Rhizome | Blog Posts tagged "community"

Community Campaign 2012 Limited Edition Artworks

Rhizome | Thu Nov 10th, 2011 11:09 a.m.

A New Age Demanded (Kline #2), Jon Rafman

Rhizome's Community Campaign is currently underway! Today, we're offering eight excellent reasons to make a contribution this year - the fantastic artworks generously donated by artists Anamanaguchi, Extreme Animals, DIS, Paul Chan, Ofri Cnaani, Kärt Ojavee & Eszter Ozvald, Joe Hamilton, and Jon Rafman.

Make a donation today at the following levels and you may choose to receive the following works:

Anamanaguchi and Extreme Animals, images courtesy of the artists

For donations of $25, we offer limited edition ringtones from the bands Anamanaguchi and Extreme Animals. Load these ringtones on your phone to ring with noise and chiptune style!

Contemporary Internet Lifestyles (2011), DIS

Contributions of $50 will receive this large photographic print titled Contemporary Internet Lifestyles by DIS. Featuring performer Paris Gotti, this photograph is a perfect piece to expand your growing collection.

Sade for Sade's Sake (2010), Paul Chan

A donation of $100 receive Sade for Sade's Sake (2010), a data CD containing 21 type fonts and a collection of digital artwork by Paul Chan. Each data CD is signed and editioned; it's fantastic gift for any collector, artist, or designer.

Slideshow #15 (no title, 1988) (2011), Ofri Cnaani

Donations of $500 include a lush digital print entitled Slideshow #15 (no title, 1988) by time-based media artist Ofri Cnaani. This print was donated by the artist specifically for Rhizome's Community Campaign.

SymbiosisC (2011), Kärt Ojavee and Eszter Ozsvald

A $750 donation will receive SymbiosisC, a heat responsive soft sculpture by Kärt Ojavee and Eszter Ozsvald. SymbiosisC is a unique decorative object that changes color with your body's warmth. Its cushion-like size will fit perfectly in any home or apartment.

Hyper Geography Print Set (2011), Joe Hamilton

For a $1,000 contribution, you can receive a ...

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Community Campaign 2012: The Download features Ryder Ripps

Zoë Salditch | Mon Nov 7th, 2011 11:58 a.m.

In-process screenshot of Ryder Ripps's Facebook, courtsey of the artist

Last week, we kicked off our annual Community Campaign with the announcement of a new program for Rhizome members called The Download. Through The Download, Rhizome members are invited to get a first look at a new and significant artwork by one artist every month. Artworks will come in a variety of ubiquitous file formats such as .gifs, .html, .mov, and .jpegs. All works will be delivered as a .zip via The Download page. Once the artwork is downloaded, it is yours to collect, share with friends, and display on the screen of any suitable device. The Download is a premier opportunity to become a collector of great digital art!

For the first Download, we are highlighting a new work by conceptual artist Ryder Ripps (Internet Archaeology, dump.fm and OKFocus). Ryder Ripps's Facebook (2011) is a copy of his entire personal Facebook history including all of his photos, private messages, chats, and wall posts. The viewer is invited to explore all of Ripps's Facebook activity, exposing some of the most intimate and private information. As with previous works, this project confronts issues of privacy, Facebook, and fetishization of technology. Read more about Ripps's work on The Download page.

Next month, we will feature a new work by video artist Sabrina Ratté including music by Roger Tellier-Craig, aka Le Révélateur. Look out for more information about upcoming featured artists in the next few months.

The Download is supported by the Artist Fund, a pool of financial support generated by our members that is divided evenly among the participating artists. You can learn more about The Download and the Artist Fund on the FAQ page.

If you would like to be able to receive The Download first-hand and directly support artists, please contribute to Rhizome's Community Campaign and the Artists Fund today!

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Community Campaign 2012 and The Download

Rhizome | Tue Nov 1st, 2011 10:48 a.m.

Today is the start of Rhizome's Community Campaign, our annual fundraiser that brings in critical operating support to the organization. This year, we are aiming to raise $25,000 by January 14th, 2012 and we ask that you consider making a contribution today to help us meet this goal.

Why prioritize a gift to Rhizome?

First, there is our broad purpose and function: Rhizome ensures that a vital space for artists engaged with digital and emergent technologies remains open, active, contested, and thriving. Rhizome serves as a focal point — and sometimes a useful flash point — for discourse around this emerging field and, since our founding in 1996, one of its most insistent and impactful advocates.

Finally, our small (4.5 people!) staff acts on our mission by producing an immense amount of programming year-round. Over the past year, we have published nearly 500 articles; preserved numerous works of digital art through the unparalleled ArtBase; financially supported the creation of 11 new artworks through our Commissions Program; and hosted countless events that have premiered new works and cultivated conversation among artists, curators, critics — all of you.

What distinguishes Rhizome from countless other causes is the large impact we have on emerging artists and an evolving field, and what differentiates us as an arts organization is that one of our biggest sources of support comes from you – our community. A donation from you will help us uphold our mission another year, as well as directly impact our programs.

As a thank you to our supporters, we are offering unique works by artists, such as Anamanaguchi, Extreme Animals, Jon Rafman, DIS, Paul Chan, Joe Hamilton, Ofri Cnaani, and Kärt Ojavee & Eszter Ozsvald.

We are also launching a new benefit of membership: The Download, a program through which we highlight and support one digital, downloadable work for free each month. Part curatorial platform, part incentive to budding digital art collectors, the Download highlights great new works and encourages members to display their new acquisitions at home—viewable on any screen, computer, or suitable device. Participating artists—Ryder Ripps, Sabrina Ratte, Clement Valla, Rick Silva, Elna Frederick, Keith & Mendi Obadike, Kristin Lucas, Heba Amin and more–are compensated directly through the Artist Fund, which is supported by members and Rhizome donors like you. More info here.

Thank you in advance for making a contribution and helping keep Rhizome alive and thriving for another year!

Please donate today!

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Virginia Heffernan Considers the Rise and Fall of Message Boards

Jason Huff | Mon Jul 11th, 2011 3:37 p.m.

Online message boards were a mainstay of early web communities. Now they have the challenge of coexisting with Facebook, Tumblr, and numerous other social networking sites. So how has their presence changed? Virginia Heffernan, writing for the New York Times, offers a survey of the rise and fall of message boards from declining statistics to personal experience:

Not to get too misty, but the board format itself might deserve a nostalgic embrace. The Internet forum, that great old standby of Web 1.0., has become an endangered species.

Many boards are stagnant or in decline, if they even still exist. Several once-thriving boards on the women’s site iVillage have closed up shop. Big fiction-fan boards haven’t seen real action in years. Last month, a once-popular eight-old-year British board about mental health went dark with a note: “The Internet has changed significantly.”

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General Web Content: Netflix's Three Wolf Moon, "Example Short 23.976"

Jacob Gaboury | Tue Jun 28th, 2011 10:06 a.m.

Youtube rip of Example Short 23.976

In May of 2010 Netflix posted what appeared to be two internal test movies shot around the Netflix headquarters in Los Gatos, CA. Titled Example Short 23.976 and Example Short 24, the films could not be found by simply browsing the Netflix site, but were instead picked up by users of unofficial twitter feeds and websites that update with each new streaming title. At slightly over 11 minutes long, the film features a kind of in-house stock footage intended to demonstrate a variety of audio-visual effects, such as time-lapse and looping. The short film also includes a series of strange, non sequitur scenes featuring a hand running through a fountain, a toy train set running on a loop, a man moonwalking while holding a laptop, the same man running erratically between trees, and finally the man reciting Marullus' speech from Act I, Scene I of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar before shifting to a series of popping and clicking mouth noises. The film ends with a blinking white dot and a series of gridded test patterns.

The films can be difficult to find using the Netflix site, but each version of the movie has its own page and is open to view and review. Much as with the Three Wolf Moon "power animal" t-shirt that gained massive popularity on Amazon.com in 2009, users began rating and reviewing the films sarcastically as artistic works rather than technical footage, praising the symbolism of hand-in-fountain or critiquing the film's "blatant liberal agenda." Other reviewers seem to have missed the punchline, rating the film poorly and demanding an explanation for the film's otherwise glowing reviews. Netflix has subsequently released the short in a variety of forms and at various lengths, in one case looping ...

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Interview with Herbologies/Foraging Networks

Lisa Baldini | Wed Mar 2nd, 2011 noon

Photo of a plant from Herbologies/Foraging Networks expedition to Kurzeme (Photo: Bartaku)

In Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time, I: The Fault of Epimetheus, Stiegler makes the following statement, “Innovation is inevitably accompanied by the obsolescence of existing technologies that have been superseded and the out-of-dateness of social situations made possible...adapt or disappear.”¹ Applying this statement to the current network systems that we engage with on a daily basis, one might say that online network culture has transformed our relationship with people as much as industrialism had done so with the land, mediating our experience of each other through data, text messages, and on-demand catalogues of our personalities. But, the flow of information through network systems is not a new instance. In Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s Linked: The New Science of Networks, Barabasi cites the spread of Christianity as a major instance of social networks at play – albeit all executed orally.² If this is true, it begs the question: how does today’s incarnation of network systems transform oral technologies? Does it render them outdated, or does it have the potential to take on a new incarnation?

The Herbologies/Foraging Networks occupies a critical space in trying to transform oral traditions/knowledge associated with foraging for what would seem to be increasingly disinterested generations. Initially instigated by Andrew Gryf Paterson as a Scottish man’s way of learning about the cultural heritage of his resident country of Finland (as well as the connections between the surrounding Baltic region), Paterson and cohorts Ulla Taipale and Signe Pucena have established an open architecture project that has included iterations of the WindowFarms workshop to exploratory installations on folk pharmacy.

You might ask yourself why focus on oral traditions and foraging? Foraging has previously been an important cultural touch point for Nordic countries, illustrating many social and political relations. The displacement of this knowledge marks a fundamental change in the socio-economic conditions at hand as the following discussion between Paterson, Taipale and Pucena further explains.

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Required Reading

Ceci Moss | Mon Dec 20th, 2010 11 a.m.

This PDF is to serve as an extended statement of artistic purpose and critique of our contemporary relation to objects and images in Post-Internet culture. More than anything, it poses a survey of contemplations and open questions on contemporary art and culture after the Internet.

“Post-Internet Art” is a term coined by artist Marisa Olson and developed further by writer Gene McHugh in the critical blog “Post Internet” during its activity between December 2009 and September 2010. Under McHugh's definition it concerns “art responding to [a condition] described as 'Post Internet'-when the Internet is less a novelty and more a banality. Perhaps ... closer to what Guthrie Lonergan described as 'Internet Aware'-or when the photo of the art object is more widely dispersed [&] viewed than the object itself.” There are also several references to the idea of “post-net culture” in the writings of Lev Manovich as early as 2001.

Specifically within the context of this PDF, Post-Internet is defined as a result of the contemporary moment: inherently informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials.

Post-Internet also serves as an important semantic distinction from the two historical artistic modes with which it is most often associated: New Media Art and Conceptualism.

New Media is here denounced as a mode too narrowly focused on the specific workings of novel technologies, rather than a sincere exploration of cultural shifts in which that technology plays only a small role. It can therefore be seen as relying too heavily on the specific materiality of its media. Conceptualism (in theory if not practice) presumes a lack of attention to the physical substrate in favor of the methods of disseminating the artwork as idea, image ...

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From the Archives

Ceci Moss | Thu Dec 16th, 2010 noon

In 1993 Howard Rheingold wrote a remarkable book called The Virtual Community. In this book he gives what might best be called a personal account of the expanding culture of people communicating via computer networks. I asked him some questions about the relationship between virtual and traditional communities, most appropriately, via e-mail.

Howard Rheingold has been publishing books and articles on computer culture for many years. He is the multimedia columnist for Publish magazine and editor of Whole Earth Review. He has also been a consultant to the US office of Technology Assessment, and recently he took charge of Planet Wired a network project that will document the digital revolution with local examples, made accessible via the Net to a world-wide audience.

More than merely informative, his book The Virtual Community is above all a highly personal account of the way in which people are using computer networks as communication devices, or rather how they are engaging in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), the term Rheingold prefers. Rheingold maintains that Computer Mediated Communication creates a new sense of community; people from around the world are linked together in public discussions, people who exchange ideas and messages, share interests and work together, outside of the constraints of geographical space and across social barriers.

In his book he provides us with a somewhat formal definition of virtual communities, which he describes as “social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace”. Rheingold has himself been actively involved in one of the early network communities in the US, The Well, based in San Francisco.

Using networking technologies within the context of traditional geographic communities produces Community Networks. I began by asking Rheingold to explain ...

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Elements of Vogue: A Conversation with Ultra-red

Jacob Gaboury | Wed Dec 15th, 2010 10 a.m.

Ultra-red is an activist art group founded in 1994. The group proposes an alternate model for art and activism, one in which it is not the artist's critical intervention that serves as the source of cultural action, but rather that art might contribute to and challenge the process of collective organization and relationship building itself.

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Mister Modularity: Vittore Baroni, TRAX, And Network-As-Artwork

Thomas Bey William Bailey | Wed Nov 17th, 2010 10 a.m.

The concept of networked art, or art which relies on exchange and collaboration across great geographical distances, has had a rich history prior to the Internet's first rumblings (and is now, fittingly enough, being archived, reappraised, and 'blogged' all over that same Internet.) Unlike the "one to many" presentational modes of the museum, shop, or gallery, networked art pieces were comparatively intimate "one to one" experiences, absorbed by one recipient at a time. Whether we call the collected efforts of this culture "mail art," "correspondence art," or simply "networking," its history is unlike other 'art historical' narratives, insofar as few people feel qualified to act as a spokesperson for the admittedly varied intentions of other networked artists: there is an almost universal reluctance to promote oneself as the "head" of anything in this culture. Especially on the European continent, where the most radical art collectives (e.g. Surrealism) have splintered into warring factions while under the mismanagement of paranoid leaders, no one is particularly eager to waste their otherwise productive time on internecine squabbling about whom deserves what title. So, in these situations, those who are just the most enthusiastic about their work, and its place in a larger creative milieu, end up becoming "ambassadors" by default.

One such ambassador, Vittore Baroni, is an individual who makes introductory biographical surveys like this one such a daunting task: his work spans every conceivable medium from rubber stamps and "artistamps" [mock-'official' postage stamps] and stickers to novel fashion items, and his tastes run the gamut from sublime atmospheric music to graphics exhibiting an exaggerated 'comic book' sense of humor and horror. Other than a general disregard for the taxonomy of art genres, the defining characteristic of Baroni's artwork is the nurturing of paradox and contradiction (he tells me that "[the term] 'paradoxical' is for me a great compliment, and a very positive adjective.") However, I may be getting ahead of myself here, since Baroni disavows the word "artist" entirely. In an early manifesto for his TRAX 'networking project,' co-founded with Piermario Ciani and Massimo Giacon, Baroni demurs "we are not artists, because art is a word that means everything and nothing," and proceeds to apply this to more clearly defined creative categories: "we are not musicians, but we create sounds. We are not actors, but every once in a while we get on a stage. We are not writers or publishing houses, but we can print our own writings." So what exactly is Baroni - and who are "we"?

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