim / Sidewalkkilla, Courtesy of Rhizome.

Michael Connor and Xinran Yuan give opening remarks at Seven on Seven, January 27, 2024 at the New Museum. Photo by OWLEY Studios, Courtesy of Rhizome.

Apply to be a member of NEW INC’s Year 11 cohort!

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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. 

 






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