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Works from SCREENTIME

Kayla Drzewicki — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:31:00 -0400

On Sunday, March 22, Rhizome presented SCREENTIME as part of the New Museum's opening weekend, featuring eleven video works made by artists in ArtBase, Rhizome’s archive of digital art. The fully sold-out screening convened excited museum-goers, members of Rhizome's Community, and even Jeff Koons.

Works in this program unveiled the performative potential of often overlooked, pedestrian spaces on the internet. Mundane internet iconography like the YouTube playbar or buffering icon are personified through desktop performance; a forgotten GeoCities website is simultaneously mourned and brought to life through an impromptu act of karaoke, and Second Life is transformed into a space to both reflect on and remix significant historical events.

Many videos in this program are archived in ArtBase, Rhizome’s archive of born-digital art. First established in 1999, the ArtBase contains over 2,000 works of net art, and includes some of the very first artworks to use the internet as an artistic medium. For SCREENTIME, Rhizome accessioned two new video works to ArtBase: D ied in your arms tonight (Shell’s Place Page 29) by Olia Lialina, and Reenactment of Marina Abramovic and Ulay's Imponderabilia by Eva & Franco Mattes.

Artists include Silvio Lorusso, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Skawennati, Mark Fingerhut, JODI, Eva & Franco Mattes, Paul Slocum, Martins Kohout, Anne de Vries, Takeshi Murata, and Olia Lialina.

A New Museum security staff member guards the video work Moonwalk by Martins Kohout.

SCREENTIME poster, design by Ruby Miller.

View the works and learn more about them below.

Silvio Lorusso, The Best Is Yet To Come, 2012

The Best Is Yet To Come is a website displaying a series of preloaders, animated GIFs that often appear before a website's content has loaded. In this work, the preloaders are the content, encouraging the viewer to savor the experience of waiting.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Samsung, 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. In Samsung, 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.

View works by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries in ArtBase

Skawennati, TimeTraveller™ Episode 01, 2009

TimeTraveller™ is a multi-platform project that features a website, a nine-episode machinima series shot in Second Life, dozens of still images, and a 3D printed sculpture. Together, these elements explore Indigenous futurism through the invention and use of a fictional technology, the TimeTraveller™; an edutainment system which enables characters to travel through time and witness historical events significant to Native North Americans.

In the first episode of the machinima series we are introduced to Hunter, a young, angry Mohawk man living in the year 2121. Despite his impressive range of traditional skills as a hunter, warrior and iron worker, Hunter is unable to find his way in an overcrowded, hyperconsumerist, technologized world. In an act of desperate clarity, he’s decided to use his TimeTraveller™ to help him figure it out. “Go ahead,” he says, “Call it a vision quest.”

Mark Fingerhut, GOBLIN.exe, 2020

GOBLIN.exe is software that uses real malware techniques to take over the user’s desktop temporarily, only to delete itself upon completion, minutes later. A desktop poem, or a one-act desktop play, the work choreographs built-in elements of the Windows operating system—including Notepad, error messages, and the command line interface—to tell a story of privacy, the nature of time and memory, and reconciliation with the unstoppable waxing and waning of interpersonal relationships.

JODI, ://?WWJJ-=fol'\ks/omy909-live, 2007-2012

_%REmiXXes_Ff_TEc-SoCia.L%20CriTterrQuE_34r;lyOTUB3_%20SO$cialz</

This video originally appeared on FOLKSOMY.NET, and is documentation of a live VJ performance by the net art duo JODI. Originally performed live at various galleries and art spaces around the world, the artists would aggregate hundreds of amateur YouTube videos and remix, collage and blend them in real time using custom-made controllers. While performances ranged in structure and rhythm, they often included videos that brought out the creator’s uncensored feelings towards different technologies in some form; from violent acts performed on computer hardware to passionate, original musical odes celebrating popular social media platforms like Facebook.

The project’s title refers to the word “folksonomy”, a social classification system and portmanteau of the words “folk” and “taxonomy.” Folksonomy refers to user-created tags, bookmarks or keywords typically derived from the user’s own vocabulary as opposed to an official controlled taxonomy.

view works by JODI in ArtBase

Eva & Franco Mattes, Reenactment of Marina Abramovic and Ulay's Imponderabilia, 2007

Reenactments (2007–10) are actions that take place inside the video game Second Life, where Mattes’ avatars—modeled on their own bodies—restage iconic performance art pieces from the 1960s–80s. In this video, the artists reenact one of the most famous performances in art history: Imponderabilia (1977) by Marina Abramovic and Ulay. In Mattes’ 2007 reenactment, audiences from around the world could attend and interact with the performance live online—a synthetic space where the body is both present and absent, and interaction happens through code—or watch them projected in a gallery.

Paul Slocum, Time-Lapse Homepage, 2005

Time-Lapse Homepage is a video the artist made sequentially, frame-by-frame, by editing the HTML on his homepage and taking a screenshot after each change. The soundtrack was created by compiling brief clips of audio recorded from the MIDI files (primarily U2, Moby, and Madonna) playing when each screenshot was taken.

Martins Kohout, Moonwalk, 2008

Moonwalk was created through a recursive process which involved uploading a black video to YouTube, screen-recording it with the playbar visible, and uploading the result to the platform. This process repeated multiple times, gradually forming the pyramid structure seen at the end. Originally, YouTube’s actual playbar aligned with the one inside the video, visually blending with the lowest layer of the composition—an effect lost after the site’s later redesigns. Uploaded only three years after YouTube’s founding, Moonwalk was created during a time when many net artists were experimenting with the formal qualities of the platform.

Anne de Vries, Forecast, 2011

Forecast is a computer-generated video featuring a camera panning through photographs of a blue sky with clouds over Amsterdam. A slow voice guides the viewer through selected passages from Bertrand Russell’s A.B.C. of Relativity, explaining distinctions between actuality and perception and addressing relativity theory and concepts of space-time. Midway through the work, the spoken text transitions into music, leading the viewer into a more associative and hypnotic experience.

Olia Lialina, Died in your arms tonight (Shell’s Place Page 29), 2019

This video documents what has become of a web page made by the user Shell on the free web-hosting service Geocities, founded in 1995. Once a carefully considered web page that choreographed images and lyrics to a MIDI rendition of the 1986 classic rock song “Died in your arms tonight,” it now survives more than a decade later in a state of ruins. Missing image icons cascade about the page, the lyrics are difficult to read, and the audio file referenced in the work’s title is no longer supported in a modern browser, and must be brought up separately in a YouTube window. Through desktop performance, Lialina pays tribute to the devotion and earnestness of early Geocities users, while also acknowledging the inevitable expiration that came with their creations.

Takeshi Murata, Untitled (Pink Dot), 2007

This piece is a part of Takeshi Murata's influential body of work that pioneered the practice known as data moshing. Murata edits and strategically removes certain data from digital video files, creating an undulating effect. The source video in Untitled (Pink Dot) is Sylvester Stallone's 1982 film, Rambo: First Blood.

Rhizome’s public programs are made possible by grants from the Mellon Foundation, Teiger Foundation, and in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

This program was curated by Kayla Drzewicki, Archive & Program Manager, Rhizome.

Program Design & Title Cards by Ruby Miller.

Documentation from Model as Medium is online

Rhizome Staff post — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:00:38 -0400

Video documentation from our recent event with TITLES, Model as Medium, is now up on video.rhizome.org, Rhizome's self-hosted video platform.

This winter, Rhizome partnered with TITLES to commission artists Maya Man, Louis Osmosis, balfua, Alix Vernet, and Aarati Akkapeddi to create their own custom generative AI models.

Though coming from diverse artistic backgrounds, some rooted in tactile media and others already engaging with AI, participating artists offered insight into their creative processes and the evolving implications of authorship in the AI age.

Time Travel Through Our Digital Past

Nicole Savoy — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:12:00 -0400

This article was originally published on January 22, 2026 on HEK (House of Electronic Arts) Website.

On December 14th, 2025 Rhizome partnered with HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Switzerland to host the workshop TechBrunch: Born-Digital Art. Taking place six times per year, TechBrunches are HEK's workshop series that explore current topics in the field of art and technology, alongside Coffee, tea and Swiss pastries.

In this edition of TechBrunch, Claudia Röck, Conservator of the HEK’s media art collection and Dragan Espenschied, Preservation Director at Rhizome, shared how they use emulation as a sustainable method of preservation for the diverse born-digital artworks they care for. Workshop participants including artists, designers, and students and professionals in the field of media preservation restored an artwork in an emulator and explored cultural history through an outdated operating system.

TechBrunch: Born-Digital Art, 14.12.25. Photo: Nicolas Gysin.

HEK’s collection holds 117 media artworks created in Switzerland between 1983 and 2024, 30 to 40 of which are born-digital artworks, meaning they are created entirely with digital tools and need specific digital environments (composed of various software) to function. Examples include digital audio visual, animated, software-based or generative artworks, net- or web-based works, as well as those produced using virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), or AI- and algorithm-driven processes.

Overview of HEK Collection. Screenshot from Claudia Röck’s presentation.

Artists use digital tools in a variety of ways to create unique born-digital artworks. As these tools develop and change, older versions become incompatible with contemporary computer systems, making many artworks increasingly difficult to view and experience. Born-digital works created in or before the early 2000s are especially vulnerable to this kind of obsolescence. Röck points out the importance of emulation as a preservation method for making these otherwise lost treasures accessible.

Preserving Digital Ecosystems

Restoring a born-digital artwork via emulation often involves reconstructing whole software environments and can be an arduous process, depending on the complexity of the work and the availability of its files, media, and the software it was built with. Many more born-digital artworks exist than operating systems and software. This means that with a large collection, it is probable that several artworks will require similar combinations of these tools.

With over 2,200 born-digital artworks in the ArtBase, Rhizome’s approach to preservation is to focus on preserving, not only individual artworks themselves, but the operating systems and other software that artworks in the collection need to work. By preserving these digital ecosystems, artworks depending on the same environments can be restored in groups, preventing the likelihood of repeating preservation processes if treated individually.

Emulation as a Translation of Symbols

Espenschied describes how all computers, including modern laptops, smartphones, and decades-old mainframes, are fundamentally the same—machines that read symbols and interpret them as instructions. Performance and scale can be affected by differences in processors, RAM, storage capacity, or peripherals but at their core all computers are symbol-processing machines.

Operating systems act as mediators between a computer’s physical hardware and other software programs, defining the symbolic environments these programs are designed to be compatible with. Software tells the computer which symbols to read, how to manipulate those symbols, and how to interpret the resulting data. Obsolescence can occur when this symbolic environment is altered, for example, with updates to operating systems or hardware architectures.

This is where emulation comes in handy. Emulators are software programs that map or translate the symbols and instructions from one computer system (the guest) to another (the host). This allows programs built for the guest to be executed on the host computer. By enabling a computer system to virtually run or host another, emulation highlights how computation is at its core an abstract translation of symbols.

Xerox Star 8010. Screenshot from Dragan Espenschied’s Presentation during TechBrunch: Born-Digital Art, 14.12.25.

Restoring Every Icon

Emulators can recreate outdated digital environments, providing access to old software, games, or born-digital artworks that rely on these systems. For example, in the late 90s to early 2000s, before modern web standards, many artists built Java Applets which enabled animations and interactivity on websites. Java Applets require a Java virtual machine (JVM) and a browser with a compatible Java plugin. An early version of Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1), released in 2002, included a Microsoft JVM by default. Later versions of Windows XP removed this JVM and required manual installation. Emulating Windows XP SP1 with a period-appropriate browser can provide access to these obsolete Java Applets.

Workshop participants installed Windows XP SP1 in the UTM emulator (hosted on contemporary Mac computers) to restore the artwork Every Icon (1997) by John F. Simon, Jr. which exists in both the HEK’s collection and Rhizome’s ArtBase. The artwork consists of a Java Applet that runs through every possible combination of patterns of black and white squares on a 32 x 32 grid. The work’s duration is described as 300 trillion years since that is how long it would take for the program to run through all 4.3 trillion possibilities.

John F. Simon, Jr., Every Icon. 1997. Part of HEK’s collection.

Software as Time Capsules of Digital Culture

After installing Windows XP SP1 and accessing Every Icon, participants were given time to explore the legacy operating system. A round robin session revealed games like 3D Pinball, drawings participants made in Microsoft Paint, and Windows Media Player skins not found in later versions. Operating systems and applications embody the aesthetic, technical, and social language of their time. Features like media player skins, wallpapers, system sounds, sample media, and early browser behaviors provide historical context for artworks created within those environments.

Windows XP SP1 reflects a period when software still held some traces of the people who built it. Earlier, when development teams were smaller and software production less corporatized, it was more common to find fingerprints left by programmers—such as stock videos and audio files, playful error messages, or Easter eggs embedded in code. These elements reveal the human side of software development and have gradually diminished over time through increasing standardization. Emulating software is not only a method for conserving born-digital artworks but also a way to preserve these important cultural histories.

Alienware “Invader” Windows Media Player skin. Windows XP, ca. 2001-2007. Screenshot from Windows XP emulator during TechBrunch: Born-Digital Art Workshop.

3D PinBall for Windows – Space Cadet. Windows XP, ca. 2001-2007. Screenshot from Windows XP emulator during TechBrunch: Born-Digital Art Workshop.

Emulation for All

Beyond providing insight into historical digital environments and artworks, emulation plays an important role in making digital history publicly accessible. Emulators enable artists, researchers, programmers, and enthusiasts to explore different computer systems and early web and software environments, experiment with new platforms, and run legacy computer games and applications.

A whole world of well-documented open-source emulators exists for anyone to explore. A small selection of those requiring minimal to moderate expertise includes UTM, which allows users to install and run multiple operating systems on a Mac; DOSBox for running MS-DOS software; and Basilisk II and SheepShaver for classic Apple systems. Curated software collections available through online archives such as the Internet Archive are a useful resource for recreating and emulating digital environments. For those interested in experiencing a wide range of legacy computer systems without the need to set up their own emulators, the Internet Archive provides in-browser emulation for dozens of historical platforms.

The scope and accessibility of these resources, along with the practical experience gained by participants of the TechBrunch: Born-Digital Art workshop show that emulation is not limited to specialists but is available to anyone curious about engaging in digital cultural history. Follow along as the HEK continues to explore the use of emulation to preserve digital culture, with more TechBruch events to come!

TechBrunch: Born-Digital Art, 14.12.25. Photo: Nicolas Gysin.

Artist Profile: Taína Cruz

manuel arturo abreu — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 10:23:00 -0400

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

manuel arturo abreu: In your work, I see the synergy or generative friction between digital media and its aesthetics, and the spiritual or mystical drive often associated with folklore or folk culture. Your gallery Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler says that you render not real people but “avatars, or proxies”—contemporary versions of mythical figures or positionalities. I first came across your practice on Instagram possibly a decade ago, and thought “this is also someone who grew up in New York, steeped in Caribbean ways of moving.”

Your work God Save You (2018) was included in the group show "a re:trospective", which I curated. It is this beautiful, massive unstretched canvas of a campesino scene, what looks like a central square surrounded by indigenous houses. A foreshortened foreground shows an indigenous person, a hound with a hare in its mouth, and a cross that reads “God save you.” I’d say you’ve been dealing with spiritual topics in your work for a while. Could you speak to how you came to this set of topics and how your engagement with it has developed over the years?

Taína Cruz: Growing up in Harlem and spending time in the Southern Christian Baptist church with my family on my mom’s side in the South, I felt spirit moving in the city. I also spent a lot of time in the woods in North Carolina, which would feel damp and thick, with red clay forming for centuries. I understood what it meant even when I would actively try to ignore it during rebellious stages. It was something I could sense, even if I didn’t have the words for it. Now spirit has developed in a way that feels inherent to the work I’m excited to create.

Installation view, “re:trospective” at Pfizer Pharmaceutical Factory, Brooklyn, New York 2018. Pictured: Taína Cruz, God Save You (2018), acrylic on unstretched canvas with sound.

The painting you mentioned definitely stirred a lot of meaning because it was made when I was studying sculpture; I wasn’t making paintings primarily at that time. I paired that painting with an atmospheric recording of wolves howling above it to transport the viewers more fully into the multiple layers I was thinking about. I enjoy working in layers. An awareness that the visible world doesn’t have to be the only layer. There’s always something underneath and surrounding it pressing in.

I was thinking about atmosphere. The cross that reads “God save you” felt both sincere and ominous. I’m interested in that tension. The figures have somewhat changed in meaning over time, but they sometimes still fit within being sincere, sincere about the spirit. Not ironic. Not detached. There is a real relationship there. I’m interested in the frequency that hums beneath the image, the vibration I feel before I fully understand what I’m looking at.

maa: You studied computer science when you were younger, and across the range of mediums you work in, technology is an ongoing theme, location, and resource. How do you explore the use of the internet and digital technology to explore themes of religion, spirituality, mythology, and collective memory? How do you respond to the legacies of your biological and spiritual families, and the aesthetic legacy of the Bronx, as you move through this technoscape?

TC: I studied computer science at a time when it was “trendy,” or maybe when the money was being pointed towards investing in children from low income backgrounds so teens could have a computer and code. I did a few summer internships, one for inner city kids and another for girls who were otherwise not present in the conversation around technology. So I experienced technology from the side of marginalized groups. I learned about collaboration, abstraction, understanding systems in the computer, and then on the hour long commute back home uptown, it would be extra loud how those systems existed outside the screen too.

When I was younger it felt more open. I was making characters online, finding glitch art communities (DeviantArt, Minecraft, dump.fm); learning from people who were sharing things freely. It felt accessible and experimental. Endless, especially as my time on the screen expanded from sixty-minute sessions at the library to having my own laptop for school and homework in middle school.

Now it feels more controlled, more privatized. You can feel the monopoly of it. It leaves a kind of filmy cast of bleakness, like the magic show is over. And that shift makes me more aware of how my relationship with the computer is changing.

I am thinking about the internet now as something cybernetic, in the sense of feedback loops. Systems responding to systems. We put things into it, and it reshapes how we see. That feels similar to artmaking. When I work I enjoy thinking about the exchange between the body, the image, and the viewer. Something circulates and comes back different. There’s something spiritual in that for me, in the way we’re constantly dealing with invisible forces, sending and receiving signals inside systems larger than ourselves. And as I’m moving through this technoscape, I’m responding to my biological and spiritual families and to the aesthetic legacy of the Bronx at the same time. It’s all inside the loop.

Taína Cruz, Motor Hound, 2023. Rotary motor, rubber dog head, tennis ball

maa: You will sometimes source an image from the internet and digitally manipulate it before using it as a source image for a work. To me, the distortion of forms here has less to do with, say, disfigurated elegance in an Ingres or Cubist frameworks around painting the materiality of time, and more to do with the impact of advanced technology on human consciousness. What does your still and moving image archive look like, and how do you engage it? Could you discuss a bit about your workflow and its significance?

TC: I definitely used to be inspired by images I found interesting on blogs like Tumblr, or saved images from when I was a preteen moving through different digital art blogs. I already knew how to digitally manipulate photos in school. My life with the computer started early because I had a desktop at home, and my school gave us laptops for homework. Along with that came digital tech classes,which provided instruction on Photoshop and other programs. What began as something to game on and find community through virtual worlds slowly became a tool for changing how I see.

My still and moving image archive is layered and a little chaotic. It holds screenshots, saved folders from years ago; fragments from blogs that probably don’t even exist anymore. It’s not a pristine archive. It’s sedimented. Distortion for me feels like adding pressure. We’re consuming images at an accelerated pace now, and I’m interested in what that pressure does to the body and to memory.

Describing my workflow feels harder now because I’ve been unlearning some of my older ways of starting. Lately it begins more with listening. I spend time in silence, either at home or in the studio. I’ll joke around with my dog, and then something shifts and it’s time to work. For larger projects I build small maquettes of the space. I set up DIY theatrical lighting in the studio to test how things might feel atmospherically before they exist at scale.

Painting, drawing, 3D modeling, and video feel intuitive, almost like extensions of perception. My relationship with physical sculpture calls for a more scheduled, structured process. But across all mediums, a big part of my workflow is knowing when to stop.

Installation view, “Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art ” at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, 2025. Pictured Left: Taína Cruz, rentaroot.com (2025), Oil on Canvas; Right: Liberty.exe (2025), Oil on Canvas; etc. Courtesy of Timothy Johnson.

maa: You’re a fan of horror, and my understanding of the reception of your work is that many who are at the beginning of their engagement with it are drawn to horror, its industry and tropes, as a means to delve deeper into your practice. I think this has great value as a “gateway,” but I also recognize in the trajectory of your practice a sustained engagement with the shadow, with the ambivalence or “darkness” of the trickster figure, and with the idea that the filter of consciousness is a hallucination. Could you discuss this nexus of topics a bit?

TC: When I talk about horror I feel like I have to start with the mood, the way it feels in my body. I don’t really watch horror movies, my dad didn’t have any horror DVDs. I joke to myself that maybe the heightened sensory feeling of being a child, of everything I was picking up on, was already enough. I didn’t need to add more. So when people enter the work through horror, I understand it, but for me it’s coming from lived atmosphere.

It’s the steam in the boiler room in a basement in the Bronx. That damp metallic heat. Police sirens separating family. The shadows that felt like they were saying something while you’re standing there watching adults try to regulate themselves verbally and physically. It’s that feeling of being small but hyper-aware. Your body buzzing a little. Not because something jumped out at you, but because something was always slightly off.

The work doesn’t sit inside horror, but it borrows its language. I’m not trying to stamp the work with it. The dynamic of “horror” just shows up because it holds tension well. For me it’s always braided with humor, with beauty, with honesty. It lets me stay with uncertainty. I’m interested in that moment right before something shifts, when you feel it in your stomach or your skin but nothing has technically happened yet.

I get really curious why the work lands with horror, because I am definitely not in the studio going ‘let me make a painting that fits this genre.’ A lot of what I’m touching on in the studio would be lingering feelings. Not something that shocks me, that I would want to shock others with. More like a presence. A haunting that isn’t necessarily scary. Just something that comes back when you’re alone and your guard drops from performing being human 24/7.

The jester, trickster feels important too. This is a figure that destabilizes order and moves across all storytelling, analogue and digital, across all time. The idea that consciousness itself might be a kind of hallucination resonates with me because it flattens hierarchy. If perception is unstable, then the painting doesn’t have to resolve anything. It can lean into that instability.

The darkness in the work doesn’t feel dark to me. It never really did. It feels exploratory. It feels like how I remember gaining consciousness, noticing light and shadow at the same time. I stopped thinking of them as opposites. They feel more like collaborators.

Taína Cruz, Two Hounds Wait Patiently, 2025. Oil on canvas. Image Courtesy of Julian Blum.

maa: That makes sense. I think of the ambivalence of the trickster figure, a connection with the margins and the work of shadows that makes a Legba or Anansi so powerful. Let’s talk about a specific idiom or set of icons in your work, the dog or hound. One thinks of Kerberos or the Island Arawak ‘soul-dog’ Opiyelguwobiran. What is your connection to this trope? Could you walk us through the process and concept for a specific work using the canine, for example, two hounds wait patiently (2025) and Motor Hound (2023)?

TC: Dogs appear in my work as figures of attention and waiting. I feel a strong connection to them because they represent what it feels like to have a companion, while also carrying the awareness that those connections are temporary. It’s hard not to relate that to the isolating feeling of figuring out belonging, whether in real life or in digital spaces. I’ve learned a lot from dogs. I think it's important to be in dialogue with animals. I’m drawn to how present dogs are as animals, how they seem to sense things before we do, and how they can hold a quiet feeling of vigilance or loneliness without needing to dramatize it. In Two Hounds Wait Patiently (2025), the dogs act almost like witnesses in the scene, holding a stillness that creates a subtle tension in the atmosphere. In Motor Hound (2023), the dog appears in a looping GIF where a motorized arm moves a hound’s head toward a tennis ball. I was thinking about repetition and instinct, the dog is a small machine of attention; illiciting a feeling somewhere between familiar and unease.

Taína Cruz, Curved wall maquette, Gesso and cardboard. 2025

maa: You mentioned recently returning to sculpture. For example, you’ve got some sculptures in this year’s Whitney Biennial. In the past, you’ve also made sculptures, moving image works, and text-based online works. Could you walk us through what it looks like for you to work on a medium that isn’t painting? For example, how do you draw upon your image archive? What gestures or processes of fabrication interest you? Do they connect to themes of spirituality, the city, the uncanny, and if so, how?

TC: When I first began painting more rigorously, I naturally found myself pulling from an image archive I had already been building for years on my computer across various platforms. I've always collected or reposted digital images that resonated with my interests, and it trained me to notice very quickly what holds my attention and what doesn't. That instinct tends to guide how an image develops.

More recently the work has shifted away from that. I am much less interested in digging through folders of images now. Letting the work meet an audience and hearing how people respond has become more interesting to me. When the work moves into sculpture or video it’s usually because the idea wants it to behave differently. Fabrication for me is pretty direct, I like working with various materials and seeing what they do, keeping that process open.

For me, painting and sculpture have never felt separate. I love both mediums, and the work naturally moves between them depending on what the image or form needs. Even in painting I’m often thinking about what is occupying the space, almost as if I’m building it. Being an artist for me is about following the mediums that bring a sense of joy, frustration and curiosity and letting them speak to each other.

Age (if you’d like to share): I was born in 1998

Location: NYC

How/when did you begin working creatively with technology?

I began working creatively with technology around eight years old. I would go with my dad to his school’s library and spend hours playing on pixel canvases and dressing up models and their bedrooms on online girl games.

What did you study at school or elsewhere?

I studied interdisciplinary sculpture and critical theory.

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

I make art for a living.

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

Announcing the Counterstructural Commons Residents!

Rhizome Staff post — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0400

Back in December, Rhizome announced that it will host the winter edition of Creative Futures: Counterstructures (CFC), Mozilla Foundation’s 10-week cultural R&D residency

Running from February through April 2026 in New York City, The Counterstructural Commons program brings together creative technologists and multidisciplinary artists to prototype tools, systems, and experiences that imagine alternative technological infrastructures.

Through cycles of research, community testing, and peer critique, residents will develop their projects, culminating in a shared publication and a final presentation as an extension of Rhizome's 7×7 program. This cohort's work spans an expansive range of questions about how technology shapes human life and community: from a steganographic tool that repurposes machine learning for activist self-protection to a biosemiotic urban habitat that translates bat and moth behavior into civic care instructions.

Learn about the eight residents below!

Michael Candy is an international artist known for kinetic sculptures, interactive installations, and video works that challenge the socio-political implications of contemporary technology. His practice navigates shifting landscapes of automation, mythology, and agency, constructing engineered phenomena that reconfigure space and perception.

beck haberstroh is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator. As a part of Counterstructural Commons, they will be developing 'We are already gathered,' a project that explores the social relationships that exist between us as data.

Shakti Mb is a media artist and filmmaker from South India based in NYC. Her recent work documents independent bot maker communities and the craft, the code, and the creative labor behind designing AI bots for roleplay and companionship.

Ari J. Melenciano is an artist and cultural researcher working with perception, time, consciousness, and cybernetics as materials.

Ramsey Nasser makes games, systems, and art that challenge, delight, and confound. He hopes people come away from his work with renewed belief in themselves and their communities, with greater contempt for those who hoard wealth and power over them, and with a deepened faith in the possibility of a better world.

zzyw (Zhenzhen Qi, Yang Wang) employs critical technical practice and speculative inquiry to challenge hegemonic technological constructs. Through software prototypes and writing, zzyw explores the cultural and political imprints of computing systems while envisioning alternative modes of technicality.

Steven Jos Phan works at the edge of what's presently possible. His practice finds form in nascent technologies and systems without precedent, in dialogue with traditional design craft. He lives and works from a regenerative farm in upstate New York, where the study of ecology and tending land informs his work.

Chris Woebken is a participatory futures researcher, experimental interaction designer, and co-founder of the Extrapolation Factory. He develops platforms that allow underserved communities to prototype and navigate complex futures.

Digital Painting in LA and Beyond, the Set List

Michael Connor — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 19:42:51 -0500

For tonight's program in Los Angeles, organized in partnership with LACMA Digital Leaders and Ark/8, I sought to gather up some images that I think of as digital painting, from Rhizome’s archive and beyond, with a few key figures from Los Angeles.

Digital painting can be a slippery and contested category, but also a longstanding part of digital culture. Maybe this is because the computer runs on symbols and metaphors – think of the Photoshop paintbrush – and the word “painting” is, by now, also quite dislocated from its concrete, descriptive meaning. Maybe this is partly because the word “digital” refers both to the hand – the first tool of the painter – and to computer code.

Tonight’s event came together quickly, and I did not even get to the topic of AI painting; that will have to come later. But already through this selection of images that I think of as paintings, interesting questions and arguments emerge.

Questions like:

Do digital paintings have to be made by hand? Does a digital painting have to be drawn with a mouse or Wacom tablet? Can a digital painting be made by executing computer code in ways that we recognize as “painterly”?

Does that also extend to work made with GANs and LLMs that reference the history of painting – an entire field that we won't get to tonight, deserving of its own standalone event?

Does a curator like me get to decide if something is a digital painting, or does the term belong to active digital painting communities on platforms like deviantart?

Thank you to all of the artists who lent their images, code, video, and presence to tonight's event:

Slideshow 1, 830pm

Shelley Lake, One Thousand Question Marks, 1987

Mike Winkelmann (Beeple), Music for Plants (excerpt), 2005

Parker Ito, work from Paintfx

Sabrina Ratté, Objets-Monde, 2022

Sara Ludy, Bloom 1, 2024

Yung Jake, Bob, 2017

Yung Jake, lil pump

Michael Manning, from the series Microsoft Store Paintings, 2012

Laura Brothers (out4pizza), PREEN

Interactive Artwork 1, 830pm

Maya Man, can i go where you go?

Slideshow 2, 9pm

Katherine Frazer, ikebananana2 – sketchbook

Presentations, 9pm

Petra Cortright

The Estate of Lee Mullican

Code-based artworks for the browser, 930pm

Emily Xie, Memories of QIlin

Lovid, Tide Predictor

Casey Reas, 923 Empty Rooms

Interactive Artwork, 930pm

Andrew Benson (pixlpa), Grind Painter

Presentation / Demo & Artworks, 10pm

Jeffrey Alan Scudder / aesthetic.computer

Board Updates for Rhizome’s Fourth Decade

Rhizome Staff post — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 15:00:00 -0500

Jeannie Vu and Katherine Frazer have been elected to Rhizome’s Board of Directors, strengthening the organization as it enters its fourth decade.

Katherine Frazer is an artist and product designer at Apple with a multidisciplinary background spanning new media art, software application design, accessible technologies, social therapy robotics, and Japanese floral arrangement. Frazer’s design practice focuses on helping others realize their creativity, working on popular consumer applications like Apple’s Keynote and Freeform, and software design tool Figma. Her artistic practice subverts these same tools by demonstrating that applications designed for work can also be spaces for beauty. Frazer’s design work has been patented, and her artwork has been exhibited in Times Square and internationally, accessioned in Rhizome’s ArtBase, and featured in publications by Taschen and Phaidon. Frazer graduated with degrees in Communication Design and Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University.

Jeannie Vu is an investor and arts leader with experience across finance, real estate, and blockchain. She is Co-Founder of Azura and a Partner at Kenetic, and serves as Co-Chair of LACMA’s Digital Leaders and on the board of the Lumen Prize. She was previously CFO of JRK Property Holdings ($7B AUM) and SVP of Investments at Colony Capital ($70B AUM). Her work across institutions and global arts organizations reflects a sustained commitment to supporting artists and cultural ecosystems. Jeannie graduated from University of Southern California and holds an MBA from the Wharton School. She is a Certified Public Accountant (inactive).

After serving on the Board for four years, and as Board Chair since November 2024, Lindsay Howard is stepping down from the Board. During her tenure, she guided Rhizome through a period of major growth in the digital art field, expanding on-chain artist support, launching new programs for emerging creators, and strengthening the organization’s governance and strategic partnerships.

Rhizome’s founder, Mark Tribe, will step in as Interim Board Chair, bringing his decades of experience as an artist, curator, and cultural leader to provide continuity and strategic vision as the organization advances into its next chapter.

Rhizome.org in India

Rhizome — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 05:12:48 -0500

This month, Rhizome launches a series of programs in India, in a continuing partnership with Anthropic. Thanks to this visionary support, Rhizome will have the opportunity to connect with burgeoning creative communities in Bangalore, Mumbai, and elsewhere. Through a workshop, a festival partnership, and a year-long fellowship, Rhizome aims to create space for artists to experiment with and reflect on AI tools and AI-assisted coding, while supporting digital art practice more generally.

Workshop/Hackathon

This afternoon / evening (Tuesday, February 17), Rhizome will present an evening program in Bengaluru in partnership with Anthropic and the Museum of Art & Photography. The program, Vibe Shift, is a mindful hackathon designed for artists and creative practitioners interested in AI-assisted creative coding—often referred to as “vibe coding.” Building on a previous edition hosted in New York City, the Bengaluru program will bring together mentors from digital art, creative code, and experimental music for workshops, collaborative exercises, presentations, and structured work time using Anthropic’s AI model, Claude.

Activation

From Bengaluru, Rhizome will travel to Mumbai for Slingshot Festival’s inaugural India edition. As part of the festival, Rhizome has partnered with Anthropic to commission Resona, an immersive, responsive installation powered by Claude that connects audience movement to live-generated sound and visuals by musicians and artists based in India and elsewhere. The work extends Slingshot’s exploration of electronic music and digital art into a participatory, spatial experience, emphasizing AI as a connective medium rather than a spectacle. Slingshot is free to attend with RSVP.

Bengaluru City Fellow

To build further connections with communities in India beyond these two events, Rhizome will also appoint a part-time, stipend-based Bengaluru City Fellow, made possible by Anthropic. This new fellowship program embeds Rhizome contributors in institutions and cities around the world.The Bengaluru City Fellow will write a monthly regional newsletter, connect with digital art communities in the region, and conduct interviews and research.

Read the full description for more information and to apply.

Praxinoscope as Praxis with Margot McEwen

Ana Meisel — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500

In this interview, Ana Meisel is joined by Margot McEwen, an artist in London. They discuss GIFs as modern-day praxinoscope animations, making art on outdated equipment, and the art of scrolling.

Ana Meisel: Where are we right now?

Margot McEwen: We are in Peckham Rye Park or Peckham Rye Common. I'm not sure what the difference is. And we're in the Japanese garden, which I didn’t know existed. I know that William Blake said that when he was a kid he came here and saw angels.

Picture taken of Peckham Rye Park & Common on a frosty morning

AM: Can you introduce yourself and what you do?

MM: My name is Margot McEwen and I don't know what I do exactly. I don't know what to call it exactly. Lillian Schwartz wrote that she’s a computer artist and I like that as a phrase. I think that works. I studied at a traditional film school, and then went into more video art. The stuff I do is almost always with video or images, but I think it's computer art.

AM: What’s the big thing you're working on at the moment?

MM: It's all been around transcoding, which is the process of decoding one video format and encoding it into another. I like the state of being in-between, how this creates movement, and its relationship to transness. I think film preservation and film exhibition is very standardised in a way film historically wasn't. It was this sort of mass thing—fairground attractions, exhibited and made in all sorts of different ways. I enjoy trying to de-standardise the way we look at historical film objects. They typically become these untouchable things, and it can be nice to break that down and make them approachable again.

AM: What are some examples?

MM: Reynaud gifset comes from praxinoscope animations invented by Émile Reynaud in the 1870s. He was one of the first to project moving images. I first saw them as HD scans on Cinémathèque Française, presented like modern films in full screen. But historically, people would’ve seen them looped, together, tiny, and hand-painted.

A GIF isn't the same, but it feels closer to the original reception. They’re cute and funny, like they were meant to be. Transcoding de-standardises their presentation. The fidelity is worse than the HD scan, but the experience is closer to the original.

Margot McEwen, Reynaud gifset.

Network Topology started from reading Sergei Eisenstein’s "The Film Sense", where he writes about montage between picture and sound before he could record sound. His diagrams reminded me of network topologies—maps of how computers connect. I wanted to see if you could transpose those diagrams into film montage: start small, and build systematically until something incomprehensible emerges—like diagrams of the whole internet.

The images had to be simple so they wouldn’t get lost. Faces make for good subjects because we’re good at recognising them. The film became about two trans women passing each other in the street, trying to catch the other’s eye and failing—like how the internet both facilitates and ruins connection. I wanted the film to carry that feeling. In the end I stole the ending of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights—they finally see each other.

Projector screen displaying a still from Network Topology, 2024, Margot McEwen, with a silhouette of a figure amidst splashes of black and blue.

AM: What was your first encounter with the idea of ecology and computers, or permacomputing?

MM: The first time I encountered permacomputing was with the first meeting of the London permacomputing club. It felt nice to have words for something that seemed obviously true.

Before that, I’d been thinking about these things in ecological terms, but it first came out of the economics of it. I wanted to make films but only had a shitty laptop and could only afford an old camera that shot on miniDV tapes. Lots of modern editing software no longer support DV codecs, and modern operating systems don't support firewire anymore, so I was using open-source software on Linux to pull these old formats off old cameras. They’re still good cameras.

It started out of necessity, but then I got attached to it and bristled at “fancy” film-school equipment. Why use a Blackmagic camera when the stuff I have works and I know how it works? This led me to learning more about video codecs, transcoding into formats good for editing or publishing, all without Adobe.

AM: Is this granular control of open-source software a key method in your practice?

MM: I think it's a mix. What’s nice about using the media processing software FFmpeg is that you can get it to do exactly what you need, even if it’s weird. Breaking things into image sequences, intra-frame compression, specific color formats, pixel formats, etc. It opens up everything. Archivists use it because you can throw basically anything at it and get a usable file out.

"Using older hardware forces you to design things more thoughtfully." — Margot McEwen

AM: Has permacomputing changed your practice?

MM: I feel more attached to it. I want to push back even more against anyone telling me to use something new. I was using my work laptop because it was faster, then tried the same code on my old laptop and it ran terribly. At first I blamed the laptop, but then realised it was just awful code. A couple tweaks and it ran full speed. I wouldn’t have noticed that on the new laptop. Using older hardware forces you to design things more thoughtfully.

AM: Was that for a particular piece?

MM: It was for a workshop—lots of little example projects in cables.GL. I’m glad I switched because it means anyone who comes to the workshop doesn’t need a fancy computer. The cable’s homepage doesn’t run on my old laptop, but the standalone version works. Exported projects run at 60fps if designed well.

An example is the Akt-Skulpturen scrolling piece. This film from 1903, Akt-Skulpturen. Studienfilm für bildende Künstler (Living Sculptures: Film Study for Screen Artist) by Oskar Messter, was sold to art schools who couldn’t afford live models. Students would project it and wind the film back and forth to get poses.

Margot McEwen, Akt-Skulpturen.

I realised browser scrolling has momentum built in, so I could attach scrolling to the film’s movement. It’s the same trick of using transcoding to de-standardise the film and bring back its original use.

AM: Permacomputing embraces contradictions. Do you find yourself balancing things?

MM: Yes, especially in the workshop context. For example, showing every step of a process makes it more legible, but also less efficient and slower for some computers. In some works, I want the contradictions to be confrontational. But I also want all the pieces of how things are made to be visible. Simple and complicated at the same time can be nice.

AM: What tools are you most obsessed with right now?

MM: I use cables.GL a lot right now, but FFmpeg is still my favorite. It forces you to understand the materiality of video files, and you can tell it to do things to every frame or every other frame—whatever you want. Mistakes can lead to interesting results.

AM: What do you want to see more of in digital culture and tech?

MM: I want students to stop using Adobe software. They get a free license at the start of university and then they're trapped for life. They lack control over their art. If they stop paying, they lose access. There are great open-source tools that don’t restrict them and open up different possibilities. If I could plant a seed, it would be introducing these tools from the start.

Ana Meisel is a Polish-German web developer based in London, UK, who runs internet art gallery External Pages and is one-third of the research group Superkilogirls.

Margot McEwen is a computer artist, attempting to synthesise a new film grammar that reflects the underlying structures of the internet – a language for the ways in which the internet moves. She is also exploring transcoding (the conversion of one moving image format to another) as an artform unto itself.

Open Call: Vibe Shift Bengaluru

Rhizome — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:39:06 -0500

This February, Rhizome.org arrives in Bengaluru for a special evening program, presented in partnership with Claude and the Museum of Art & Photography.

Marking the beginning of a series of Rhizome programs in India, Vibe Shift is a mindful hackathon that gives artists and creative practitioners the opportunity to explore AI-assisted creative coding, often referred to as “vibe coding.” This event builds off of a previous program that Rhizome hosted at ZeroSpace in New York City last fall.

The evening will feature mentors from the worlds of digital art, creative code, and experimental music, who will lead participants through workshops, collaborative exercises, presentations, and structured work time. Every workshop participant will be given Claude credits to work with, and will create something with Anthropic’s AI model Claude. Attendance is free, and dinner and drinks will be served.

The program is especially geared toward participants who are interested in engaging with AI in the coding process—whether for the first time or in a new way. Applicants with active, independent creative practices, including work with websites, games, software, or generative art, will be prioritized, while remaining open to anyone curious about creative code and AI.

Prospective participants are asked to fill out a very brief application to register interest, with a deadline of Tuesday, February 10. Accepted participants will be notified by Thursday, February 12. please email info@rhizome.org with any questions.

Apply Now!

Conifer Twilight and Rhizome’s Next Chapter in Digital Preservation

Rhizome Staff post — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 16:02:00 -0500

As we prepare for Rhizome’s 30th anniversary, we’re taking an important step in the evolution of our approach to dynamic web archiving.

Rhizome’s software infrastructure for digital preservation—which represents more than $3M of investment over the past decade, and an annual server bill that rivals what other organizations spend on rent—allows us to offer an unrivaled set of services to institutions around the world, and powers access to our own public archives.

For nearly a decade, a key part of this offering has been cloud-based web archiving tools that have helped thousands of people capture and access dynamic web content.

Beginning in 2015, with the visionary support of the Mellon Foundation, we incubated Webrecorder, a service for archiving the dynamic web created by Ilya Kreymer. When Webrecorder spun off as a standalone entity in 2020, we continued to operate Conifer as a hosted service based on that software.

Our intention was to integrate Webrecorder updates into Conifer on an ongoing basis. However, Webrecorder’s offerings had to undergo significant technical change to keep up with an ever-evolving web, and can no longer be meaningfully integrated into the hosted service as initially envisioned.

The result is that Conifer’s ability to archive modern websites is increasingly limited. Capturing web pages that require logging in to a platform has become nearly impossible, as platforms are ramping up security measures and bot protection. In response, the Webrecorder team has focused on developing more viable approaches, such as their flagship archiving service Browsertrix.

In June 2026, Conifer will enter a “twilight” phase: it will no longer allow new captures to be made, but all existing collections will remain accessible and hosted by Rhizome, with clear options for export or migration. (For a full explanation, see the longer post on conifer.rhizome.org) Rhizome will offer workshops for Conifer users throughout the spring to support their adoption of alternative approaches to web archiving.

Our transition away from Conifer reflects a deep sense of responsibility towards everyone who has entrusted us with their collections and to the larger mission of making digital preservation more accessible to artists, archivists, and communities everywhere.

Conifer has served us—and many of you—extremely well. As we move into its twilight, we’re excited to focus on the next generation of preservation infrastructure that will support the field for years to come.

2025-26 Microgrants Awardees!

Bri Griffin — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 14:44:08 -0500

We're thrilled to announce the 17 recipients of our 2025-26 Microgrants, selected from an open call encouraging experimentation with alternatives for digital culture. This year's awarded projects explore four themes: Network Commons (reimagining how we connect), Public Personas (navigating fame and identity in algorithmic environments), Narrative Systems (breaking free from traditional interaction mechanics), and Synthetic Agents (collaborating with other intelligences). Projects were reviewed by a combination of Rhizome staff and an extended panel of guest jurors: Francis Tseng, Constant Dullaart, Hundred Rabbits, and Claire L. Evans.

Grant recipients will have the opportunity to present work to fellow artists and community members, as well as receive feedback for in-progress work. Select awardees will be considered for future Rhizome programming, exhibitions, and inclusion in ArtBase.

Awarded projects span online performance, an off-grid solar server, a 24/7 call center in the Philippines, and many more. In addition to being funded by small donations from our community, nine projects were supported by Octant in support of a more open internet. These projects propose the development of free/open-source software, build interoperable or decentralized systems, or increase transparency around digital infrastructure and policy.

Elizabeth Kezia Widjaja......is making a web-based tool for uploading multiple geotagged 360 photos and linking them together to create branching, location-based narratives.

"Streets adapts Google Street View’s interface to tell branching, location-based stories. Created in response to the lack of platforms that accommodate and present 360 imagery, it offers an alternative to traditional photography and narrative methods. Past stories include fictional navigations in Jakarta and Hong Kong, where each choice reshapes the outcome.

With Rhizome’s support, I’ll open the project to public participation—building a database and server where anyone can upload geotagged 360 narratives. A secondary goal is to expand the work in New York through parallel narratives across its surface and underground, exploring how daily commutes shape the city’s collective story."

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Pao Silva Lizárraga...is creating an animated, virtual shopping mall that illustrates the absurdity of commerce tourism along the US-Mexico border.

"My project imagines the US-Mexico border as an absurd web art shopping mall. As a former resident of Tijuana, Mexico, I saw shopping malls as “the border”: Tijuana’s Chula Vista border is connected to the shopping mall. Tijuana was and is built for commerce tourism; once liquor, now dentistry and plastic surgery. The shopping mall as a border is the American castle. By subverting luxury through Mexican street vendors’ graphic design, I will make an absurd mall inspired by the crudely Photoshopped advertisements on the SENTRI line, where immigrants, children, and souls are for sale... mocking surveillance and gentrification, culturally familiar yet dehumanizing. Grant funds will support animation production, domain name, and artist book."

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Erisa Bakalli...is investigating the visual and spatial qualities of retro video games, focusing on video game death animations as a primary visual and conceptual source.

"This project investigates the visual and spatial qualities of retro video games, focusing on the ambiguous relationship between two- and three-dimensional representation. Early titles such as Vectorman (Sega Genesis), Virtuoso (PC), Attack of the Saucermen (PS1), Serious Sam: The First Encounter, and The Binding of Isaac employ limited visual technologies to simulate depth, volume, and motion. Their imagery exists in a space that is neither flat nor fully dimensional a visual illusion that attempts to render the real without ever fully achieving it. With my background in painting, my interest lies in translating these digital illusions into material form. I consider the aesthetics of early game graphics as a continuation of painting’s history: a negotiation between surface, illusion, and spatial construction. The pixel operates as a kind of brushstroke; dithering becomes a painterly gesture that attempts to resolve the question of shadow and volume through code. "

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8 Ball Community TV Website Redesign Team...is developing 8 Ball TV’s new scheduler and open sourcing it to enable DIY community groups/colleges/etc. to deploy their own internet TV stations.

"8 Ball TV is a web based community DIY television station run by 8 Ball Community in Chinatown, Manhattan. We are in the process of redeveloping our (currently very slow and difficult to use) scheduler backend. Our plan is to open source our new solution as a simple, easily deployable suite of docker containers that other organizations, such as college TV stations and community groups, can use to deploy their own internet TV stations without using oppressive, noncommunal platforms like YouTube or Twitch, and at a low cost. We would use this funding to help pay for hosting the new site’s VPS/DigitalOcean droplet (under $100/month) and pilot/bankroll our first external beta tester for the software stack."

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Chaline Bang......is repurposing obsolete smartphones to self-host information about permacomputing, permacomputing aesthetics, and repair culture.

"If my phone is so smart, why am I only using it to do silly things?

With the microgrant I want to develop a website that explores permacomputing, its aesthetics and repair culture by self-hosting servers through repurposing obsolete smartphones. I will document how to to install an open-source operating system (PostmarketOS) and self-host applications with Nginx for creative reuse.

The visual website (html& css) includes a step-by-step manual with illustrated technical guidance and conceptual framing and will be published on the permacomputing wiki https://permacomputing.net. While e-waste piles up and new devices flood the market, this project offers an opportunity to expose the short life cycles imposed by the ICT industries."

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Leonardo Aranda...is continuing the second phase of a project (initially supported by Processing Foundation) that tells the story of Mexico City from the perspectives of it’s bodies of water.

"This proposal is the second phase of the project Where Has the Lake Gone? initiated with support from Processing Foundation. The project tells the story of Mexico City from the perspective of its bodies of water. Originally built on a lake, the city currently suffers constant droughts and floodings caused by uncontrolled growth and excessive exploitation of its water resources. The project consists of a digital counter-cartography that articulates a narrative that connects different times and dimensions of the city. The story is constructed from a non-human perspective where infrastructure, urban layouts, and their relationship with water are presented as multiple layers of historical sediment that reveals what Rob Nixon calls slow violence"

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Isis Vargas...is making a web-based performance to explore the impossibility of disappearing from the digital sphere.

"Unmapping my Digital Identity is a web-based performance that explores the impossibility of disappearing from the digital sphere. The project documents the process of requesting the deletion of my own image from platforms, institutions, and archives. This process involves reaching out to people I no longer speak to, facing institutional bureaucracy, and confronting the impossibility of accessing inactive or forgotten accounts. Each attempt, whether through emails, refusals, or silences, becomes part of a paradoxical record: an archive of erasure. Through this ongoing gesture, the project reflects on image ownership, consent, and the involuntary persistence of identity within digital memory."

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Básica TV...is building a long-term, online archive that preserves and exhibits the collective’s full body of work alongside Spanish-English texts.

"Básica TV is a queer video collective from Uruguay exploring experimental audiovisual practices since 2014. Formed by Lulo Demarco, Guzmán Paz, and Emilio Bianchic, the group pioneered a distinctive approach to postproduction, remixing mass media and internet aesthetics into an irreverent and critical queer visual language. Their work has greatly influenced contemporary video art in Uruguay and Argentina. We aim to build a long-term online archive to preserve, exhibit, and share our full body of work. The website will host videos for 8 years, feature Spanish–English texts, and provide a carefully designed interface. This grant will support technical development, translation, and hosting costs."

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The following 9 microgrants were funded thanks to a grant from Octant in support of a more open internet:

Mo Wisdom...is organizng an installation and panel discussion in Atlanta that features content creators from the #BlackDirectory YouTube index, with the aim of educating attendees about algorithmic bias.

"Divesting from the Algorithms: A #BlackDirectory Creator Showcase is a public exhibition that proposes the need for internet users to divest from algorithmic recommendations systems. Instead, by engaging in content curation, we can explore new, more critical and communal relationships with digital content. It is an audiovisual installment that aims to educate attendees about algorithmic bias while facilitating space for creators and audiences to interrogate their experiences with algorithmically distributed content. The exhibit will feature a curation of videos from YouTube from The #BlackDirectory YouTube Index, my predominantly Black archive of over 270 content creators, as well as a panel discussion led content creators based in Atlanta."

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Jonny Hopkins......is making a web tool that allows anyone to generate interactive, three.js game environments featuring their own photos.

"I'm inspired by pre-rendered, fixed-camera 3D environments + adventure games from the 90s and 2000s and want to make a game engine that allows anyone to create walkable environments + stories out of any photos they upload.

By modifying the perspective-matching algorithm used by Fspy (an open source perspective software used for modeling), I will be able to generate camera data that can be used in a three.js scene. All in one page, players can upload photos from their computer, draw perspective lines to generate camera data, and drop in a character into their scene. From there you can add collision details. Finally you will be able to export your scene into its own web page:^) The grant will help with development time and hosting a domain."

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trav fryer......is building v2 of a kisok that lets people design + print stickers and clothing tags, encouraging mending and care for used objects.

"custo is a kiosk for archiving stories of objects. The kiosk allows users to design, print and scan tags affixed to items. The kiosk can print both stickers and ribbons (just like the tags in clothes).

They are designed on the kiosk using a stylus. These tags contain a QR code that links to a Scuttlebutt message associated with the item. People can comment on the item with stories about it or contact the current owner of the item.

My thesis is that people care more about (and are less likely to discard) items with stories. custo exists currently as a prototype.

With your help I'd like to build an improved second kiosk and publicly install it somewhere: a public library, free store, hackerspace, gallery, etc."

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SwampNet...is building an off-grid, solar-powered server on a community farm in New Orleans.

"SwampNet is a project to build alternative and autonomous communications in Bvlbancha (New Orleans) and across the American Gulf South. Since 2023, we have been deploying and experimenting with different networking technologies to build emergency communication infrastructures and experiment with ways of thinking about relationships between data, place, and memory. With the funds from the microgrant, we will build out a solar-powered, off-grid server that lives at a community farm, one of our partner sites. The server will function as a local digital archive for the garden that includes seasonal records and observations, in addition to hosting resources to support communities in times of emergencies, such as maps, tutorials, and guides."

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Spencer Chang...is building a library of tools to create interconneected, social interations that unfold across multiple websites in real-time

"Traditional social media comes with platform lock-in and a need to accrue following. Instead, I envision an archipelago of interconnected but independent websites that blend the shared experience of physical third spaces with the web’s distributed scale.

archipelago is infrastructure for creating communal spaces on the open internet, built on playhtml, an open-source library for making collaborative elements. Website owners can program social interactions that unfold across multiple websites in real-time. Built to be unopinionated and universally compatible, it enables new kinds of collective play while preserving personal expression.

The award will fund development and hosting costs to run the infrastructure as a free public good."

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Developh...is organizing a simulated call center where Filipino political & historical figures, celebrities, and posters are on-call 24/7 to respond to anything from legislative commentary to sexual fantasies.

"‘Binondo Global Solutions’ is a simulated call center where Filipino political & historical figures, celebrities, and posters are on-call 24/7 to respond to anything from legislative commentary to sexual fantasies.

The call center is the Philippines’ largest industry. This repositions the center to question why our institutions remain inefficient & corrupt, while white collar citizens power hyperefficient labor. It touches on call center's sexuality/queerness, state weaponization of AI, surveillance, etc. in its dialog trees. Agents will evolve, emote, give up.

Solutions will present as an 'actual company' with a website, phone line (where you must be on mobile to 'dial' your agent), and IRL advertisements + possible pop-up performances."

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Etienne Mason......is further developing a portable spatial audio system that reacts to environmental noise, making it easier to turn any space into an immersive experience.

"I am developing a portable spatial audio system that can turn any space into an immersive experience, scalable from a few speakers to a full array. It combines a synthesizer I designed called CYCL with a network of NODE devices, wireless microphones and processing units with custom DSP. These capture audience sounds and environmental noise, reshape them, and diffuse them back into the room in real time. This grant would support the research and fabrication of the NODEs, leading to an open-source release of firmware and schematics."

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Sanjna Selva...is crafting a screen-based desktop documentary to explore how grief, surveillance, and state control converge on Malaysia’s internet.

"Open Source is a screen-based narrative in the form of a desktop documentary, exploring how grief, surveillance, and state control converge on Malaysia’s internet. Using the desktop as both interface and medium, the project reimagines the computer screen as a site of digital ethnography, tracing how the suicide of a Malaysian influencer named Esha due to cyberbullying, sparks sweeping “digital safety” laws that quietly erode online freedom. Here, browser tabs, chat threads, and policy data expose the politics of connection, tracing how a single tragedy ripples into networked control. The Rhizome Microgrant will support the creation of an interactive companion—part-online archive, part-living interface—that extends the film’s research, allowing users to navigate Esha’s digital footprint and Malaysia’s shifting DNS policies as an open, participatory network, as an experiment in rethinking how we witness, remember, and resist online."

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Miguel Cinta Robles...is setting up a small-scale data center to enable offline, local file exchange in a community space based in Oaxaca.

"“VERNOS” is a gathering for exchanging digital files in a physical/offline space. The idea emerges from taking responsibility for the weight of our documents through a collective network of USBs and bodies that seek to confront recommendation and profiling algorithms by creating spaces to look each other in the eye, tell stories, and share readings, programs, or music. The concept comes from the idea of “trueque,” a mesoamerican technology of exchange practiced in tianquiztli (markets), where farmers used seeds, fruits, meat, or vegetables as currency."..."This grant would allow to begin the construction of the first module of a small-scale data center. The support would be used to acquire a low-energy microserver (such as a Raspberry Pi or MiniPC), external hard drives for backup, solar batteries, and materials for a weather-resistant protective casing."

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The Rhizome Microgrants 2025-26 program has been funded by small donations from our community.

Octant-funded projects were required to support an "open internet" by developing free/open-source software, building interoperable or decentralized systems, or increasing transparency around digital infrastructure and policy.

[DEADLINE EXTENDED!] Apply to the Counterstructural Commons Residency

Rhizome Staff post — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 11:13:00 -0500

Apply by January 28

Update: The deadline has been extended to January 28, 12AM.

Beginning in January, Rhizome will host the winter edition of Creative Futures: Counterstructures (CFC), Mozilla Foundation’s 10-week cultural R&D residency where creative technologists and communities come together to imagine, test, and build alternative tech infrastructures. Based on the Mozilla Foundation's global futurist communities, we've put together a list of guiding principles (see below) for this residency.

The program will run weekly in NYC from Feb 25, 2026 to April 29, 2026, with a final presentation of finished projects on May 16, 2025. Applications will be juried by Bri Griffin (rhizome community designer), Ruby Justice (designer, writer, and theorist), Sam Lavigne (artist and educator), and Laurel Schwulst (designer and educator).

As AI and algorithmic systems increasingly mediate human decision-making, and as ecological crises demand new models of consensus formation and collaboration, communities need accessible frameworks for examining technological systems. The Counterstructural Commons residency provides technology-focused artists with resources for prototyping and developing a project over the course of 10 weeks. Projects could take many forms, including but not limited to an educational tool, cooperative game format, or a workshop syllabus.

This residency is for creative technologists and multidisciplinary artists who use technology as a medium for cultural inquiry. Participants bring critical perspectives, research-driven practices, and collaborative approaches to emerging tools. Experience with AI can be at any level, but some proficiency with coding is required. Because this cohort is hosted by Rhizome in New York, residents must be based in NYC for the full 10 weeks.

What do residents receive?

$2,500 (USD): $2,000 stipend + $500 materials budget
Weekly in-person worksessions at Rhizome’s Lower Manhattan offices
Guest lectures with practitioners across art, technology, and community design
Inclusion in Rhizome’s 7×7 program via video documentation
Publication of final projects in a collective documentation report (online and print)
Digital preservation of work following Rhizome’s archival guidelines

What will residents do?

Prototype an artifact: Develop a counterstructure— an artifact, installation, system, artwork, or tool— for public exhibition. Projects should take up at least one of the guiding principles around community governance, technological agency, commoning, consent, human-AI relations, or ecological accountability. You can find these principles in the application form.

Participate in programming: Engage in listening, reading, sharing, workshops, and facilitated critique. Residents will test ideas with peers and community members, gaining access to audiences and spaces to refine, iterate, and deepen the work.

Document and reflect: Write a 750-word report capturing the project’s development, process, and insights. Documentation contributes to the Creative Futures Counterstructures Report and the online archive.

Present: Share your work with a public audience at Rhizome’s 7×7 program, as part of a culminating presentation.

Guiding Principles

Infrastructure for public good rather than extractive or proprietary systems
Technologies that create resonance - tools and environments that return agency and aliveness to people rather than absorbing it.
Alternative technological histories and ecological knowledge that inform different digital futures
Joy, play, and beauty as core components of community technology
Consent in human-AI collaboration, including who has standing to grant or refuse it
What neighbors actually think about technology’s role in their lives, beyond platform-generated assumptions
Community-based worldbuilding instead of expert-driven forecasting
Viable and thriving digital commons and how to strengthen them
Technology for diverse realities (literacy, connectivity, device access, culture)
Minimally mediated, inquiry-driven spaces for communal technological learning

Bedrocks, Not Clouds: an interview with Batool Desouky

Ana Meisel — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 11:44:00 -0500

Have you ever been interested in ways of applying commoning, ecology, and degrowth to your creative practice? In this interview, Ana Meisel interviews Batool Desouky, a computational artist who is reimagining computation through analog processes, community organizing, and combinatorics.

Ana Meisel: Where are we right now?

Batool Desouky: We’re in London, England, in the Walthamstow Marshes, tucked under a tree. It’s also a bird observation area and a reservoir. I haven’t been on the observation decks but I’ve seen the blackboard in the café with recently observed birds. I live not far from here, in Seven Sisters, so it’s a five-minute bus ride.

Picture of walthamstow marshes and fields

AM: How do you describe yourself as an artist?

BD: I describe myself as a computational artist. It helps focus my practice to the realm of computing. Even though I work with analog and physical materials—drawings, physical computing—it is always guided by algorithmic concerns and processes.

I’m also a part of In-grid, a collective formed in 2019 that works in and around digital infrastructures. We work on community-facing projects, including parties and events in club venues, bringing performance and interactive practices into those spaces.

AM: What are you researching now?

BD: Labor—specifically the ways in which low-level technical processes attempt to automate labor, and how algorithms become implicated in labor extraction through automation. I'm tying with historical research on magical workings, and the techincal processes of making talismans.

Currently, we are working a lot on ServPub, which is an experimental platform for computational publishing. It’s a research project done in collaboration with several other collectives experienced in collective infrastructure and feminist server spaces. We built a London server node—supported by Systerserver, a feminist server project, offering services to its network of feminist, queer and antipatriarchal folks to host Servpub and a collective writing platform that we called wiki4print. It is based on earlier versions of this tools; Wiki-to-print by Creative Crowds, wiki2print by Hackers & Designers and wiki-to-pdf by TITiPI.

Batool presenting collective publishing ideas, butterfly emoji hovering above their hand, taken from https://www.in-grid.io/projects/collective-infra/

AM: How did you start thinking about technology in a permacomputing or environmental way?

BD: I hadn’t thought of my work as “locality-focused,” until you mentioned it, but but that’s true, the servers literally live in our bedrooms. My entry point into permacomputing was researching an algorithm related to ordering sequences (combinatorics). That led me to magic squares, and then to Arabic mathematical and magic traditions, which conceptualise number structures relationally instead of through classification and division.

Still from "Programmoire and The Workstation," Batool Desouky. https://vimeo.com/465162807.

AM: Do you follow a specific methodology?

BD: I like following research until I find a point where it intersects with material conditions—land, time, embodied labor. I try to trace things back to where they make physical, consequential sense. For ServPub, the technical documentation and actual physical build of the server are central.

AM: Do you have advice on divesting from big tech?

BD: Yes, I’m developing a summer school about this. A great resource is NEoN’s Counter-Cloud Audit. The first step is emotional: accept that it’s okay to leave platforms like Google. The next step is to remove your files from cloud drives, and store them locally. Understand what you’re storing and why. Use video only when needed—it saves power.

AM: Are these technological practices political acts?

BD: Yes. Especially now, as corporations increasingly secure government contracts. Political acts aren’t only “anti-establishment," sometimes they’re about resisting corporate power that overshadows public institutions.

AM: Do you think your work deals with “radical” approaches to technology?

BD: Yes, in the sense of going to the roots which is literally the etymology of “radical.” I think a lot about origins and material grounding.

AM: Do you find tension between accessibility and exposing infrastructure?

BD: Definitely. Even the word “server” scares people. We try to demystify our work by bringing the physical Raspberry Pi with us when we give public workshops on the servpub infrastructure. Our documentation also takes into account common human-made errors, like lost SSH keys or coordination issues which reveal the real structure behind the system. Our hosted pages are extremely simple HTML.

Screenshot of "Example Domain", ServPub, https://github.com/In-grid-collective/servPubWiki/blob/main/EasstWorkshop/media/exampledomain.png.

AM:What are some tools you love right now?

BD: Obsidian. Deeply obsessed. It supports markdown, plugins, calendars, PDF annotation, Git repos… everything. I love that you can apply custom CSS to change the interface. I haven’t tried SilverBullet yet, but I will.

AM: What is something you wish were more normalised in tech culture?

BD: Hardware storage! Localizing work. Developing an intimate relationship with your own machine. Students now use any random laptop and rely on cloud accounts. It erodes connection with their own tools. Hardware should become precious again.

Ana Meisel is a Polish-German web developer based in London, UK, who runs internet art gallery External Pages and is one-third of the research group Superkilogirls.

Batool Desouky is a computational artist and creative technologist. Their work is cultivated through a practice-based research on the technical and historical ties between computation and Arabic indigenous occult traditions. They work in code, drawing, physical computing and writing to explore alternative and decolonial histories of the narrative of technology.

Rhizome at 18th Street Arts Center!

Rhizome Staff post — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 12:12:00 -0500

Rhizome’s solar server has found a permanent home on the roof of the historic 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California, where it will bask in the Organization’s vibrant rays.

Founded in 1988, 18th Street Arts Center has a rich history as a meeting place for artists and activists in Southern California and beyond. The space has been an early champion of performance art—publishing the seminal High Performance Magazine in its early days—and served as an active hub for ACT-UP’s west coast branch. The center has long kept up with the surrounding arts and tech scene of Los Angeles, and from 1989-2000 housed the Electronic Cafe Network, a decades-long initiative led by artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, which consisted of a network of computer terminals in cafes throughout neighborhoods in the region. Today, 18th Street runs one of the top Artist-in-Residency programs in the US, which supports artists with the creation of new artworks.

Rhizome’s server exists within a “naturally intelligent network” of other solar-powered servers, an initiative led by artists Tega Brain, Alex Nathanson, and Benedetta Piantella, called Solar Protocol. The server can only offer sporadic connectivity that is dependent on available sunshine, the length of day, and local weather conditions in Santa Monica. Requests for a given website are routed by the network to whatever location has the most sunshine at that time.

Back in August, we shared a bit about our solar web in schools workshops series, funded by grants from Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation and the New York City Cultural Development Fund. To conclude these workshops, students created their own ASCII artworks that are currently being exhibited on a website that lives on the server. At 18th Street Arts Center, we’re excited to bridge Rhizome’s programming with the creative communities in Santa Monica.

--
18th Street Arts Center is one of the top artist residency programs in the US, and the largest in Southern California. Conceived as a radical think tank in the shape of an artist community, 18th Street supports artists from around the globe to imagine, research, and develop significant, meaningful new artworks and share them with the public. We strive to provide artists the space and time to take risks, to foster the ideal environment for artists and the public to directly engage, and to create experiences and partnerships that foster positive social change.

This program was made possible with support from Teiger Foundation’s Climate Action Pilot

Rhizome’s Climate Impact work and Solar Server Development was led by Mark Beasley

Special thank you to Michael Ano and Tyler Madsen at 18th Street Arts Center, and Solar Protocol (Tega Brain, Alex Nathanson, and Benefetta Piantella)

3 reasons why you should buy Rhizome's 2026 wall calendars, backed by Science!

Kayla Drzewicki — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 13:38:00 -0500

To mark our 30th anniversary, we've released a limited-edition, 2026 wall calendar featuring artworks from ArtBase.

For this occasion, we've put together 3 reasons why it's a good idea to use a wall calendar in 2026.

1. Writing by hand is better for memory. In a 2014 study conducted at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), participants wore hairnets with 256 sensors that recorded their brain activity as they wrote or typed 15 words from the game Pictonary. When students wrote the words by hand, "the sensors picked up widespread connectivity across many brain regions. Typing, however, led to minimal activity, if any, in the same areas. Handwriting activated connection patterns spanning visual regions, regions that receive and process sensory information and the motor cortex. The latter handles body movement and sensorimotor integration, which helps the brain use environmental inputs to inform a person’s next action."

2. Paper calendars make you more productive and successful. If you are looking to have a more productive year, researchers at Columbia Business School argue that using a paper calendar can help. Key findings of their 2022 study illustrate that people who use paper calendars are more easily able to see the "big picture" when they're making plans, and are more likely to follow through on their activities than people who use digital calendars.

3. You'll be cooler and more interesting. Sure, you probably have all of your friends' and families' birthdays memorized by this point. But, do you happen to know important dates in internet history, like "Change your password Day," "SysAdmin Appreciation Day," or the date that rhizome hosted a competitive web surfing event in 2014? Knowing internet facts like these make you stand out amongst your peers and make for great conversation starters!

From digital love letters, to "networked" self-portraits, to generative artwork, this calendar illustrates the rich 26 year history of ArtBase, while also noting interesting dates in rhizome's history as a 30 year old born-digital arts institution.

Three new works have also been accessioned to ArtBase to mark the occasion - Memories of Digital Data (2023) by Kazuhiro Tanimoto, Self-Portrait (2018) by Olia Lialina, and TimeTraveller™(2012) by Skawennati. In addition to a major redesign of ArtBase coming next year, Rhizome will also bring back more regular accessions to ArtBase.

Artists in the calendar include Michael Manning, Entropy8Zuper!, Animated Text, Paper Rad, Kazuhiro Tanimoto, Eva & Franco Mattes, Penelope Umbrico, Skawennati, Olia Lialina, Mouchette, Yoshi Sodeoka, and Nathalie Lawhead.

Get yours today via Metalabel!

Introducing 𝔦 ❤ 𝔠𝔬𝔪𝔭𝔲𝔱𝔢𝔯 bumper stickers

Bri Griffin — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 12:01:00 -0500

Do you enjoy going online and do you own a car? Do you want to rep your definitely healthy relationship with your computer? We've got you covered with a set of six bumper stickers!

Designed by Rhizome Community Designer Bri Griffin, There's HONK for HTML, MY OTHER CAR IS A BROWSER, I BRAKE FOR <BR>, ONLINE SINCE 1996, LOOKING FOR WIFI, and of course I <3 COMPUTER.

Stickers are now on sale via Metalabel for $7. Or, purchase a mystery pack of 3 for $18! Prepare to be honked at.

On sale via Metalabel

Vibe Shift

Rhizome Staff post — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 13:04:00 -0400

Earlier this month, Rhizome presented Vibe Shift, a two-part event featuring a hackathon and showcase at ZeroSpace in Brooklyn, New York. Organized in partnership with Anthropic, this event sought to explore the creative practice of Vibe Coding, or the practice of using plain language to prompt LLMs like Claude to create executable computer code.

Rhizome has long supported some of the very first artists working online—artists misunderstood for experimenting with new technologies, for troubling canonical standards online and beyond, for treating the internet as a playground. From quantum internet experiments to pigeons that monitor air quality to competitive web surfing, we are committed to platforming art that defies categorization. With that in mind, we convened our communities as well as those of our partners NEW INC, Onassis ONX, and ZeroSpace to explore the nascent creative practice of AI-assisted coding and how artists are responding to these new systems.

Day 1: Hackathon

participants at the hackathon, October 8 at ZeroSpace in Brooklyn, NYC.

We gathered 100 artists from our community and 16 mentors to participate in a one-evening hackathon where they would learn, make, and reflect; participants and mentors were also invited to share their work in a public showcase the following night.

Ploipailin Flynn, co-founder of AIxDESIGN, set the broader context for the night, urging participants to reflect on process over product. She set out a framework of “Slow AI,” prompting those gathered to make things that are “small, weird, and situated.” Everyone was given printed worksheets that asked them to make note of credit usage, intentions, and results.

The hackathon was anchored by a wonderful group of mentors—Chia Amisola, Kevin McCoy, Louise Macfadyen, Will Freudenheim, Don Hanson, Morry Kolman, Paizley Lee, Jamie Wilkinson, Daniel Temkin, Aaron Santiago, Shakti Mb, Saarim Zaman, John Threat, Ploipailin Flynn, Char Stiles, Rox Harris—who provided guidance on how to get started, sharing insight into their practices and how vibe coding can be used to augment, intersect with, or interrogate them.

breakout mentor session during the hackathon, October 8 at ZeroSpace in Brooklyn, NYC.

In a workshop with Chia Amisola, participants learned how to generate bookmarklets to “perform” websites; Morry Kolman walked us through how one might use AI to scrape public data from websites; Kevin McCoy challenged us to vibe code software with a user base of one.

From creating unscalable software, to designing absurd programming languages, to imagining alternative, slower narratives to AI, the evening was a vivid snapshot of artist communities navigating change, and a testament to the continued relevance of artistic perspectives even as tools and contexts shift.

Ploipailin Flynn, co-founder of AIxDESIGN, speaks at the hackathon on October 8 at ZeroSpace in Brooklyn, NYC.

Kevin McCoy, artist, served as a mentor during the hackathon on October 8 at ZeroSpace in Brooklyn, NYC.

Day 2: Vibe Shift Party

The following day we returned to ZeroSpace once again to see the works made during the hackathon, dance to live coded performances, eat cupcakes, scream at the top of our lungs during the vibe code battle, and more!

Showcase

A simulation of a 2-month old baby’s vision. An interactive maze that invites you to “browse the universe.” A rude horoscope. An ambient drone interface inspired by the cosmos of the universe. These are a few of the Claude-powered works on view at Vibe Shift, installed on projections and computers and in a subway car. Along with the exhibited works, participants and mentors also shared work via five-minute presentations for an attentive crowd.

Vibe Code Jam with John Threat/Rip Space

John Threat leads the vibe code battle on October 9 at ZeroSpace in Brooklyn, NYC.

Bethany Crystal and Lyell Hintz compete at the vibe code battle, October 9 at ZeroSpace in Brooklyn, NYC.

There’s a lot that you can do in 8 minutes—

Veteran vibe coders were invited to the stage to see what they could make with Claude in 8 minutes, starting from scratch with an empty prompt. At the end of each round, audience cheers determined a “winner;” drama and hijinks ensued, with emcee John Threat keeping the energy level high.

Paizley Lee made a video game starring a rogue Anthropic employee; Alexander Bricken created an MS Paint clone that turned sketches into 3d objects; Lyell Hintz created an ASCII composition that cascaded all over the screen; Bethany Crystal imagined what Taylor Swift’s campaign website might look like; Xuelong Mu created a visualizer for Pachelbel's Canon; and Char Stiles could not connect to wifi, but still won her round.

Live Coding Performances

The night closed out with a celebration of more traditional creative coding: live coded performances by Roxanne Harris and Char Stiles. Live Coding is the act of writing and editing computer code to generate live music or an audiovisual experience—it emphasizes process and transparency, revealing the code and interfaces the performer uses to generate the sound and visuals in real-time.

participants in a breakout mentor session lead by Char Stiles, October 8 at ZeroSpace in Brooklyn, NYC.

Part 5: Thank you!

Like all of our events, this one could not have been possible without the support and guidance of many people, and our community.

Thanks to Anthropic, NEW INC, Matthew, Aaron, and Toups at Onassis ONX for everything from last-minute tech support, to encouraging members of your community to take part in the hackathon!

Thanks to the team at ZeroSpace: Jae Shin, Xuelong Mu, Hanzo, Josh Pitts, and Audrey Perera.

Thank you to all of our hackathon participants who presented works: Audrey Chou, Elizabeth Lin, Jenn Scheer, Lord Fascinator, Jackie Neon, Kalinda Panholzer, Jason Isolini, dotsimulate, Noah Eisenbruch, Mariel Martinez Estevez, Isaac Sante, Dahlia Bloomstone, Aarati Akkapeddi, Shayla Lee, Adelle Yingxi Lin, Morry Kolman, and Shristi Singh.

Thank you to our presenters Ploi Flynn, Daniel Temkin, Chia Amisola, Don Hanson, Paizley Lee, Jason Isolini, Morry Kolman, Brent Cox, Audrey Chou, Amita Shukla, and Shristi Singh.

Thanks to our excellent docents and staff: Jacob, Marin, Kendall, Chuck, Roger, David, Martin Campbell Security, and Tapuz Staffing.

Thanks to our vendors: Perfect Blends catering, Yummy Tummy’s Cupcakes, Brooklyn Food Guild, NA Visitor Beer, Lunar Hard Seltzer.

Thanks to SDN Broadcast for another seamless event!

ZeroSpace

crowd watches the presentations on October 9 at ZeroSpace in Brooklyn, NYC.

Call 1-800 Shaolin for a good time

Rhizome Staff post — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 10:54:00 -0400

In 2008, the electronic artist Max Tundra released an album in the form of a Kosher Chicken noodle soup can.

In a recent interview, rapper Soulja Boy revealed that he purposefully mistitled his song Crank That on Limewire, attributing it to prominent Billboard artists such as 50 Cent, Eminem, and Britney Spears, in order to trick users into downloading the song.

Years later in 2014, U2 sparked backlash when they released their thirteenth studio album Song of Innocence for free on iTunes—automatically adding it to users’ libraries without their consent.

Since the shift from owned media to streaming rewrote music industry power dynamics, many artists have released music in unconventional ways – but few have gone as far as Wu-Tang Clan. In 2015 they released only one copy of their seventh studio album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin for $1 million, deleted the master files, put it on a CD, and placed it inside of a silver jewel-encrusted box with a wax Wu-Tang Clan seal. The terms established by the group—that it must remain private, free and non-replicable—meant that it could not be uploaded, streamed or downloaded online. In doing so, the group hoped to raise its value to that of fine art, and “inspire urgent debates about the value of music” in a world where streaming is so ubiquitous the very act tends to water down its value.

This begs the question, how do you experience an album that has only one copy in the world; whose online existence is forbidden?

For their 7x7 presentation this year, Spencer Harrison, Artistic Director of PleaserDAO, who purchased the album in 2021, and Máuhan M Zonoozy, entrepreneur, designer, and conceptual artist, set out to answer this question with a series of truly out-of-the (silver jewel-encrusted) box solutions.

(Note: by reading past this point, you agree to be bound by the project’s NDA. If you consent you may scroll further. This is definitely legally binding and would for sure hold up in court.)

Some of their solutions:

A spring-loaded shoe with a subwoofer so you can “feel the music in your sole.”

A semi-autonomous ride share experience where the album is embedded inside of the speaker system.

A dual-purpose private listening helmet that is NASA certified to go to space.

And more.

While the pair ultimately went in a different direction, all of the above prototypes provide private, free and non-replicable forms of listening. Using the law as their source material to create from, see how the pair transforms a New York City phone booth into a private listening experience.

This year’s 7x7 was copresented by Rhizome and Backslash at Cornell Tech. Watch other presentations from this year's conference.

Read "wu-tang clan, $4 million dollars, and a phone booth" by Máuhan Zonoozy

Guests of the rhizome 2025 Benefit listening to Once upon a time in Shaolin on a custom speaker designed by Emmett Palaima. Guests had to put their phones in a sealed magnetic pouch that required a special magnet to be opened. Photo by Alexey Kim/ Sidewalkkilla.

Instead of Reading this Post, Consider Wasting your Life

Rhizome Staff post — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 10:33:00 -0400

Going for a walk on the beach. Dancing. Taking a nap. Walking your dog. Staring out the window. Waiting in line. What do these activities have in common?

According to experiential art and technology duo Operator (Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti), and Helen Nissenbaum, philosopher and Director of the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, all of these so-called meaningful activities are a total waste!

…a waste for whom?

In today’s data economy, constant online engagement and attention is seen as an extractable resource. Predatory technologies are watching your every move in order to see how they can make more money off of you. They may be the most meaningful, life-affirming moments, but because the above activities do not depend on platforms, generate shareable content, or trigger targeted ads, they are worthless to algorithms: a waste.

In their presentation for 7x7 this year, the group demonstrated a speculative tool that encourages users to have useless experiences–useless from a Data Economy perspective. For example, say you’re sitting at a park watching a pigeon instead of your phone. The Data Economy Verdict would rate this as “catastrophic” because there is zero Return on Investment (ROI); no pigeon products were purchased and no pigeon data was generated. By redefining waste from the perspective of algorithmic systems, can we gain a new appreciation for the uneventful, mundane, albeit unavoidable moments in our daily lives? Can the practice of Wasting our Lives help us recover what has been lost to platform capitalism?

From a human perspective, “empty moments,” like waiting in line, getting stuck in traffic, or commuting on the subway, can feel like a waste of time. So the next time you find yourself engaged in a boring activity, take comfort in the fact that you’re also wasting the time of platforms and technologies that constantly profit off of you.

This year’s 7x7 was copresented by Rhizome and Backslash at Cornell Tech, and this collaboration is supported by OnKaos. Watch other presentations from this year's conference.

Open Call: Microgrants 2025

Bri Griffin — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 10:47:21 -0400

For nearly 30 years, Rhizome has supported digital art that has helped to shape contemporary conversations about technology and culture. In an era of platform monopolies, algorithmic manipulation, and AI-generated content, artists have become essential voices in debates about digital rights, community ownership, and technological futures. They're not just creating objects for gallery walls, but participating within an expanded understanding of artistic practice.

Our 2025 Microgrants ($500-$1500) support creators experimenting with alternatives for digital culture, from community-owned platforms to algorithmic realities. We're looking for projects that fit four themes: Network Commons (reimagining how we connect), Public Personas (navigating fame and identity in algorithmic environments), Narrative Systems (breaking free from traditional interaction mechanics), and Synthetic Agents (collaborating with other intelligences). The Rhizome Microgrants are funded by small donations from our community; thanks to a special grant from Octant, we also have an add-on grant available for any project that relates to the theme of “open internet.” (See details below!)

Submissions will be reviewed by a combination of rhizome staff and an extended panel of guest jurors: Francis Tseng, Constant Dullaart, Hundred Rabbits, and Claire L. Evans. In addition to receiving funding, awarded grant recipients will have the opportunity to present work to fellow artists and community members, as well as receive feedback for in-progress work. Select awardees are considered for rhizome programming, exhibitions, and potential inclusion in ArtBase, rhizome’s archive of digital art.

We're looking for compelling ideas and creative vision, regardless of your technical or demographic background. Artists, hackers, researchers, game masters, designers, storytellers, tinkers, community builders, scientists, archivists, culture workers, and dreamers are all invited to apply.

Apply by October 10

If you have questions about the program, they might have already been answered on our FAQ page for microgrants. Otherwise, we'll have an infromation session x micro-grantwriting guide event on September 29, 2025 @ 10am EST! If interested in learning more about the program and process, please RSVP!

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Submission Categories :

Network Commons supports projects that reimagine how we gather, connect, and interact. We welcome proposals for physical spaces enhanced by digital tools, online communities with strong offline components, and the models for connection that venture into the realm of the unexpected.

We're interested in artists and technologists who are building and owning their own infrastructure—whether that's hosting servers, building small-scale social platforms, or developing speculative protocols for community interactions. Artists who examine and amplify case studies of 'in-between' digital environments such as YouTube comment threads, readme.txt files, and Venmo payment descriptions, are also encouraged to apply!.

Is it human nature to find intimacy even in the tiniest interactions? Rather than accumulating followers, what role does the modern artist play as a community facilitator? Can we reclaim the ways we meet? Are there gathering places that resist the surveillance and addiction cycles of mainstream platforms?

(small, intimate groups, gathering places, temporary homes, alt social media, p2p networks, diy infrastructure, file exchange)

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Must we always be the author of our realities?

Synthetic Agents doubles down into the world of the uncanny, supporting the creation of experimental models, virtual clones, algorithmic authors, and generated realities. This category encompasses projects that engage in technological mimicry of biological systems, including deepfakes, simulations, and spambots as artistic material. We're interested in artists who dive deeper into treating technology as both collaborators and subjects of investigation. Rather than mourning lost autonomy, how might we produce new forms of synthetic freedom?

Instead of building systems based on human-centric assumptions, what happens when we let synthetic agents develop their own ways of perceiving and categorizing reality? How do we move beyond "Garbage In, Garbage Out" approaches that trap AI in a sea of accumulated human biases, toward unsupervised learning that might reveal patterns we've failed to recognize?

Proposals might use synthetic media not just to replicate natural behavior, but to dig deeper into constructed natures of identity and expression. We welcome work that explores the emergent, non-rational, and unpredictable aspects of programmed environments, examining the social and cultural implications of increasingly complex technological systems.

(deepfakes, voice cloning, bots of all types, exploring authenticity and authorship in algorithmic creation, generated realities)

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Narrative Systems focuses on artists who experiment with mechanisms of user interaction, modifying and challenging homogenized design patterns of our technological life. We're particularly interested in exploring how under-appreciated systems—controller vibrations, alt-text, pop-up notifications, scent diffusers, scroll wheels, remotes, loading screens, and motion sensors—can give new meaning to pedestrian spaces online.

Proposals might feature experimental apps, alternative game formats, subversive interface design, modified consumer electronics, odd file structures, or websites that blur the lines between interface and narrative.

We also welcome work that reconsiders the chaos of the early interactive media era with a contemporary lens. Among countless 'gimmicks' that failed to find commercial success, are there special forms of interaction waiting to be revealed? Can a website miss you if you don’t visit it often enough? What if buttons degraded after being pressed too many times? What would a sarcastic search bar look like?

(storytelling through menu design, revisiting early point and click/CD-ROMs in browser, weird UI/HCI experiments)

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Public Personas examines the increasingly interweaving roles of “artist” and “content creator”, supporting projects that engage critically and creatively with algorithmic environments and large-scale audience engagement. Proposals can range from chain-mail to tiktok edits, featuring personas that are either real or fabricated.

Throughout the history of communication technologies, artists have molded their practice after the dynamics of information transmission to create works that exist across multiple nodes rather than as fixed objects.

Following the tradition of “culture workers” who operate within popular systems while maintaining deeper values, we support artists who study their cultural milieu to create work that moves people rather than merely manipulating them. In an era where all art exists within an overwhelming informational landscape, can anything meaningful be smuggled into mainstream circulation? What are the tensions between authentic artistic expression and the seemingly endless demand for viral content? How do different platform economics shape the culture that is successfully transmitted?

(thinking of the artist as a public figure, viral content, creating work to move large audiences, optimizing for platforms

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Optional Add-On Funding:

Projects in any category may also opt-in to qualifying for additional funding through Octant if they align with the theme of an "open internet", such as developing free/open-source software, building interoperable or decentralized systems, or increasing transparency around digital infrastructure and policy.

Octant is an Ethereum-based platform supporting hundreds of impactful open-source projects through sustainable funding and community-led decision-making. They're now building a suite of products that empower other organizations to flexibly do the same.

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Finally...as a bonus, we've put together a few inspo boards for each of this year's categories.

Graphic Design by Bri Griffin.

Announcing NEW INC's Y12 Art & Code Cohort!

Rhizome Staff post — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 12:36:00 -0400

Meet the cohort making up NEW INC's 2025-26 Art & Code track, a collaboration between Rhizome and NEW INC, now in its sixth year!

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.

Learn about the cohort below!

Anna Zhang is an artist and creative technologist working across new media, speculative fiction, and games. Her practice explores the invisible labor, power dynamics, and unspoken rules embedded within technological systems. Through images, code, text, and interactive media, she examines how these systems shape lived experience while creating space for reinterpretation, resistance, and reimagination.

Her work has been featured in The Royal Photographic Journal, Real Life, New Media Caucus, and Forbes, and exhibited at the National Museum of American History.

Aurora Mititelu is an artist based in Los Angeles, working with computer images, AI, and physical installations to examine how computational media constructs perception, identity, and autonomy. Informed by her experience growing up in post-socialist Romania amid the influx of Western digital culture, her practice reflects a critical interest in how media technologies shape social imaginaries.

She is a Fulbright grantee and the coordinator of Social Software, a research lab at UCLA focused on critical approaches to software and society. She also teaches at and directs the AI, Code & Art Summer Institute at UCLA. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including a commission from Google DeepMind and exhibitions at House of Arts Brno (Czech Republic) and Plexus Projects (New York).

¡wénrán zhào! is an artist, programmer, and designer working with data, language, and fiber. She crafts software tools, data visualizations, and digital publications, examining the political and cultural implications of technological advancement and globalization.

She divides her time equally between two crafts: writing code and making textiles. Her textile works are often augmented with bespoke software, through projection, electronics or otherwise.

Her work has been published at ISEA 2024, Electronic Literature Organization Conference, Taper, and The New River. She was a recipient of NMC Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award in 2024.

Lita (DJ Lita) is a first-generation Ecuadorian-American interdisciplinary artist, DJ, and creative technologist whose practice bridges sound, code, and design to build accessible, justice-centered systems of expression. Working at the intersection of decolonial frameworks, open-source technology, and collective memory, she creates immersive sonic experiences, custom-built musical instruments, and participatory installations. Her ongoing project, Sonic Liberation Devices, explores how hardware and sound can function as tools for protest, pedagogy, and communal storytelling. Through performances, workshops, and collaborative platforms, Lita invites communities to engage with music technology in tactile, inclusive, and transformative ways. Her work foregrounds accessibility, care, and creative resistance as central frameworks for reimagining who gets to build, listen, and be heard.

Marissa Sean Cruz is a digital multimedia and video performance artist from Kjipuktuk (so-called Halifax). Cruz’s topics of interest are related to labour, power and surveillance as seen through digital platforms and pop culture. Their experimental videos comprise found footage, 3D modelling, sound design and costumed performances to look at value systems with critical sensibility. These satirical works aim to capture a fast-paced contemporary present and envision possible, liberatory futures.

Mattaniah Aytenfsu is a new media artist, designer, and engineer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the interplay of computation, consciousness, and expression.

Using code as her primary medium, Mattaniah creates generative artifacts and experiences that demystify technology and reveal its humanistic potential. Her work seeks to externalize the internal, empowering individuals to reflect on their inner worlds, their communities, and the ecosystems they inhabit.

Her work has been presented at Sundance Film Festival and Gray Area, and featured in publications such as Forbes and Refinery29.

Morry Kolman (WTTDOTM) is an award-winning independent multimedia artist and developer born and raised in NYC. His work - which includes Traffic Cam Photobooth, First Light, Are You The Asshole, Mr. Beast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money, and more - has been featured internationally in GQ, The Guardian, Vice, Fast Company, The Verge, and elsewhere. He creates interactive and entertaining ways to demystify, make legible, or upend the technological and cultural forces that affect us everyday. With a background in visual theory and science and technology studies, he is especially interested in the differences of perception and processing that separate humans from machines, and the potentials for expression, meaning, or subversion come out of that gap. He currently lives in Brooklyn with a very cluttered desk and his two cats.

Nicci Yin (she/her) is a designer, researcher, and artist based between the US and Taiwan. She creates playful, embodied, and collaborative approaches to technology, exploring computing as both object and medium. Her practice investigates the metaphors embedded in interfaces and how screen-based rituals—like clicking, swiping, or linking—can be reimagined in material space. With a background in UX for digital platforms, wearables, and AI systems, she is also focused on interactions that are expressive, relational, or purposefully useless. Her recent work treats design as a generative, social process and code as choreography for shared, situated experiences.

Her work has been presented internationally, including at Ars Electronica and MAAT (Portugal). She has also contributed as a mentor and guest critic at the University of Washington and ArtCenter College of Design.

Romi Ron Morrison is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and writer. Using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center Black diasporic technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world—reducing land into property, people into digits, and knowledge into data. Their current projects explore theories of Black Computational Thought, entropy, and forms of kinship that thrive in the face of uncertainty and unpredictability.

Romi has exhibited work and given talks at numerous exhibitions, conferences, and workshops around the world including Transmediale (Berlin), The Kitchen (New York), ALT_CPH Biennial (Copenhagen), the American Institute of Architects (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Queens Museum (New York), and the Walker Museum of Art.

They are currently an Assistant Professor in the Design Media Arts program at UCLA in Los Angeles and a 2024-2026 Just Tech Fellow.

Shakti Mb is designer, artist, and filmmaker from south India currently living in New York City. She runs Two Shiny Coins, an NYC-based experimental studio — part design, part film. Her work often spans video, software, and the web. For the past decade, she has been working as a software designer.

Tara Kelton is an Indian-American artist living in Bangalore, India. Tara’s work explores the evolving relationship between humans and machines, interrogating how individuals exercise control, decision-making and influence within digital systems and networks. Digital labour is at the centre of her practice—she immerses herself in the workings of digital services and platforms, from co-creating with image production studios in India, to collaborative experiments with gig workers, to reimagining the functionalities of search engines.

Tara’s work has been featured and supported by Hyundai Artlab, ZKM Karlsruhe, ArtForum, distant.gallery, Institute of Network Cultures, ICA Singapore, The Centre for Internet and Society, and the Kochi Muziris Biennale.

Tara is co-editor of Silicon Plateau, a publishing series that explores the intersection of technology, culture and society in the Indian IT city Bangalore.

Viola He is a Shanghai-born, NYC-brew educator, performer, interdisciplinary artist, and culture organizer. They work with DIY electronics, computer programming, dance/movements, and various time-based media, exploring pathways towards alternative structures, systems and interfaces across digital and physical mediums.

They create immersive experiences, installations, XR theatre, and improvisational performances using algorithmic approaches to enhance, alternate, and obfuscate audio-visual assets, investigating new sonic and visual aesthetics across digital and physical mediums. Viola is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Art at NYU Shanghai, as well as an organizing artist of leaderless collective Livecode.NYC, where they organize, perform, and wield their love/hate relationship with technology to challenge the rigid infrastructures around them.

X. A. Li is a Chinese-American artist and computer scientist living in Chicago. Using video, sound, text, and code, she creates site-responsive installations and performances that reclaim human meaning from complex economic and technological systems. Drawing from a formal background in artificial intelligence research, her work challenges dominant frameworks of utility, prediction, and optimization that collapse entropic reality into finite data. In uncanny environments unfurling over time and space, she induces state-of-the-art methods towards self-revelation at their illogical horizons, surfacing immediate tensions from inaccessible power structures and inviting active choice beyond what is known. She performs as half of Post Consumer Material and co-directs Leisure, a space for artistic experimentation in Chicago.

Learn about the 2024-2025 Year 11 cohort members.

Learn about the 2023-2024 Year 10 cohort members.

Learn about the 2022-2023 Year 10 cohort members.

Learn about the 2021-2022 Year 10 cohort members.

Octant to Offer Additional Support for Upcoming Microgrants

Rhizome Staff post — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:51:55 -0400

Mark your calendars, Rhizome’s next open call for Microgrants will launch in September!

Funded by donations from our community, Rhizome’s Microgrants program supports promising projects that relate to the artistic use of technology from artists around the world. Organized by Rhizome’s Community Designer Bri Griffin, the Microgrants program is designed to be highly accessible to anyone who wants to make something weird on the web, requiring only a very brief submission.

Last year, we had nearly 1000 applications and funded 19 projects across four themes. ”Categories encouraged submissions from themes inspired by various ongoing movements within and around the field of art, such as “Desktop Performance,” “Lost Web Histories,” “Money as a Medium,” and “Natural Cycles.”

As part of Rhizome’s next open call in September, microgrants will be augmented by an additional budget made available by the Ethereum platform Octant. Applicants and past micrograntees whose projects relate to the theme of “open internet” can opt in to be considered for additional support on top of their microgrant; the only ask is that funded projects would be asked to credit Octant.

Separately, Octant is running their own open call, Epoch 9. Closing on Wednesday, August 27, this open call is limited to creators who have previously created work working about or with Ethereum, with $1 million in funding available.

If you have ideas for the Rhizome Microgrants program or would like to provide support, there is still time – please reach out to us at briana.griffin@Rhizome.org!

Empowering Creators in the Algorithmic Era with rootoftwo and Michael Bennett

Rhizome Staff post — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 16:40:56 -0400

Do you believe that artists should be compensated when AI models use their (copyrighted) work as training data? Are you interested in joining a values-aligned community exploring networked forms of sovereignty that might replace the nation state, but you aren’t fabulously wealthy? Do you enjoy fresh water recreation and four distinct seasons?

If you answered yes to these questions, then the Great Lakes Urban Conurbation (Gluchaven) may be for you.

Rather than waiting for US federal courts to make a (likely unfavorable) decision about artist rights in the AI age, rootoftwo, a Detroit-based design and technology studio, and Michael Bennett, a Chicago-based attorney and researcher, proposed an act of anticipatory intervention on a regional level for their collaboration at this year’s 7x7.

Gluchaven is a data trust for artists in the Great Lakes Region. Holding creative works in all media, Gluchaven is a “legal, technical and cultural infrastructure” that protects and licenses works, enables AI training rights, hosts cultural programming, and even supports the right to exit.

As AI continues to scrape and influence culture at an astonishing rate, Gluchaven empowers artists to write the rules of engagement for the algorithmic era, and suggests that existing political entities and institutions may be insufficient to the task. The collaborators aim to harness the power that lies in the region already—a population of 110 million, a GDP of $6 trillion, and a history of writing their own rules—to give artists the freedom to define their participation in this new technological era, including the option to opt-out entirely and remove the influences of their data from a model using processes known as “Machine Unlearning.”

Watch the full presentation, May 9 at Cornell Tech!

7x7 is Rhizome’s yearly art and tech conference which pairs artists with technologists and asks them to “make something new.” This year’s 7x7 was co-presented by Rhizome and Backslash at Cornell Tech. See other presentations from this year’s conference!

Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art at MOCAD

Michael Connor — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 11:07:00 -0400

On view for just one more week, Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art is a wide-ranging exhibition that plays out across the central and front galleries, and Mike Kelley’s mobile homestead at MOCA Detroit.

For this exhibition, Rhizome prepared an offline environment featuring two significant web-based works by Pope.l – The Black Factory and distributingmartin (2000-2008). The former was a touring performance/intervention that took place in a customized touring van; the online platform served as portal and archive for it. The latter was intended as a kind of “easter egg” within the more visible platform; it was structured as a nonlinear blog that mixed personal narrative and science fiction, portraying a future set in the year “2025” in which the public has been infected, via biologically engineered fruit, with the DNA of MLK Jr. This website was only one part of a multi-channel project that also included proposed billboards; rumors; magazine ads, and a postering campaign. Pope.l described it as a way of “dispersing the body or the shadow of the body of Martin Luther King;” the website an incredible, enigmatic exploration of embodiment, Blackness, and information systems.

Pope.l’s works were given pride of place on a 2000s vintage flat screen computer monitor that greets visitors upon entry to the exhibition, which gathers up a proliferation of stories and positions. The rest of the show is equally full of deep histories and wild visions; works by Rhizome collaborators like manuel arturo abreu and Martine Syms; multi generational participation by Rafia Santana and her mother, Marilyn Nance; lost classics like the 1988 videogame Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness by Muriel Tramis.

With any luck, the exhibition will tour to further venues, but for those in the Detroit area, the show is up through August 10, 2025; you must check it out!

Installation view, Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art presented by The Kitchen at Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, May 2–August 10, 2025. Image courtesy of MOCAD. Photo by Timothy Johnson.

Rafia Santana, Installation view, Code Switch: DistributingBlackness, Reprogramming Internet Art presented by The Kitchen at Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, May 2–August 10, 2025. Image courtesy of MOCAD. Photo by Timothy Johnson.

Solar Web in schools

Rhizome Staff post — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 10:23:00 -0400

Can the solar web invite us into a more intentional relationship with computers and connectivity?

In an age of abundant computation and connectivity, this was the question that animated Rhizome’s recent workshop series, Solar Web in Schools, funded by grants from Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation and the New York City Cultural Development Fund.

The project emerged from thinking about our own digital footprint. Over the past decade, Rhizome has created a Winchester mansion of software infrastructure on the cloud. The effort to keep legacy digital art alive has led us to spin up server after server, making our archives dependent on a vast and resource-intensive infrastructure. It’s an incongruous match for a bastion of independent digital culture.

As participants in the 2023 Teiger Foundation Climate Action Pilot, we began to take a closer look at this dependency. Our erstwhile Lead Developer Mark Beasley developed a portal to track Rhizome’s digital carbon footprint. This effort illustrated that server computation is the most costly aspect of common hosting infrastructure, and thus the most energy-intensive.

Rhizome's climate portal. Screenshot, 2025, Firefox 140.0.4 on macOS Monterey, https://rhizome.org/climate-impact/.

But beyond resource use, is it really in keeping with Rhizome’s ethos to mirror the behavior of large platforms, gobbling up cloud computing? What other kinds of relationships with digital culture would emerge from a different approach to infrastructure?

We decided to explore an alternative approach by joining the “naturally intelligent” network of Solar Protocol. Established by artists Tega Brain, Alex Nathanson, and Benedetta Piantella, Solar Protocol is a network of solar-powered servers. Each server can only offer sporadic connectivity that is dependent on available sunshine, the length of day, and local weather conditions. Requests for a given website are routed by the network to whatever location has the most sunshine at that time.

To keep the equipment required lightweight, the Solar Protocol network imposes certain constraints on websites, which offer an opportunity to get creative with the web.

Solar Web Workshops

Slide created for the workshop.

Now…back to the workshops! Taught at four schools—Brooklyn Arbor Elementary, Waterside Studio School, PS.96, and PS.01 throughout May and June; third, fourth, and fifth grade students learned about digital art and the resources underlying their online actions. We discussed what they use the internet for (Roblox, TikTok were popular responses), what the web is made up of, and how it stays online. Students learned that the internet is a resource-intensive space which is made up of the labor of engineers and users, physical components, energy, and physical spaces.

Unsurprisingly, students shared that their internet usage is high—they use the internet, in some form, constantly. When learning about the solar server, students learned that sometimes we don’t need to be online 24/7. Humans need to take breaks, and our hardware should too. Better yet, we can plan for this so it’s not an inconvenience, but rather a short pause in our everyday lives.

Students at PS.96 work on their drawings. Photo by Nafisa Skeie.

To conclude the three-part workshops, students learned to make their own ASCII artworks, which now live on a dedicated website hosted on Rhizome’s solar server. ASCII was chosen because, unlike large, hi-res images that often contribute to website bloat, ASCII is just text and characters. If we make images solely out of text, this results in a more environmentally-friendly approach to making digital art.

Students “translated” their own drawings and photos to ASCII using a variety of open-source tools. Resources, including a kid-friendly guide to making digital art, our lesson plans, and workshop materials, are available to access for free. (PW: asciiart123).

Explore student works!

ASCII artwork by Denislav, a student at Waterside Studio School in Far Rockaway. Screenshot, 2025, Firefox 140.0.4 on macOS Monterey, https://solar-classroom.rhizome.org/303.html.

ASCII artwork created by a student at PS.1. Screenshot, 2025, Firefox 140.0.4 on macOS Monterey, https://solar-classroom.rhizome.org/ps01.html.

Workshops at Brooklyn Arbor and Waterside Elementary were taught by Kayla Drzewicki, Archive & Program Manager, Rhizome. Workshops at PS.96 and PS.01 were taught by Bri Griffin, Community Designer, Rhizome, and Diwa Tamrong.

Website design by Kayla Drzewicki with support from Mark Beasley.

Special Thanks to Brooklyn Arbor Elementary, Waterside Studio School, PS.96, PS.01, Solar Protocol, Mark Beasley, Diwa Tamrong, Nafisa Skeie, Rachel Shapiro, Manhattan Borough Arts Director, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation.

Artist Profile: Daniel Murray

Kristoffer Tjalve — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 12:08:00 -0400

Kristoffer Skorstengaard Tjalve: Daniel, we first started talking when I invited you to speak at Naive Yearly. During one of our calls, you said that the internet is really good at being big and small. I think this is such a simple and acute observation that is often forgotten today, where a few platforms occupy the mainstream discourse and imagination of the internet. Your work is full of reminders of the vastness of the internet that exists outside the primary platforms, almost like the things you’d interact with as you move through The Ozway.

At the same time, you are also incredible at creating entire micro-worlds, which help illustrate the endless niches of the internet. Maybe the internet is an underpopulated ecosystem, with space and potential for many other ways of being online. MelonLand, the online project you started in 2007, seems like the most expansive of your worlds. Could you tell us who MelonLand is for?

Daniel Murray: I've discovered over the years that I have a bad habit of not fitting into any community unless I happen to make the community myself. I thought this was a bad thing, but I described it to someone once, and they said, It means you're a leader. I don’t know about that. I lack a lot of the qualities usually associated with leadership. But to answer your question: MelonLand is made for me, although I’m glad that people come in and participate in it too, and I’m glad they seem to get something out of it.

I try very hard to remember, first and foremost; that it is something I do for myself. Because if I don’t, it’s very hard to justify the realities of cost and the work involved. It has to be something where I feel like this is really, truly something I need to do for myself.

I think with a lot of web stuff, there’s actually an element of selfishness that needs to be inherent within it. It can’t function as, "I’m going to be utterly altruistic and give everything away to everyone for free." You have to start by giving yourself what you need, and from that grows the kind of energy that you can then give to other people.

Daniel Murray, Homepage of Pixel Sea in the process of bubble zooming a car. GIF, 2023. Screenshot. https://pixelsea.neocities.org. Courtesy of Daniel Murray.

KT: I think that’s very beautiful. And I think it comes through—the idiosyncrasy of everything you’re creating. It’s almost a surreal experience encountering your work within the commercial and professional realm the internet is today. If template sites and strict user profiles inspire ordered gardens, you are the rewilding, the ecological turn, where subjects cannot be separated from the rich web of relationships in their environment. You are squatting in the ruins of the capitalistic infrastructure.

Before Naive Yearly, I asked what pronouns you use. Your first reaction was a smile, and then you said you were happy with any. In the end, we used he/him, but then on the day of the gathering you asked me if we could change it to “all.” I found that very fitting for you because I struggle to categorise you and your work. You remind me of the 90s GeoCities amateur webmasters that Olia Lialina describes in From My to Me, those early web pioneers who took on every task of publishing a website, including writing, coding, and designing, for many reasons beyond commercial or promotional incentives. I wonder what you think about labels? How do you describe yourself and your work?

DM: I don’t like labels. I don’t necessarily think they are evil, they’re just limited. Sometimes that limit is really useful. Sometimes you have to describe things. But even saying that a website is a website is a kind of label that inherently limits it down to a certain subset of things that aren’t necessarily always applicable to the websites I’ve encountered.

When I made the request about pronouns, that came from a place of being very uncomfortable with telling people how to see me. I think you, and anyone else, have the right to decide what I am to you. I don’t think it’s my job to tell you what you should see in me or in my work. That’s why I prefer all, it’s meant to be open to interpretation. That’s part of the creative act of engaging with someone and engaging with a piece of work. Narrowing it down for the viewer is essentially doing the viewer’s job for them. And that’s not what I want to do.

Daniel Murray, The crows island on display at Melonland, 2017-2024. VR Screenshot. https://melonking.net/melon?z=/vr/. Courtesy of Daniel Murray.

Sometimes I refer to myself as a game designer. I once referred to myself as a Z-tier influencer. Sometimes people will just say, “Are you an artist?” They seem to assume that much, and so I’ll just say yes. Though I don’t love that phrase. There’s so much implied in it, and it adds a weight that can be a bit distressing. Because when you say I’m an artist, suddenly you’re saying, This thing I do is art, and that’s actually not where I start with most things.

KT: So where do you start with most things?

DM: A thing is a thing. In the sense that a person is a person, but a person is also like a rock, and a person is also like the air. A thing is both a presence and an absence, an entity that you can perceive, and you might associate some degree of autonomy to it—but you might also see it as something integrated into a whole. You can say that a painting is an artwork, but you can also say that one tiny detail of the painting is an artwork. How do you separate them out?

I’ve heard that if you have a stroke, your ability to see the boundaries of things essentially decays—it’s very disturbing for people. But it’s also very true to what the universe actually is. You have this horrible moment when you see what reality is around you, everything is everything, and you lose those human-defined labels that create barriers between things. So I think of most things as part of a continuum.

Daniel Murray, Melonland eParty rendering every image on the site at once, 2025. Screenshot. https://melonking.net/melon?z=/hidden/million. Courtesy of Daniel Murray.

KT: I wanted to go back to MelonLand, and ask you about its very specific aesthetic. Can you describe what informed that—its textures, feeling, the design choices?

DM: People ask me that a lot, and I don’t think I really have an answer. You start with something, for example, maybe the site needs music. So what does music feel like? Maybe it’s a wavy line. Then there are practical questions. The website needs text, and an image. So once you’ve got the core idea, “this should feel like music,” and a few required elements, it starts to tell you what it wants. You go through your images, your vocabulary, your collection of associations. The site very quickly starts to say, “I want to wear this.” I think MelonLand, Ozwomp and the other projects each have their own spirits and their own answers. I’m not sure any number of questions to me could really speak for them.

Daniel Murray, An Everyone Site page showing communally written rules for the web, 2024. Screenshot. https://everyone.melonland.net/rules. Courtesy of Daniel Murray.

I suppose that’s expressed quite strongly in something like the Everyone Site - a project where there is no webmaster and no plan or intention; the site is its own identity, one that merges pieces of each person who contributes to it.

There’s one thing I do deliberately: if I reach a point where I look at the page and think, “This reminds me of something,” I stop and I redo it. Because it must not remind me of anything. That’s the aesthetic line I draw. I really don’t want it to feel like something I’ve seen before.

Photo of Daniel Murray’s Desk, Backwater Artists Group studios, Cork, Ireland, April 2025. Left to Right - iMac G4 running OS9, for early art programs - MacBook M1 Pro, for most web craft, audio and video work - Dell T3600 running Windows 7, for 3D modelling and obscure windows software.

KT: That’s so radical. Speaking of being reminded of things—there are people who feel like peers or kin to your work. One that comes to mind is Nathalie Lawhead. There are visual similarities, color, animation, and obviously the “melon” connection. You’re MelonKing, Nathalie is AlienMelon. But also, in your approach to creating tools for others to express themselves, there’s overlap. How do you think about that—this idea of your work not reminding you of anything, while still participating in communities that may be influencing one another?

DM: Well, when I say “it doesn’t remind me of anything,” I mean that personally. It’s definitely going to remind other people of things. One of the most common reactions I get is, “Oh, this reminds me of the web in the 1990s.” And I look at them and think, “This is not what the web in the ’90s looked like. You’re having a false memory.” But that’s okay.

Daniel Murray, The snake room after an encounter with a decorating algorithm, 2020-2022. Screenshot in Texture Town. https://textures.neocities.org. Courtesy of Daniel Murray.

About Nathalie’s work—I totally get why people make that connection. But from my perspective, we’re almost opposites. Their work is full of frenetic tension. It’s like a spring, coiled and ready to pop, while mine is quite ambivalent to your presence; it’s extremely relaxed. I try to convert tension into a flowing, endless continuum. I do find the “melon” name connection interesting. I know why I picked it. It’s almost irrelevant that it’s a melon, but also not, because I chose it for being a round, friendly object. I think in Tolkien’s Elvish, “mellon” means “friend.”

When you sent your initial discussion ideas, they included “What are your inspirations?”, I started thinking about who had actually influenced me. The first person who came to mind, quite strongly, was the folk singer Pete Seeger. He’s fairly well known for his protest songs, but more than that, he was sort of a historian of folk music. He travelled around collecting folk songs—recording them, tracing their stories, and retelling them for a new audience.

Each folk song is like a tiny mythology of a place. Sometimes they’re based on real events, sometimes just feelings that needed to be expressed. But they were always passed down, changed and morphed. One community might have one version. A family might have another. Over generations, the songs evolve, taking on lyrics and melodies from other songs, updated to suit a new moment. I don’t see a difference between that process and the web. Or even the general experience of being a human. We go through life recycling and re-amalgamating pieces of the people we meet, the things we enjoy, the work we admire. So if I’m asked something like, “What’s your personal story with myths?”, I can’t really answer that. Because it’s not about me. It’s thousands of fragments I’ve absorbed over time and, for a moment, brought together in a project. But by the time someone sees that project, I’ve probably moved on and become someone else.

To me, identity isn’t collective, it’s transient. Too fluid to ever fully pin down.

That’s why I feel such a deep connection between folk culture, webcraft, and the experience of encountering the world through these kinds of mediums.

Daniel Murray, An entity having an encounter with the mouse, 2006. GIF. https://video.loom.cafe/?v=aiCk5t. Courtesy of Daniel Murray.

I had one more thought. From your email, you also asked, “What’s your idea of a good web?” Going back to something you said before we started recording about how, when you’re out in nature, you realize it’s not all fuzzy bunnies and friendly things. I’d say the same applies here: there’s no such thing as a good web. There’s only the web.

I wouldn’t moralize it into being good or bad. It simply exists. For many, it’s an educational tool. For others, commerce. For me, it’s an art tool, a way to extend myself beyond my physical limits. To reach the world.

That said, if you asked any great artist in history to compress art into the perfect medium to be broadcast worldwide, I doubt any of them would invent HTML. Still, it’s what we’ve got and we should make the most of it. It’s easy to fill the world with noise. Life is short, and often feels meaningless. But humanity does have this odd talent for making meaning. I don’t know where that comes from, but we do it. And I think it’s important to give people the chance to do that.

Is it important to keep the web alive? Is it important to keep a TamaNOTchi alive?

Daniel Murray, Melonland is closed on Mondays and you may not visit, 2024. Screenshot. https://melonking.net. Courtesy of Daniel Murray.

Age (if you’d like to share):

986,256,000 seconds, according to whatismyagenow.com! 

Location:

Cork, Ireland, Europe, Earth

How/when did you begin working creatively with technology?

Around 3 million years ago! Humans hadn't evolved yet but we were making good progress and there was a big fad for artful rocks. You can’t be a human without technology, so, like everyone else, I began before existing. The fact that I work with the web is only a byproduct of this era, if I had been born 500 years ago I’d be just as excited about clocks or maps. I love the web because it is now, I love now because it is the only place I can be.

What did you study at school or elsewhere?

I remember flying buttresses in secondary school art class, and that lady who climbs out of a sea shell. My parents dragged me to thousands of art galleries, which I hated, but I couldn't help studying them too. I studied games at the Glasgow School of Art in 2019, and I studied my classmates and they studied me. Sitting on the floor I once studied peoples shoes and the way they reminded me of Egyptian museums. At University College Cork in 2012 I studied hex casting (both as computer science and Wicca), and I learned how to be alone with myself. I had no idea what I wanted, and I still don’t, and I'm glad about that.

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

I get up most days, and I have breakfast, and some days I have a reason to get up and other days I don’t. It doesn't really matter what the reason is, it might be because it's 2018 and I’m supposed to be a programmer at a company in Dublin making school timetables. Or maybe I’m a shop assistant in New York at John Derian’s, walking through the snow with holes in my shoes on my way to organise the storerooms. I could be a cowboy but I can't ride a horse, and I could be a game designer but I didn't get the job.

I’m not sure what the difference is between a living and life, or if I’ve ever been living, or if I'm still waiting for my life. Money comes and goes and doesn't seem to leave much behind but obsolete laptops and a mild feeling that it should have been better spent, but I’m still here and still making things!

What does your desktop or workspace look like?

Source code of crow island in its native X3D and the Melonking.Net file structure in the Nova text editor. Courtesy of Daniel Murray.

Please confirm receipt: Documentation from Morry Kolman and Kendra Albert’s 7x7 collaboration is now online!

Rhizome Staff post — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 14:39:00 -0400

The internet has long been used as a stand-in for free legal consultation. Instead of paying for a lawyer, which is expensive and out of reach for many, we’d rather try our luck with the search engine, or chatGPT.

For their 7x7 collaboration this year, Kendra Albert, Public interest & Technology Media Lawyer, and Morry Kolman, Artist/Software Developer, created a tool that empowers you to represent yourself without actually having to hire legal representation.

How do they do it? By exposing the visual aesthetics of legal authority.

Heavyweight is a website form generator that allows anyone to create their own “lawyer” letters. Having an issue with your landlord? Been scammed buying something off of Facebook marketplace? With Heavyweight, anyone can now send their own (completely legal) demand letters without actually hiring a lawyer. You can even control things like the snootiness, number of partners, floor, and age of the law firm on your letterhead!

Heavyweight criticizes the “all bark no bite” intimidating visual language of legal letterhead. As Albert states: “For a profession based on words, it is a place where power is conveyed through aesthetics rather than words themselves.” Better yet, Heavyweight is completely legal, because although it implies a law firm, nowhere does it explicitly claim to be from a lawyer.

As the duo writes on the Heavyweight website:

“At least some of what lawyers sell is lawyer vibes. We're making that part free.”

The full video is now available on video.rhizome.org, our self-hosted video platform.

This year’s 7x7 was copresented by Rhizome and Backslash at Cornell Tech. See other videos from this year’s 7x7!

Morry Kolman and Kendra Albert's presentation for 7x7.

Documentation from Nouf Aljowaysir and Alfred Steiner's 7x7 collaboration is now online!

Rhizome Staff post — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 15:17:00 -0400

How much human input is required in order for an artwork to be considered original enough to copyright?

This question was at the center of Nouf Aljowaysir and Alfred Steiner’s collaboration for this year’s 7x7, the renowned art and tech initiative in which artists and technologists work in pairs to “make something new” and present the results at a public conference.

This year, at a moment in which the bounds of technology’s role in society are a matter of fierce public debate, all of the “technologists” brought legal expertise—whether through formal training, professional practice, or critical inquiry.

To explore this question, artist Nouf Aljowaysir and artist/attorney Alfred Steiner presented two “hypothetical” tools: one, an “expression remover” that strips copyrightable expression from an image, rendering them (at least in theory) uncopyrightable; and two, a tool that uses AI algorithms to test the amount of humanity present in a given images.

Both tools suggest that traditional definitions of art and copyright no longer offer much protection or distinction to human creators. Is it time to redefine what we think of as creativity to include nonhuman expression? Can we do so while protecting the rights and labors of human artists, and develop strategies for the continuation of copyright by other means?

The full video is now available on video.rhizome.org, our self-hosted video platform.

This year’s 7x7 was copresented by Rhizome and Backslash at Cornell Tech, and this collaboration is supported by ONX Onassis.

Rhizome Spreads to Canyon, Partners with EAI

Rhizome — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 15:34:43 -0400

Rhizome and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) are teaming up with Canyon—a major new venue for media art opening on New York’s Lower East Side in 2026—to develop joint programming and expand public access to our archives.

As part of this partnership, we’re working with EAI on curating periodic exhibitions and establishing a free, public-facing space within Canyon dedicated to accessing the histories of time-based and born-digital art that Rhizome and EAI steward. This initiative lays the groundwork for Rhizome’s long-term goal of developing archival collaborations with other institutions globally.

Just a few blocks away, our primary home remains at the New Museum, where we've been an affiliate in residence since 2003 and anchor members of NEW INC since its founding in 2014. We look forward to growing our work there as the museum reopens this fall with its new OMA-designed expansion.

Community Memory, May 10 & 11

Rhizome Staff post — Wed, 07 May 2025 15:38:00 -0400

For the final weekend of Rhizome world, we present progamming centered around the theme of Community Memory.

On Saturday, we'll have a talk with MSCHF and Thalia Stefaniuk, a Media Art Symposium in partnership with Onassis ONX, an event with Wikimedia, and lastly a performance with Age of Reflections featuring Huerco S and Spencher Zahn.

On Sunday, we'll have a talk by LARPA, a book launch for Do Not Research, and an event with Maya Man and Thalia Stefaniuk.

Saturday, May 10

12-6pm: Public open hours

12-1pm: THE SPICY PRESENT AND CAPITALISM’S HOPEFUL MONSTERS: MSCHF in conversation with Thalia Stefaniuk

1-3pm: Media Art 21 Symposium

3-6pm: Wikicurious - Amplifying Media Art

7:30-10pm: Reflections x Rhizome: Huerco S. and Spencer Zahn

Sunday, May 11

12-6pm: Public open hours

2-3pm: LARPA: Today’s Solutions Creating Tomorrow’s Problems

3-4pm: Do Not Research Book Launch

4:30-5:30pm: HEARTLine: Confessions on Love, Art, and the Internet with Maya Man and Thalia Stefaniuk

More than Human

Rhizome Staff post — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 14:07:27 -0400

The third weekend of Rhizome World, our month-long pop-up in NYC is called “More than Human,” exploring nonhuman entities in nature, AI, and gaming.

It kicks off Friday, May 2 with a presentation by Ezra Miller on TouchDesigner, a conversation between Adrian Wilson and Kenny Schacter on collecting, a performance by Isa Spector, "Mr. Art Needs a Break", and the opening of World Computer Sculpture Garden, a new online exhibition presented within Rhizome World.

On Saturday, we'll have a conversation about the work of Beatríz Da Costa with Daniela Leija Quintanar and Robert Nideffer; followed by a talk with Mark Fingerhut, artist behind Halcyon.exe The Ride; concluding with a talk by Tommy Martinez and performance by Michael J Schumacher.

Finally, on Sunday, we'll have a workshop lead by folk.computer; a workshop "The Dao of Planetary Breath" with Wendi Yan, Yunuen Rhi and Zandie Brockett; a conversation between Karen Wong and Jake Harper of Soot; and finally an interactive screening of dmstfcn's GOD MODE (episode 1)

See the full schedule for this weekend below!

Friday, May 2

5pm: Members Early Open Hours

6-9pm: General Admission Open Hours

6-7pm: Talk: Flow State Machine: Ezra Miller on Touchdesigner

RSVP for the talk

7-8pm: Discussion: HOW TO COLLECT NOTHING WELL with Adrian Wilson and Kenny Schachter

RSVP to the talk

8:30: Performance: Mr. Art Needs a Break (A Rhizome World Parody) by Isa Spector

RSVP to the performance

Saturday, May 3

12-6pm: General Admission Open Hours

3:30-4:30pm: Discussion: On Beatríz da Costa's Pigeon Blog with Daniela Lieja Quintanar and Robert Nideffer

RSVP to the talk

4:30-5:30pm: An Artist Talk with Mark Fingerhut and Jason Isolini

RSVP for the talk

6:30-8pm: Spectral Fantasy: Tommy Martinez on Multichannel Spectral panning in Max for Live + Performance from Michael J. Schumacher

RSVP for the talk

Sunday, May 4

12-6pm: General Admission open hours

12-1:30pm: a folk.computer workshop

Purchase Tickets

1:30-3pm: Survival Strategies: The Dao of Planetary Breath with Wendi Yan, Yunuen Rhi and Zandie Brockett

3:30-4:30pm: Enter the Forest: The Evolution of Post-Chatbot Human-Computer Collaboration with Jake Harper and Karen Wong

RSVP to the talk

5-7pm: Interactive Screening + Playsession: dmstfctn's GOD MODE (ep.1) + Godmode Epochs

RSVP to the screening/playsession

7x7 2025: May 9 in NYC

Rhizome — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 15:57:00 -0400

Get Tickets

The 2025 edition of Seven on Seven (7x7), the iconic art and technology program, is hosted by Backslash at Cornell Tech on May 9, 2025.

After an AI-focused edition in 2024, Rhizome is shaking up the format with a bold proposition by MSCHF and Rhizome Board member Karen Wong: this time, the key technology isn’t code – it’s the law.

Founded in 2010, 7x7 pairs leading artists with tech luminaries for deep conversations and groundbreaking collaborations, giving them a simple assignment: Make Something New. The results—which may be an app, a prototype, a performance, an artwork—are unveiled for the first time at a public event, after which many of these projects go on to further development and exhibition.

Over the years, the program has sparked visionary projects exploring AI, immersive media, and decentralized systems, pushing the boundaries of artistic and technological discourse. Past participants include Ai Weiwei, Miranda July, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and Martine Syms, alongside pioneering technologists shaping the future of digital culture.

For the program’s 2025 edition, 7x7 proposes that innovation isn’t just about new tools, but about navigating, subverting, and reshaping laws, from AI regulation to copyright battles and digital identity.

7x7 2025 is hosted by Backslash at Cornell Tech and made possible by Cactoid Labs, Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, Onkaos, and Onassis ONX.

Kendra Albert x Morry Kolman

Kendra Albert is a partner at Albert Sellars LLP, a public interest technology and media law firm. Previously, they taught law students how to practice law at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School and ran the Initiative for a Representative First Amendment, which provided funding and support for students interested in pursuing freedom of expression work.

Morry Kolman (WTTDOTM) is an independent multimedia artist and researcher born and raised in NYC. Primarily, he focuses on interactive and entertaining ways to demystify, make legible, or upend the technological and cultural forces that affect us every day. He is especially interested in the differences of perception and processing that separate humans from machines, and the potentials for expression, meaning, and subversion come out of that gap.

Michael Bennett x rootoftwo

Michael Bennett is a licensed attorney and researcher, whose expertise spans physics, mathematics, law, science, and technology studies. He has extensive leadership experience in AI, data science, and innovation strategy across complex organizations. 

rootoftwo is a research- and practice-driven art, design, and technology studio based in Detroit. Formed in 1998 by Cézanne Charles and John Marshall, they explore under-imagined futures by engaging diverse stakeholders through interaction, participation, humor, and play. rootoftwo creates artifacts, spaces, publications, experiences, events, and public works.

Helen Nissenbaum x Operator

Helen Nissenbaum is the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor of Information Science and the founding director of the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech. Her research spans issues of bias, trust, security, autonomy, and accountability in digital systems, most notably, privacy as contextual integrity.

Ania Catherine (b. 1990, US) and Dejha Ti (b. 1985, US) are an artist duo whose collaborative practice, Operator, develops critical and conceptual approaches to experience. With Ti’s background as a multimedia artist and HCI technologist, and Catherine’s as a choreographer and performance artist, they engineer medium-agnostic output, joining environments, technology, and the body.

Máuhan M Zonoozy x Pleasr

After studying law, Máuhan M Zonoozy went on to become an entrepreneur, designer, and conceptual artist. Currently, he is the Founder and CEO of A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, a venture backed product studio focused on the future of music.

Pleasr is a collective of digital artists, cypherpunks, and collectors who have built a formidable yet benevolent reputation for acquiring culturally significant artifacts and reimagining ownership in the networked age.

Alfred Steiner x Nouf Aljowaysir

Nouf Aljowaysir is a Saudi new media artist examining our changing behaviours and interactions with algorithms. By navigating intimate questions with AI tools and challenging their conventional utility, her work uncovers their underlying training logic and capitalist motivations that shape their outputs and influence our perspectives.

Alfred Steiner, a founding partner at Meister & Steiner PLLC, is an attorney who has advised clients for over 25 years on legal matters related to technology and new media, from the earliest domain name disputes to the latest in digital assets and artificial intelligence.

Amy Adler x Darren Bader

Amy Adler, the Emily Kempin Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, is one of the leading scholars of Art Law in the U.S. She teaches Art Law, First Amendment Law, and Feminist Jurisprudence at NYU Law, and lectures about these topics to a wide range of audiences. Adler’s scholarship focuses on the persistent conflict between legal rules and artistic expression, addressing topics such as fair use, authenticity, meme culture, online norms, and the art market.

In 2002 (after having shoplifted it (pecuniary reality not philosophical ideals) from Barnes & Noble) Darren Bader read 3-4 chapters of Mille Plateaux in 2002 and remembers liking Year Zero: Faciality. Purportedly drawn to image, text, and idea, Bader largely succeeded at creating an art career. With this final sentence, Bader hopes to catch the attention of a collecting institution to which he can donate a number of (largely immaterial) works.

Sonia Katyal x Lauren Lee

Professor Sonia Katyal’s work focuses on the intersection of technology, intellectual property, and civil rights (including antidiscrimination, privacy, and freedom of speech). Professor Katyal’s current projects focus on artificial intelligence and intellectual property; trademark law, branding and advertising; the intersection between the right to information and human rights; and a variety of projects on the intersection between art law, cultural heritage and new media.

Lauren Lee is an artist exploring 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 creative coding platform that prioritizes inclusion and access with over 5 million users worldwide. She is also Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts.

Supported by Backslash at Cornell Tech

Rhizome’s 2025 Benefit

Michael Connor — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 11:17:00 -0400

Honoring:

Taryn Simon
Aaron Swartz (In memoriam)
Auriea Harvey
Michaël Samyn

Patrons Circle:

Fred Benenson
Dorothy Chou
Jehan Chu & Jeannie Vu
MSCHF
Benny Redbeard
Lisa Roumell & Mark Rosenthal

Committee:
Aniko Berman
Zandie Brockett
Lady Cactoid
Sofia Garcia
Whitney Hart
Lindsay Howard
Jason Isolini
Martina Negro
Jack Pitney
Amanda Schmitt
Natalie Stone
Karen Wong
Marcella Zimmermann

Partners:
Artifacts in partnership with Microsoft
Digital Counsel
Pleasr
Water Street Projects
WSA

The Rhizome World Benefit Dinner celebrates luminaries who have deeply shaped digital culture.

The benefit follows 7x7 2025, Rhizome’s annual art-tech collaboration program, which will be held from 12-5pm. The dinner takes place at Rhizome World, a month-long celebration of software art. Rhizome World features newly commissioned installations and conserved digital artworks, including installations by each honoree.

Founded in 1996, Rhizome is a prolific organization that can be traced along the history of the internet. Our programming takes place online + in partnership with institutions & venues around the world – and with our affiliate organization, the New Museum in NYC. We support specialized digital art research & production, and we conserve and maintain access to the history of digital art.

The program will include a dinner, live performances, and artworks on view, as well as a paddle raise to raise funds for Rhizome’s annual commissions and microgrants.

May 9 Schedule

12-5pm: 7x7 (includes lunch for VIP ticketholders)
530pm: VIP transportation to Rhizome World
6pm: Cocktails
730pm: Dinner

***Festive attire***

Benefit Tickets

reserve tickets via credit card
or email rsvp@rhizome.org to pay by crypto or bank transfer

Individual ticket (benefit only) $550
Add 7x7 VIP ticket: +$150

Standard: $3,500
Includes 8x seats + 2x VIP tickets to 7x7

Patrons table: $10,000
Includes 8x seats + 8x VIP tickets to 7x7

Rhizome World Partners: $2,000
For companies; includes 2x VIP tickets + logo recognition as part of 7x7 & benefit.

Benefit tickets are tax-deductible, less $125 per meal.

About the Honorees

In a project at Rhizome in 2012, Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz created Image Atlas, a landmark work of internet art that investigates online platforms’ power to define visual culture and shape the flow of information across national borders.

The work of Samyn & Harvey, made together under names including Entropy8Zuper!, Tale of Tales, and Song of Songs, has long exemplified the potential of digital media to create a immersive, expressive “total experiences.” Defying traditional categories such as contemporary art or videogames, they’ve built their own audience across multiple decades, across every digital medium.

7x7 2025

The benefit dinner immediately follows 7x7, which pairs leading artists with tech luminaries for deep conversations and groundbreaking collaborations. The results—which may be an app, a prototype, a performance, an artwork—are unveiled for the first time at a public event.

For the program’s 2025 edition, taking place at Cornell Tech, 7x7 proposes that innovation isn’t just about new tools, but about navigating, subverting, and reshaping the law, from AI regulation to copyright battles and digital identity.

Supporters & Partners
Backslash
Bench Architecture
Cactoid Labs
Duggal Visual Solutions
ITM Studio
Octant Fund

Rhizome is affiliate in residence of the New Museum and an anchor tenant of NEW INC.

Another Internet Is Possible

Rhizome Staff post — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 17:50:00 -0400

The second weekend of Rhizome World, our month-long pop-up in NYC is called “Another Internet is Possible,” exploring alternative and experimental networks.

It kicks off April 25 with two conversations, the first featuring Rhizome’s Michael Connor with Laurie Anderson and the second featuring artist Emmett Palaima with Carol Parkinson of Harvestworks. Friday is rounded out by four sonic performances on Palaima’s spatial sound installation Heaven & Earth Diptych!

On Saturday, Mike Pepi gives a “pure heater” of a talk about his new book Against Platforms, followed by a launch event for Lori Emerson’s new book Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook. Artist Cory Arcangel & Dragan Espenschied round out the lineup, with a conversation comparing notes about legacy software preservation.

Finally, on Sunday, the data farmer's market takes over Rhizome World alongside a showcase of the experimantal p5.js documentary CLOUDS!

See the full schedule for this weekend below!

APRIL 25

6pm: Laurie Anderson on Puppet Motel

Newly restored by Rhizome, Laurie Anderson’s Puppet Motel was an interactive CD-ROM that extended her practice to the then-emerging medium. In this talk, she revisits this early work, made in collaboration with designer Hsin-Chien Huang and published with The Voyager Company.

RSVP

7pm: Carol Parkinson + Emmett Palaima: electronic media makes sound

Emmett Palaima, the artist behind Rhizome World’s spatial sound installation Heaven and Earth Diptych, will be in conversation with Carol Parkinson of Harvestworks, exploring electronic sounds past and futures, as well as dive into Palaima’s practice.. Previous to Rhizome World, Emmett Palaima had an incredible spatial sound installation titled "Cathedral-64" at Harvestworks, two performers for tonight are also past residents of Harvestworks.

RSVP

8pm: experimental performances by Mizu, Daniel Neumann, Madeline Stephenson, Kwami Winfield

A series of incredible live performance on Emmett Pailaima's Heaven and Earth Diptych. Performances will be streamed in partnership with Wave Farm, an international transmission arts organization driven by experimentation with the electromagnetic spectrum.

Purchase Tickets

APRIL 26

2pm: Other Networks: Beyond the Internet Imaginary

A talk by Lori Emerson to celebrate the launch of "Other Networks"

RSVP

3:30pm: Cory Arcangel x Dragan Espenschied on Software as Embodied Knowledge

In this conversation, artist Cory Arcangel and Rhizome’s digital preservation director discuss the possibilities and pitfalls of working with old software, looking at examples from Arcangel’s artistic practice and from the Rhizome ArtBase.

RSVP for Software as Embodied Knowledge

5pm: Book Launch for Against Platforms by Mike Pepi

RSVP

APRIL 27

12-4pm: Data Farmers Market

Browse farmers market of artists‑curated datasets including manga screenshot troves, heartbreak maps, MoMA‑tote street‑view sightings, LoRA training kits, POV cleaning videos and more. Swap dollars or creative barters for custom USBs, QR scratch‑offs, and on‑the‑spot model‑training sessions. Curated and organized by Claire Hentschker

RSVP for Small Batch: A Dataset Farmer's Market

4pm: CLOUDs: an interactive documentary exploring code and creativity

RSVP for Presenting CLOUDS + the documentary's directors

The title for “Another Internet is Possible” is drawn from an event proposal by West of Here.

Welcome to Rhizome World

Michael Connor — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 13:33:00 -0400

Get your free ticket to Rhizome World

Buy $5 tickets for Halcyon.exe: The Ride

May 2–4 Schedule

Coming up at Rhizome World

April 25-27: Another Internet is Possible
May 2-4: More than Human
May 10-11: Community Memory

In the early days of the web, Rhizome emerged as an online gathering place for artists working with new media. Dreamers and tinkerers who glimpsed the possibilities and problems of code, networks, and machines—not just tools, but collaborators in evolving creative languages and communities, and new systems of power and knowledge.

From our beginnings as an email list, Rhizome has grown into a mature nonprofit. Through our digital preservation program led by Dragan Espenschied and an impressive network of archived websites, services, and software infra- structure, we make outsized contributions to the longevity of digital art. We also continue to support specialized artistic experimentation with technology – through our microgrants, commissions, and 7x7 programs – often giving emerging artists their first opportunity to collaborate with an institution.

We are a long time partner of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, where we have been affiliate in residence since 2003, and anchor tenant of NEW INC since its opening. Our programs take place online, at the New Museum – which will reopen this fall with an impressive OMA-designed expansion – and in partnership with museums and venues around the world.

And yet even as we have matured as an institution, we have not lost our adventurous spirit. Even with the ongoing siege of US arts organizations, we could not resist the opportunity to take over a vast space at WSA in FiDi in Lower Manhattan, at the invitation of Water Street Projects, and to make it a temporary home for art & tech dreams.

Rhizome World extends our founding ethos into physical space. Each weekend from April 18 to May 11, 2025, audiences will experience artworks, conversations, and experiments that refuse easy categorization. Over two floors, installations evoke some of the rich and unruly possibilities of digital culture: from generative aesthetics to to experiments with gaming, poetry, and software viruses. New commissions rub elbows with long lost artworks given new life. Community workshops and family activities coexist with specialist debates about platform politics and AI simulation.

To gather up these disparate activities, we offer the term “software art.” Some artists and curators began to adopt the term in the early 2000s as a more grounded alternative to the vaguer, art historically oriented term “new media,” or the burgeoning “net art” or “net.art” scenes. Software art’s particular advocates included people like artists Amy Alexander and Alexei Shulgin, musician / researcher / live coding pioneer Alex McLean, and curator and theorist Olga Goriunova, who together with other collaborators ran an online repository called runme.org.

In a recent conversation, McLean joked that software art was a term that curators were trying to make happen, but never really stood on its own as a community. Still, words make worlds, and the words “software art” conjure a particularly interesting world – one where artists are in dialogue with the pioneers of computer arts, with the ethos and strategies of open source software, with the commercial tools we all use, with the dream that the digital world we have inherited might yet be reprogrammed.

Guest at opening of rhizome world. Photo by Alexey Kim / @sidewalkkilla

Across Rhizome World, themes of play, memory, ecology, and community resonate. Rhizome World brings together works created using p5.js, demonstrating how a community has formed across the world around generative art mainstays such as Tyler Hobbs as well as code-driven experiments with decolonial computing and traditional knowledge. The exhibition features new restorations such as Image Atlas by Taryn Simon and internet activist and programmer Aaron Swartz, which critiques search engines and their influence on access to knowledge and meaning making, restored by Rhizome with Université de Montréal, Faculty of Arts and Science, Department of Computer Science and Operations Research.

Each weekend will be animated by a new lens. “Hello World” explores code as creative language and the communities it enables. “Another Internet Is Possible” turns to experimental networks. “More Than Human” reflects on simulation, AI, and interspecies connection. “Community Memory” closes the month by honoring digital social memory and alternative infrastructures for the arts. The program culminates in the Rhizome World Benefit on May 9, an evening dedicated to honoring and raising support for Rhizome’s ongoing commissioning and preservation work.

Rhizome World came together quickly, in a few short months. It isn’t a formal history or museum exhibition, but the beginning of an inquiry that will continue with a major planned exhibition in 2026.

More on that later – but for now, I want to close by looking back on my first encounter with software art in the early 2000s, when I was working as a curator of new media for FACT, Liverpool. On a trip to Riga, I came across a text written by Olga Goriunova; it was in a slim reader that I’ve since misplaced, but I remember the title vividly: “Hello World: to software art, with love.”

Rhizome World is an invitation to look sideways, backward, and forward at software art. To celebrate the visionary practitioners who have made software their medium and subject matter, to affirm the importance of preserving and expanding this field for the knowledge of future generations, and to always remember to do it with love.

Welcome to Rhizome World.

Rhizome World was Made Possible By
Water Street Partners / WSA
Digital Counsel
Duggal Visual Solutions
Rhizome Council
New Museum
NEW INC
Mezcal Rosaluna

P5.JS Artists
Supported by Generative Art Foundation and Onassis ONX. In partnership with Processing Foundation.

Aarati Akkapeddi
Aarón Montoya-Moraga
Allison Parrish
Dmitri Cherniak
elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ
Kazuhiro Tanimoto
Kristin Lucas
Tyler Hobbs
Lauren Lee McCarthy
Maya Man
Operator
Casey Reas
Emily Xie
Kamau Kamau and Ian Wright

Partner Presentations

PigeonBlog, Excerpt of the exhibition “Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics” presented by LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) and curated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar with Ana Briz, in collaboration with Leslie García and media archaeologist and advisor Robert F. Nideffer.

Bladee x James Ferraro, Sanctuary. Commissioned by Artifacts in partnership with Rhizome & powered by Microsoft.

Adrian Wilson survey / Paintboxed - Tezos World Tour presented by ArtMeta and Tezos Foundation.

Mark Fingerhut, Halcyon.exe: The Ride curated by PWA (Alison Sirico & Sam Black)

Entropy8Zuper! (Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn), Eden.Garden, an excerpt of the exhibition “Choose Your Filter,” curated for ZKM by Inge Hinterwaldner and Daniela Hönigsberg with Laura C. Schmidt, software restoration: Marc Schütze (ZKM | Karlsruhe).

Commissions
Emmett James Palaima, Heaven & Earth Diptych, made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Limbo Accra, The Ritual, The Void, The Repair, made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts.

MSCHF, Tax Heaven 3000, curated by Thalia Stefankiuk. Installation commissioned for Rhizome World by Pleasr.

Archive
Rafaël Rozendaal
Anna Anthropy
Entropy8Zuper! (Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn)
Porpentine Charity Heartscape & Neotenomie
Alex Rivera and Angel Nevarez
Mark Tribe, Alex Galloway, Martin Wattenberg
Taryn Simon with Aaron Swartz
Laurie Anderson

Opening April 25:
Cory Arcangel
Reginald Woolery
Solar Protocol (Tega Brain, Alex Nathanson, Beneditta Piantella)

Opening May 2:
0xfff

Event Partners
Onkaos
Processing Foudnation

Announcing 🌐 Rhizome World ! 🌐

Rhizome Staff post — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 09:06:48 -0400

Introducing Rhizome World, a month-long exhibition and weekly events celebrating software art hosted by Water Street Projects and taking place across two floors of the WSA building in the Financial District of lower Manhattan (161 Water St., NYC) from April 18 to May 11, 2025. In keeping with Rhizome’s networked approach, the exhibition will showcase past and present software-based artworks in conjunction with public activations throughout the show’s run.

EXHIBITION DETAILS & PARTNERS

The installations in this exhibition evoke the breadth and depth of artistic experimentation with software, providing a temporary home for an alternative art world, one marked by technological experimentation, promiscuous collaboration, and subversive creativity, long marginalized by mainstream institutions. With Rhizome Executive Director Michael Connor acting as lead curator, Rhizome World will present a number of archival projects and commissions, some organized with Rhizome’s friends and collaborators, including:

Rhizome’s new restoration of Image Atlas, a landmark project developed by Taryn Simon with Aaron Swartz as part of the 7x7 conference in 2012, preserved in partnership with Université de Montréal’s Department of Computer Science and Operations Research;
Casco Viejo, a 2021 generative artwork by artist Ix Shells (Itzel Yard) shown at large scale across the windows of WSA;
a selection of artworks from the Rhizome Artbase; including Porpentine Charity Heartscape and Neotenomie, Rafaël Rozendaal, and Cory Arcangel;
artworks created using the programming language p5.js, which over the past decade plus has transformed access to code as a creative medium, supported by Generative Art Fund and selected by Rhizome friends, a project that will continue with a new partnership between Rhizome and Processing Foundation to create more expansive archives of Processing and p5.js communities and histories;
an installation of MSCHF’s Tax Heaven 3000, a visual dating simulator that actually prepared participants’ federal income tax return, curated by Thalia Stefaniuk and presented in partnership with Pleasr;
artist Beatriz da Costa’s landmark work, PigeonBlog (2006-2008/2024), an interspecies collaboration between homing pigeons, artists, engineers, and pigeon fanciers to collect and distribute air quality data to the public, an excerpt of the exhibition "Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics" presented by LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) and curated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar with Ana Briz, in collaboration with Leslie García and media archaeologist and advisor Robert F. Nideffer;
a restoration of the long-lost work Eden.Garden 1.1 by Entropy8Zuper!, now better known as Tale of Tales (Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn), newly restored and presented by ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, curated by Inge Hinterwaldner and Daniela Hönigsberg with Laura C. Schmidt and restored by Marc Schütze;
a newly commissioned video work by Limbo Accra (Dominique Petit-Frère and Emil Grip), exploring 3D scans of half-finished modernist architecture in West Africa and the cultural narratives behind them;
Sanctuary, an immersive poem by Bladee and James Ferraro, commissioned by Artifacts in partnership with Rhizome & powered by Microsoft; and
a new staging of a ticketed immersive experience by Mark Fingerhut, curated by PWA (Alison Sirico & Sam Black);
and more – a complete artist list will follow.

Rhizome World will also feature ongoing events and workshops, such as a series of music and sound performances to activate a “spatial sound instrument” by artist Emmett James Palaima; and opportunities for members of the public to book time to try out the iconic early image editing tool Quantel Paintbox with artist Adrian Wilson, presented as part of the ongoing Paintboxed Tezos World tour organised by ArtMeta with support from the Tezos Foundation.

FOUR WEEKENDS, FOUR THEMES:

Over the course of Rhizome World’s month long run, each of the four weekends will feature different themes:

Weekend 1: Hello World (April 18-20) celebrates code as a creative medium. A p5.js party on April 19, the start of a new partnership between Rhizome and Processing Foundation, will feature workshops and live coding performances.

Weekend 2: Another Internet is Possible (April 25-27) explores alternative networks. It opens April 25 with a talk by Mike Pepi about his book Against Platforms, and includes the April 26 launch of Lori Emerson’s new book Other Networks.

Weekend 3: More than Human (May 2-4) explores relating to “more than human” entities in nature, AI, and gaming. Events will include a talk led by Daniela Lieja Quintanar about the work of Beatriz da Costa.

Weekend 4: Community Memory (May 10-11) draws inspiration from the early bulletin board experiment in 1970s Berkeley that showed the potential for gathering knowledge on local community networks. The weekend will highlight the importance of digital histories and alternative models for arts organizations, anchored by a night with immersive series Age of Reflections, presenting Huerco S. and Spencer Zahn performing live ambient sets

Additional details forthcoming, including news around the 2025 edition of Rhizome’s 7x7.

Keep up with upcoming events for Rhizome World!

Rhizome World is hosted by Water Street Projects. The exhibition is organized by Michael Connor and produced by Danica Newell with curators Bri Griffin, Thalia Stefaniuk, and Kayla Drzewicki. Digital art conservation is led by digital preservation director Dragan Espenschied with conservator Nicole Savoy. The exhibition is designed by Bench Architecture. Art direction and digital strategy for Rhizome World is developed by Digital Counsel, a full stack creative agency led by Marcella Zimmermann.

Artworks commissioned for Rhizome World were made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts and Rhizome Council. Printing and fabrication by Duggal Visual Solutions, and window installation is provided by YAWAL USA. Generous support for the p5.js presentation was made possible by Generative Art Fund, with p5.js programming made possible by Processing Foundation.

Rhizome’s program is made possible by Teiger Foundation for the Arts, Mellon Foundation, NYSCA, Onassis ONX, and DCLA.

♡ Online Talk ! Steps towards Conserving Digital Artworks ♡

Bri Griffin — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 13:42:42 -0400

If you are using computers and the internet to make art in 2025, this event is for you! Rhizome’s digital preservation director will introduce some basic principles involved in preserving digital artworks, and will answer your questions.

RSVP for this event.

This event is free and open to the public. If you’re interested in attending future online events and supporting digital art, please become a member and sign-up for our newsletter! If you have any suggestions for online events, feel free to email community@rhizome.org.

Access to this program will be via Zoom; live captioning will be available.

This program was made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Introducing...the Rhizome Microgrants awardees !

Bri Griffin — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:01:47 -0500

After receiving nearly 1000 proposals from all over the world, we're thrilled to announce the 19 projects that have been awarded 2024 Microgrants!

Our jury–Mindy Seu, Tega Brain, and Chia Amisola, who have all successfully completed past microgrants projects–assessed submissions carefully in collaboration with rhizome staff. Selections are based on artistic merit and potential cultural impact across four categories; Desktop Performance, Lost Web Histories, Money as a Medium, and Natural Cycles, aiming for a mix of formats and styles. Awarded projects include video games, social sculpture, online archives, and more.

The 2024 Microgrants program is 100% funded by the guests of Rhizome’s benefit.

Learn about awarded projects below!

Yellow Pages for the Past Web

"I will build a multilingual archive of printed “Internet directory” books from the mid 90s and early 2000s. Often marketed as “yellow pages” for the internet, these books provide lists of URLs organized by category. Being physical relics of the early web, these books provide crucial insights into the online experience of the dot-com era.

Since 2021 I have been collecting these books in various languages for my own research. With the microgrant, I will build a web-based interface for visitors to query the contents of the books in my collection, and access these URLs on web archives.

The archive will serve researchers, artists, and anyone interested in the early web.
The grant will also help me purchase more books in different languages."

- Richard Lewei Huang

Interspecies

"Interspecies was a non-profit organization founded and run by artist and environmental activist Jim Nollman from 1978 to 2014.

The aim of Interspecies was to promote communication between humans and other lifeforms. With the aid of their sponsors, the Interspecies team led expeditions to habitats around the world in the pursuit of communicating with the local non-human inhabitants, mainly through the medium of music.

After disbanding in 2014, the documentation of Interspecies projects was archived and removed from the web.

In collaboration with Mr. Nollman, now 77, we would like to re-design the Interspecies site to meet current web standards and get entirety of the Interspecies archive back online for the general public."

- Nonhuman Teachers

Ghost Voice

"The site archives a voicemail catalog from a cellular device given to my grandmother by my mother in the final year of her life. 139 calls were attempted, 107 were completed, and 22 were missed.

These are accompanied by voicemails, ranging between 1 second and 8 minutes long. Of this final correspondence between Karachi,Pakistan and Grayson, Georgia, almost all remains stuck inside the device.

The microgrant would provide the financial support to take the phone to a data recovery specialist, who would use methods of audio forensics to help me extract its audio data. These files compose a “playable” web-audio archive, translated from Urdu. Broadly, the project explores the making of ancestral continuity through digital archaeology."

- Shariq Shah

Shouting at the Data Center

"Inspired by a video titled “Shouting in the Datacenter,” this project explores the intersection of data centers and noise pollution through an interactive website. The source video demonstrates that shouting at data servers reduces their efficiency, linking noise to data processing. The proposed website will prompt users to shout at their devices to meet a volume threshold before granting access. The site will be hosted by a Virginia data center, and will use local noise pollution data to set the volume threshold. Once open, the site will reveal insights into data center noise pollution. Funding will be used to hire a developer for the volume-based interaction. The project continues my research and practice focused on the material impacts of data infrastructure."

- WIll Mianecki

Cop City Online

"Cop City Online is an interactive web 3D audio- visual installation about NY Mayor Eric Adam’s plan to build a Copy City in Queens using $225 million in taxpayer dollars.

In this environment the user will interact with various collected and 3D scanned digital artifacts rendered with three.js, influencing a real-time soundscape including live police scanner feeds and interviews manipulated with p5.sound. Interaction might involve clicking on objects to reveal more information, moving items around, or manipulating them to view different scenes.

Overall, the project hopes to help bring to light obscured information about the Cop City plan through a self-guided browser-based experience."

Sahal & Lita

"I will make a solar powered Raspberry Pi mesh node to preserve, host and share information on behalf of my building’s tenants. Too often our mostly offline local histories are lost when landlords silently disappear us. So whether its to host oral histories of the building or enable us to share our joys/issues, I hope we can express ourselves independent of the city, landlord, or internet with this local archive.

The grant is needed primarily for the mesh node, but I want this project to coincide with our budding tenant union, growing as desired. At the least, I seek to preserve what has been shared with me as I build my home alongside neighbors. So for now I will create the node, power it, and share narratives I have been entrusted with."

- Essence Amethyst

Cockpit Emulator

"The project aims to make a browser-based installation of a collection of network captures from a LGBTQ Bulletin Board System (BBS) from the early 1990s, titled “Cockpit.” While volunteering with Gerber/Hart Library and Archive in Chicago, I have been retrieving these files from floppy disks for archival reasons, as well as converting them into readable formats.
This collection represents a moment of queer history in regards to preinternet digital communication, which would be great as a browser piece.

The Rhizome microgrant will aid in the development of the project and help with domain and server costs. Gerber/Hart is volunteer-run and relies on grants and donations alone. We would also buy conversion software to open the original files."

- Emrys Brandt

Ethical Hacker

"Ethical Hacker is an ongoing online project consisting of webcomics, Flash animations, YouTube videos, and music, all contributing to an alternative cartoon-mythos internet. Central to the project is an exploration of future myth-building: creepypastas, haunted GameStops, and backlogs of cryptid-hunting BBS's—a pseudo-magical matrix formed from disparate web posts, infused with the imaginal activities of children and conservative paranoids to create an alternative rendering of their mythologies.

My primary interest is in creating webpages and Flash games, having time to develop comics, seeking technical assistance, and to enter a discourse where I must explain esoteric ideas and explore their applicability beyond cartoon ideation. "

- Parker Davis

A Mountain Sprinkled with Salt

"The proposed work is a desktop adaptation of Lee Hyoseok’s “When Buckwheat Flowers Bloom” unfolding as a series of Java GUI interfaces built with Eclipse. Living with my grandparents in rural Pyeongchang where the story is based, I experienced the world of the story firsthand - its themes of love, loss, sacrifice, agrarian struggle, and the lyricism of the land where the mountains look sprinkled with salt when the buckwheat flowers bloom. The work emerges from a desire to reclaim the browser as a site for decentering Western narratives, expressing indigenous Korean sentiment, and reflecting on the sense of loss for a spiritual homeland. The grant funds development and the assistance of a translator in preserving the poetics of Hangul."

- Yoona

Buffering

"Buffering is a desktop film that imagines into the limbo of delayed data recall. Part performance and part video essay, this 15 minute film presents an experience of being confronted with a buffering symbol while trying to load a video titled ‘Ancestral Memory’, only for a portal to open to a lost Indigenous internet informed by Akan cosmology. This reveals a sunsum (spirit) that guides the viewer through a re-orientation of their relationship with technology to restore the mind-body-environment connection that today’s capitalist tech works so hard to sever. The grant would go towards writing time, a webcam, editing software, a domain to host this work, and paying an illustrator a fee for a poster, title sequence, and portal background."

- Yaa Addae

Palestine Online Image Search

"https://palestineonline.net is an archive of websites created by Palestinians or about Palestine, primarily from the late 90s to early 2000s, which sheds new light on Palestinian online history and digital literature.

For this microgrant, I am proposing an extension to the project which allows users to search and browse through the collection of images across the archive’s websites - including gifs, 3d graphics, typography, tile backgrounds, and dithered photos, providing a new yet familiar way to engage with the archive.

The grant would help pay for Google cloud image recognition, hosting costs for the search feature and database, as well as my time to program the feature and scrape and tag all the content."

- Amad Ansari

The Guild of Afrotechnologists

"The Alternet Conversation Series seeks to engage five African and Afro-diasporic technologists in conversation to understand the ways in which their cultural heritage informs their technology practices and to explore more humane technological paradigms for an increasingly digital future. The project will be presented as a playlist and an interactive web-based prototype of the Alternet where each conversation and practitioner's projects can be engaged with. The grant award will help with paying participants for their time and insights, admin and facilitation fees and design/development costs for the browser-based project."

- ụzọma x Future Inventions

PLU Haiku Club

“PLU Haiku Club” is a web-based app that brings poetic narrative onto PLU (price look-up) code system – the 4 or 5-digit code from the stickers on store bought fruits and vegetables. The core experience allows users to exchange a haiku poem with a PLU sticker, build up their virtual PLU haiku collection, and view the haiku database contributed by all users around the world.

Using generative language models (such as RiTa or full-stack NLP model), I aim at completing a code-to-haiku generator web prototype in the first version in early 2025, following the full release at the end of next year.

..Funding will support expense around the researching, database & model building, and paying for web hosting and server for at least 2 year."

- Eager Zhang

My girlfriend is a JSON file

"For the year and half, I’ve been independently researching the rise of AI companions, from which I’ve created a body of work with two elements to it. One is the website (”my girlfriend is a JSON file”), and the other element is an experimental video titled “The force of thirst”). The dialogue in the video is lifted from discord chat rooms, depicting conversation between strangers helping each other out and giving each other advice on making AI companions. The people and their voices are AI-generated preserving anonymity. This body of work attempts to foreground how advancements in AI are changing our relationships not just with technology but also each other."

- Shakti Mb

Ultimate Sim

"US is a free web-based city simulator game, with a 32-bit isometric layout and modular gameplay, to give the hyperobject of climate change a playable form. Using 1990’s SimCity2000 as its referent, players can play/test speculative technologies, land uses, and infrastructure on their local environment. The game spawns a unique terrain map for each player, using the location data of their browser, to spark imagination and inspire agency regarding environmental sustainability. The project interrogates the gamification of land/resources within global capitalist structures, which SimCity is predicated on. This grant will fundan assistant's labor to create 100 new sprite tiles, domain name registration, and two years of web-hosting."

- tess elliot

COCKPIT

"COCKPIT is a collaborative performance project between Pianist Jenn Mong & Composer Trevor Van de Velde that reimagines Computer Interaction as Musical Performance. Building off a prior work, a pianist navigates a musical score utilizing only computer peripherals, like webcams, computer mice, and keyboards. Built using Unity, advancing through the game triggers sounds that act as a musical interface. With Rhizome’s support, we want to expand the work into a mini-opera concerning technology’s role in simulating warfare by purchasing Flight Simulator Equipment & funding travel expenses to support this collab. Using sci-fi imagery, COCKPIT is a performance where the player pilots & manifests a fantasized, violent, and musical mechanical body."

- Trevor Van de Velde

Returning Home

"The project is to republish, revitalize and expand on a website my mother made in 1998– titled “Finding Home.” The original website was made as a digital supplement to an installation piece. The website, using text and images, tells the story of my grandfather’s immigration from Baghdad, Iraq to the United States– reflecting on the events that led to him leaving, the struggles he faced while in the United States and my mother’s childhood. I will update the story with new chapters, adding more experiences and perspectives in order to create the experience of traveling through a family’s memories– with archival materials, audio recordings and videos I have collected and made. The grant would allow me to design, build and host the website."

- Skyland

Raio de sol, Portuguese for “sunbeam” or “sunshine”, guides this project under the symbolic perspectives the sun might bring, especially right before awakening from a dream. This browser-based artistic object will be built with a low-tech approach and employ the Solar Protocol API, HTML, CSS and Javascript. It presents interactive point-and-click scenes with lightweight dithered short gifs based on photos and videos from the nightlife of Rio de Janeiro and warming interiors. Each scene will have different elements/experiences based on the responses from the API.
The microgrant will allow me to support the local musicians, artists and spaces in the work, and enable me to take some time off work to fully focus on development.

- ϻaᴚ༄

HEARTENDER

"HEARTRENDER is a personal baby project of mine. Beginning in the pandemic, it was (and largely still is) an entirely solo project made with my own two hands, as I learned to become a game developer. It's hard to get funding here in Brazil. Really hard. But I see this project, this weird, trans, neurodivergent, brazilian, jewish project and I think about all the things I want to say with it. I think about the people who'd like, or need, to hear these things. And I love my work, and I want to make it because I want it to exist, but I also want it to affect something. I want it to exist because it can say things that - I believe - people need to hear. That's part of why I really want to make it."

- Lalla Cavalheira
support on steam ~

ArtBase Anthologies 002: Let’s Play Majerus G3 📽

Rhizome Staff post — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 11:16:00 -0500

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

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

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

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

Watch Let's Play Majerus G3 🎥 Episode 1: The Basics

Watch Let's Play Majerus G3 🎥 Episode 2: Painting, Painting, Painting!

Watch Let's Play Majerus G3 🎥 Episode 3: Space Invader

Watch Let's Play Majerus G3 🎥 Episode 4: Software Environment

Watch Let's Play Majerus G3 🎥 Episode 5: Atomic Kittens

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

Screenshot of Michel Majerus’ laptop (PowerBook G3)
Selected by Cory Arcangel, November 2023

Chia Amisola on queers in love at the end of the world

Rhizome Staff post — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 16:42:00 -0500

Up next in our 25 on 25 series internet ambient artist Chia Amisola recalls the impactful "queers in love at the end of the world" by Game Designer Anna Anthropy. This interactive ten-second narrative game sheds light on how impactful even a fleeting moment of intimacy can be. Chia writes:

"I always go back to hypertext. If hypertext asks us to branch off into many lives, Anna Anthropy's work does this with the constraint of compression: in the ten seconds before calamity, there is no questioning whether intimacy or vulnerability is earnest at all–here is the world, time to fall into it. I found my way into queers in love at the end of the world as situated within small communities constructing handmade tools, indie games, all of us fragmenting our identities–what the web is perhaps best for–killing and living new selves each time.

When I am on the web, I want destruction, destiny, possibility, consequence, longing, crisis, regret–I want the future folded unto my fears–splicing, rhizoming, enveloping all of me."

View the work in ArtBase

Dentimundo: A Nostalgic Exploration of Early Web Art, Dental Tourism, and Evolving Latinidad

Rodrigo Arenas — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 11:17:00 -0500

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

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

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

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

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

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, Dentimundo, 2005. Screenshot 2025, Arc 1.0.1 on MacOS 12.5. https://webarchives.rhizome.org/Q16251/20241029102343/https://www.dentimundo.com/insurance.php

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Herdimas Anggara on GOBLIN.exe

Rhizome Staff post — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 16:22:38 -0500

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

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

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

- Herdimas Anggara

View the work in Artbase !

ArtBase Anthologies 003: Postborder (code)pendency / (Código)pendencia postfronteriza

Doreen Ríos — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 10:22:00 -0500

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dentimundo

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

Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. Lab (EDT 2.0), The Transborder Immigrant Tool, 2021. Screenshot, 2025, Opera 115.0.5322.119 on Mac OS 12.5, https://www.ianalanpaul.com/tbt/index_en.html.

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

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

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

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

Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab: micha cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez, Elle Mehrmand, and Brett Stalbaum
Computer code: Walkingtools Laboratory (Brett Stalbaum and Jason Najarro)

The Desert Survival Series Poems: Amy Sara Carroll

"Geopoetic System" is indebted to Laura Borras Catanyer and Juan B. Gutiérrez’s concept of “global poetic system.”

TEXT:

The Transborder Immigrant Tool / La herramienta transfronteriza para inmigrantes

Transborder Immigrant Tool

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

Minerva Cuevas, Resources for the Journey, 2021. Screenshot, 2024, Opera 114.0.5282.102 on Mac OS 12.5, https://migratory.network/resources-for-the-journey/.

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

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

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

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

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

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

La Sección Amarilla de la Migración

LowDrone (2005) by Angel Nevarez and Alex Rivera

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

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

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

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

LowDrone

#ESTONOESINTERNET by Astrovandalistas

Astrovandalistas, Replica Este Sitio, 2019. Screenshot, 2024, Opera 114.0.5282.102 on Mac OS 12.5, https://estonoesinternet.astrovandalistas.cc/post/los-mejores-how-to-de-la-web/.

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

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

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

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

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

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

#ESTONOESINTERNET

Credits for Transborder Immigrant Tool:

Spanish Translations: Francheska Alers-Rojas, Julieta Aranda, Elizabeth Barrios, Amy Sara Carroll, Iván Chaar-López, Orquídea Morales, Omar Pimienta, and Mary Renda

The Desert Survival Series Poems––Nahuatl Translations & Recordings: Martín Vega Olmedo and Eduardo de la Cruz Cruz
The Desert Survival Series Poems––Ayuujk/Mixe Translations & Recordings: Luis Balbuena Gómez

A multitude of artists, scholars, and community members worked on the TBT project.

Postborder (code)pendency

Curation: Doreen Ríos
Preservation: Dragan Espenschied, Preservation Director, Rhizome
Site Development: Mark Beasley, Lead developer, Rhizome
Project Management: Kayla Drzewicki, Archive & Program Manager, Rhizome

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

Cory Arcangel on World of Awe: The Traveler’s Journal (Chapter 1: Forever)

Rhizome Staff post — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 14:29:00 -0500

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

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

—Cory Arcangel

View "World of Awe 1.0" in ArtBase

View "Love Letters from a World of Awe" in Artbase

Ann Hirsch on DIALTONES (A TELESYMPHONY)

Rhizome Staff post — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 12:16:00 -0500

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

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

View the work in ArtBase

Major Milestones at Rhizome

Michael Connor — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 12:41:00 -0500

Rhizome Receives $750,000 Grant from The Mellon Foundation

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

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

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

Lindsay Howard Named Board Chair; New Members Join the Board

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

We also welcome two new Board members:

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

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

Setting the Stage for Rhizome's Future

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

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

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

Make a Donation

McKenzie Wark on TEKKEN TORTURE TOURNAMENT

Rhizome Staff post — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 10:26:00 -0500

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

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

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

View the work in ArtBase

Happy Birthday ArtBase!

Rhizome Staff post — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 13:28:26 -0500

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

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

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

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

Artist Profile: Mark Fingerhut

Jason Isolini — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 10:00:00 -0500

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

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

Still, Mark Fingerhut, CompUSA Live, 2017-2020, Episode 8: Too Much Tech. Live Performance, 1:01:54. Courtesy Mark Fingerhut.

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

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

Still, Mark Fingerhut, CompUSA Live, 2017-2020. Live Performance. Courtesy Mark Fingerhut.

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

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

Still, Mark Fingerhut, GOBLIN.exe, 2020. Custom Software. Courtesy Mark Fingerhut.

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

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

Spray bottle and fan that are suspended from the cieling in Halycon.Exe the Ride, 2023. Photo: Jason Isolini. Courtesy of Mark Fingerhut.

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

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

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

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

Installation view, Halycon.exe The Ride at Public Works Administration, 2023. Courtesy of Courtney Kennare.

Age (if you’d like to share): 31

Location: NYC

How/when did you begin working creatively with technology?

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

What did you study at school or elsewhere?

Interactive Art, Pratt Institute, 2015

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

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

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