General Information
Mission
Rhizome is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. Through open platforms for exchange and collaboration, our website serves to encourage and expand the communities around these practices. Our programs, many of which happen online, include commissions, exhibitions, events, discussion, archives and portfolios. We support artists working at the furthest reaches of technological experimentation as well as those responding to the broader aesthetic and political implications of new tools and media. Our organizational voice draws attention to artists, their work, their perspectives and the complex interrelationships between technology, art and culture.
Programs & Resources
All our programs and resources strive to encourage and expand the community around new media art.
Our comprehensive resources allow people to dig deeper into the field and connect with each other.
- ArtBase
- Announcements
- Calendar
- Opportunities
- Profiles (including artist portfolios and general personal pages)
Web Hosting
Rhizome.org also offers high-quality Web Hosting services through a partnership with Broadspire, a leading web hosting provider. This partnership was conceived as a way for Rhizome to provide a valuable service to our community while also generating revenue for the organization. Learn more about hosting a site through Rhizome.
Access & Membership
Anyone can browse Rhizome content for up to one year for free! The Rhizome system is built on active participation. There are three different ways you can get involved. See below for details!
- Rhizome Users. For free, Rhizome Users can browse Rhizome's content for up to one year. Content includes the archive of our front page reBlog and our archives of art and text. Rhizome Users can post to our email lists, and submit projects to the ArtBase and our annual Commissions program. Users simply have to sign up by giving their email address and a password.
- Rhizome Members have full access to Rhizome: they can browse the full ten years' of our archives, and have the ability to use varied features and tools all of which are designed to connect people to the Rhizome community and deepen and expand their knowledge of new media art. Membership costs $25 annually, and goes directly into supporting Rhizome's programs and the efforts of our staff. Membership is incredibly important to us. Become a Member here!
- Rhizome also offers group memberships to institutions, such as universities, art schools, art centers, libraries, clubs, through our Organizational Subscriptions program. These Subscriptions allow staff, faculty, students to gain access to all of Rhizome.org's features and services for free. Contact ceci@rhizome.org for more information.
For schools and organizations in poor or excluded areas, Rhizome has different organizational access program: contact laurencornell@rhizome.org for details.
History
Founded in 1996 as an intimate email list subscribed to by some of the first artists to work online and, eleven years later, a thriving nonprofit, Rhizome has played an integral role in the history, definition and growth of art engaged with the Internet and networked technologies. Our website is a dynamic, interactive platform, rich in historical resources and updated continually with new art and commentary by a vast community. Our programs, realized both on and offline, support art creation, presentation, preservation and interpretation; they include exhibitions & events, commissioning, daily art news and in-depth criticism, and the maintenance of a singularly comprehensive digital art archive.
Rhizome affiliated with the New Museum in 2003, when the institutions identified a shared commitment to emerging art and ideas.
About the New Museum of Contemporary Art
The New Museum is the only museum with a mission to promote new art and new ideas, and the only museum in New York City devoted exclusively to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the Museum was conceived as a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists whose works did not yet have wide public exposure or critical acceptance. It has a unique history of being founded by a curator—Marcia Tucker—who had neither personal resources nor a collection, just abundant resourcefulness and a passion for living culture. At its inception, the Museum lay somewhere between a grassroots alternative space and a major museum devoted to proven historical values. The deliberate paradox was embodied in the name “New Museum” and Tucker’s daring vision and combative idea to present new art in a critical and scholarly context.
The New Museum has evolved over the past thirty plus years, from its humble beginnings as a startup in a one-room office on Hudson Street in 1977, to a gallery space in the New School later that year, to its expansion and relocation to SoHo in 1983, to the inauguration of its first freestanding, dedicated building in 2007. Our culture has also evolved over this period of time and contemporary art is more widely embraced today. The New Museum has an important and influential legacy and role to keep breaking new ground. A site of ongoing experimentation and questioning of what art and institutions can be in the 21st century, the New Museum continues to look to the future through programming that is open, fearless, and alive.
Press Highlights
All the Web's a Stage
Art News, February, 2008
Rachel Wolff: Rhizome is setting a new standard in the way it promotes, commissions, exhibits, and archives Web art. Founded in 1996 as an online hub for artists and curators interested in new-media and digital art, it was given a permanent home when its longtime affiliate, the New Museum, reopened on the Bowery in New York last December. Already the organization has emerged from the media-center ghetto by curating “Montage: Unmonumental Online,” the final installment, opening on the 15th of this month, of the museum’s inaugural exhibition, “Unmonumental.”
Even Boring Blogs Are Things of Beauty In Some Artists' Eyes
The Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2007
Andrew Lavallee: "Some of these Web-inspired works have been included in the recently reopened New Museum's "Unmonumental" exhibition, parts of which are on view at its New York location and others of which can be seen on the site for Rhizome, its new-media affiliate. This generation really knows the Net,
says Lauren Cornell, Rhizome's executive director. They grew up with it and are, for lack of a better word, native to it.
"
The Rockefeller Foundation Salutes the Inagural Award Recepients of its New York City Cultural Innovation Fund
Ad in The New York Times, December 11, 2007
Rhizome.org one of 16 organizations selected for theCultural Innovation Award,
awarded by the Rockefeller Organization. Rhizome was chosen for Rhizome Events, to give voice to artists working at the leading edge of technology.
Rhizome Integrates Creative Commons Licenses
Creative Commons, July 27th, 2007
Cameron Parkins: "Rhizome.org, 'an online platform for the global new media art community', announced yesterday that it will integrate Creative Commons licenses into its online art archive, the Artbase. From here onwards, artists who contribute to ArtBase will have the option to license their work under a Creative Commons License of their choosing, greatly adding to ArtBase’s flexibility."
Net Benefit
ArtForum, April 17, 2007
Dawn Chan: "Rhizome.org, the New Museum's new-media affiliate, which curates both real-world and virtual art exhibitions, made the most of the intimate lighting and cozy booths for its benefit (...) The event featured three bands with legs in the art world -Gang Gang Dance, Professor Murder, and YACHT- and multimedia artist Cory Arcangel as MC."
YouTube for Artists. The Best Places to Find Video Art Online
Slate, March 21, 2007
Mia Fineman: "Rhizome.org, which hosts an archive of more than 2,000 'new media' projects, is the best place to discover work in these hybrid forms that represent the most promising new directions for art on the Web."
Review: Networked Nature
ArtReview, March, 2007
Morgan Falconer: "I had a peculiar feeling that an exhibition entitled Networked Nature was going to be like a show of those scifi kitsch gadgets (...). It wasn't but it didn't disappoint."
Networked Nature
The New York Times, February 16, 2007
Holland Cotter: "This cool little show (...) filters that old Romantic stand-by, Nature, through the new-fangled technology."
Net Worth
ArtNet, February 14, 2007
Ben Davis: "Artworks that tackle the murky border between technology and nature, a hot-button issue in these days of anxiety about man-made environmental disaster."
Positively 27th Street. Carving out a home for good nature in Chelsea
The Village Voice, February 8, 2007
Jerry Saltz: "Networked Nature, the nicely weird, somewhat generic group exhibition (...) was curated by Rhizome, a collective that claims the exhibition 'explores the representation of nature though the perspective of networked culture.'"
Networked Nature
Cool Hunting, 15 January, 2007
Curated by Marisa Olson, this group exhibition at Foxy Production explores the representation of the natural world through the perspective of networked culture.
Opening: Networked Nature
FlavorPill, January 11, 2007
HGM: "Rhizome continues its tenth-anniversary celebrations with Networked Nature at Foxy Productions, a show that offers perspectives on the natural world through the digital lens of networked culture"
On the Horizon: Our Top 10 List for 2007
ArtInfo, January 3, 2007
William Hanley points out Networked Nature as one of the most interesting exhibitions in NYC in this beginning of 2007.
The Best of the Web 2006
Art Fag City, January 2, 2007
Blogger Paddy Johnson highlights Rhizome as the most important institutional web supporter working on the Internet today.
Life Imitates Art
Time Out New York, December 7 - 13, 2006
Two exhibitions focus on the virtual world of Second Life are taking place both on the real world and in SL galleries: James deavin: photographs from the new world and Eva and Franco Mattes' (a.k.a. 0100101110101101) The Most Beautiful 13 Avatars. This show is part of Rhizome's Time Shares.
Alive and clicking
The Guardian, October 19, 2006
Rhizome.org recently commissioned the activist web project Google Will Eat Itself by Hans Bernhard and Alessandro Ludovico. The project aims to be a critic of Google's appropriation of the entire Internet business.
Myownspace, un "MySpace" vraiment libre
Ecrans.fr, October 18, 2006
Ecrans points out that the alternative project "MySpace" from net activist 888 is one of the projects featured at Rhizome's The Copy and Paste Show.
They Heart a Computer
FlavorPill.net, October 10, 2006
As part of its Tenth-Anniversary Festival, Rhizome curated an evening of video and performance influenced by the Internet at The Kitchen.
New Media Depot Rhizome Celebrates 10 Years
ChelseaNow.com, October 6-12, 2006
The field has "changed a lot in the last ten years." The computer has become an extension of our personal space" says Lauren Cornell, Rhizome's Executive Director.
New Media Art
Coolhunting.com, May 31, 2006
The recent book New Media Art by Rhizome founder Mark Tribe and art critic Reena Jana anthologizes some of the innovative artists in the field, documenting a moment when the genre is at its apex (or over, according to some).
Preserving Work that Falls Outside the Norm
The New York Times, March 29, 2006
"It is a paradox that the task is to preserve things that are not materials," said Lauren Cornell, executive director of Rhizome, which documents digital work by participating artists...
Art for Free
Artinfo.com, March 12, 2006
Back at Scope, Rhizome.org is staging All Systems Go as part of the "Cinema-scope" program of new-media, installation, and video art.
Net Results: Closing the Gap between Art and Life Offline
Time Out New York, February 9-15
I think memes and other kinds of "Internet folk art" are some of the most interesting stuff happening online. The challenge, I find, is to take things I find amazing and recast them so others understand what I see in them...
On & Off: the Expanding Domain of Internet Art
NYFA Current, Feb 8th, 2006
Internet art may actually be more "present" than ever—just not exclusively in virtual space.
Rhizome.org and EAI present Net Aesthetics 2.0
Flavorpill, Jan 31, 2006
Two organizations that have worked tirelessly to promote new-media art, Rhizome.org and Electronic Arts Intermix, team up for this panel discussion on the development of Internet-based art.
About the Website
The Rhizome website is powered by custom code built on top of free software. On the infrastructural level, we use the free software standards of Linux, MySQL, and Apache. When it comes to the code itself, we use a mix of PHP, Perl, and Ruby.
We do a lot of unusual things on the site, so we end up writing a lot of our own code. However, we use free libraries when possible, and occasionally we create, maintain, or contribute to those libraries, too.
Our blog is published using WordPress. The front page also contains content published using reBlog, a joint project of Eyebeam R&D and Stamen Design. Our reBlog installation is heavily modified to support multiple users, and to conform with our specific archival requirements.
Thanks
Additional Programming & Front-end Development and Design by Gelo Factory. We also thank Anh Tuan Pham of For Office Use Only for his work on our redesign. Finally, we also thank Ana Otero for researching the new information architecture for the Discuss and Opportunities sections.
Internship Program
The Internship Program at Rhizome offers participants "hands-on" training in the non-profit curatorial practice and a comprehensive overview of website operations. Interns also gain insight into the national and international world of new media art. To apply:
Who We Are
Tyler CoburnStaff Writer
Tyler Coburn is a New York-based creative type who broadly splits his time between journalism and artmaking. Tyler's artwork spans video, photography, performance and sculpture, and has been exhibited at MARCH (New York), Gavin Brown's Passerby (New York), The Centre of Attention (London) and Galerie Ben Kaufmann (Berlin). Tyler's videos have screened on MTV2 and at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, AMODA (Austin Museum of Digital Art) and Galapagos (New York), among others. Tyler holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University and is a contributing editor to ArtReview.
Lauren Cornell
Executive Director, Rhizome, and Adjunct Curator, the New Museum of Contemporary Art
Cornell oversees and develops Rhizome's programs, all of which serve to promote and contextualize art engaged with technology. Previously, Cornell worked as a curator and writer in London and New York. She worked in the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney Museum and, from 2002-2004, she served as Executive Director of Ocularis, an organization dedicated to avant-garde cinema, video and new media. Her writing has been published in a range of international publications and she has organized events or exhibitions at venues including The Kitchen, Foxy Production, Participant Inc and The Institute of Contemporary Art in London. Cornell is also Adjunct Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, where she collaborates to produce exhibitions and the monthly New Silent Series.
Lisa Delgado
Staff Writer
Lisa Delgado is a journalist and critic who has written on digital art, film, design, performance, and culture for publications such as Wired, RES, XLR8R, Tomorrow Unlimited, and Blueprint. She has also written on the intersection of new media art and architecture for The Architect's Newspaper and eOculus. After getting her BA in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, she studied Web design at San Francisco State University's Multimedia Studies Program, where she began her career in journalism by writing for the school's online community for new media artists. More recently, she obtained a master's degree in Cultural Reporting and Criticism at New York University, providing a convenient excuse to become yet another California transplant to New York City.
Elizabeth Filardi
Social Media Intern
Elizabeth Filardi is a writer and artist living in New York City and attending graduate school for Design & Technology at Parsons the New School. She has a BA in Cultural and Literary Theory, through which she has cultivated an interest in the popular consumption of old and new media. Her work follows in the tradition of socially concerned, open source performance pranks that exist primarily in video on the web.
Nick Hasty
Technology Assistant
Nick Hasty is an artist, programmer & researcher. His projects are grounded in his background in critical theory and sound, and incorporate physical computing, performance, and web-based narratives. He received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Georgia, and is now finishing his graduate degree at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts.
Patrick May
Director of Technology
Patrick May is a programmer, organizer, and artist. May previously served as Software Engineer at SourceMedia, a financial publishing firm. He is also the founder of Open Ground, an artist collective and former exhibition space in Brooklyn. Widely recognized for his work with open source development, Patrick has spoken on Ruby at various national and international conferences.
Ceci Moss
Editor
Ceci Moss is a writer, musician, DJ, and curator. For the past two years, she managed the Special Projects of the New Museum of Contemporary Art and Rhizome. She currently writes and edits the online contemporary art and music journal A Million Keys. For the past six years, she has programmed the weekly radio show Radio Heart covering experimental, post punk, noise and miscellaneous obscurities on KALX and East Village Radio. She produces solo recordings under the name Mi Or and the Pedestals and is a member of the band S-S-S-Spectres. She studied Sociology, History and French at UC Berkeley, and Critical Theory in Paris, France at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III/Centre parisien d'études critiques.
Marisa Olson
Curator at Large / Staff writer
Marisa Olson is an artist, critic, and curator. She has organized exhibitions and programs at the Guggenheim, SFMOMA, the Getty, White Columns, Artists Space, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and elsewhere, including SF Camerawork, where she was previously Associate Director. She's written for Wired, Mute, Afterimage, Flash Art, ArtReview, and others, and has written commissioned essays for the Walker Art Center, the Banff Centre's New Media Institute, and Eyebeam. Her own work (see marisaolson.com) has recently been presented by the Whitney Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Pacific Film Archive, and the New York Underground Film Festival. Marisa holds an MA in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz, and both a BA and MA in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley, where she is a PhD Candidate and where she created and taught classes in new media in the departments of Film Studies and Art History. She is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the ITP graduate program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.
Luis Silva
Curatorial Fellow
Luis Silva studied Social Sciences and has a post-graduate degree in Communication, Culture and Information Technologies. He has curated several new media projects, namely Online - Portuguese Netart 1997-2004, Source Code and Sound Visions. In 2006 he created the Lisbon node of the Upgrade!, an international network of gatherings concerning art, technology and culture and is currently curating LX 2.0, Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporanea's net art program. Silva has published various reviews and texts addressing the issues of art and technology. Silva has also developed his activity producing contemporary art shows since 2003, mainly of Portuguese contemporary artists.