Frames from television program (1964) featuring a demo of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad, edited in Photoshop to show the onscreen graphics more clearly.
Here at Rhizome, the big news of July 2013 was the launch of the open-access media conservation project XFR STN, a collaboration with the New Museum. We asked artists to Bring Us Your Obsolete Digital Media. Treasures are now beginning to emerge, and can be seen on the Internet Archive. The press is taking note.
In Editorial, the most-read article on Rhizome was Software Takes Command: An Interview with Lev Manovich, followed by the announcement of the commissioned artists for 2013-2014. The comment of the month goes to Curt Cloninger, who shared his detailed notes on the proper approach to Situationist Tubing. (If you plan to tube this summer, make sure to read this first.)
Prosthetic Knowledge assembled a much-Liked collection of works on dance and technology. Orit Gat explored the idea of The Book as Interface in her review of the new publication from or-bits.com, WYSIWYG. Michael Connor explored the emerging language of the website takeover in the most recent effort by Hannah Perry and Bubblebyte. Rafaël Rozendaal and Jürg Lehni appreciated the finer points of Vectors. Daniel Rourke profiled artist Nick Briz about the politics of the glitch, Karen Archey interviewed Biennial of the Americas curator Carson Chan about post-internet curating, and Zoë Salditch interviewed 4Chan founder and creator of DrawQuest Chris Poole. Eva Díaz discussed the geodesic dome as a networked structure from Drop City to Rockaway Beach.
With stories of data gathering in the news constantly this month, we featured Clark Stoeckley's graphic novel-in-progress about Bradley Manning and asked pointed questions about Miranda July's ongoing series of emails from the Sent Folders of notable people, We Think Alone. We also marked the fall of Apple's Patent on the Pinch-and-Zoom (summary: your gestures can still be patented as Alex Provan warned).
Finally, our series of Performance GIFs came to an end with #10: Paul Kindersley and #11: Jesse Darling. It's been fun seeing the contributions come in over the past few months, and we want to offer our thanks to Jesse and to all of the participating artists. We look forward to revisiting this series in the future.