This is Rhizome Today for Monday, January 5, 2014. This post will be deleted tomorrow.
In September, guest juror Kimmo Modig awarded five microgrants for browser-based works, and we've recently received some updates on their progress.
Above and below, some new drawings made for Viral by Lena NW and Julia Kunberger, "a game that parodies celebrity status games (i.e. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (app), The Urbz (PS2)) but focuses on the concept of becoming an internet celebrity via social media."
Alongside Lena and Julia, Angela Washko was awarded support for BANGED — a website project inviting contributions from women who have slept with Roosh V, author of BANG: The Pickup Bible. In a surprising turn, Washko was able to interview Roosh himself; read over at Animal New York her excellent report on the surreal experience:
To my complete surprise — and after a great deal of negotiation — Roosh was up for doing an interview with me. (My art project was not enough of a selling point for him…he wanted me to find him hot girls in Poland and Ukraine….I couldn't think of anyone single…I offered him the grant money instead…he wouldn't take it…ultimately it was the opportunity to have himself presented in an art gallery context that won him over!)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also supported: Well, Actually: a journal of vernacular criticism!, a quarterly PDF-based publication, in the words of editors Deanna Havas & Jack Kahn, open to "criticism as it exists in the field, nuance welcomed but not required!" Deanna reports that editing and design will be underway shortly.
And M Hipley is using Rhizome's microgrant to pay someone to hack two inactive Twitter social media accounts, allowing the artist to hijack usernames for her own brand. Hipley just completed a Thoughtworks workshop to gain some skills, and has been working on a documentation plan.
Finally, the timely Music Obfuscator created by Ben Grosser will enable users to hide music from Content ID (the listening algorithms that identify copyrighted music on sites like Vimeo and YouTube), flagging every match for automatic muting or removal, even in cases of fair use or use with permission. Grosser recently emailed telling that he's "having success with a couple techniques for obfuscating tracks enough so that Shazam can't ID them...Plenty of work to go, though... thinking late January is looking like a reasonable target)."
We can't wait!