As Program Director, Zoë Salditch oversees and produces key Rhizome programs and events. She manages the Commissions Program, and The Download, a digital art collecting program she conceived and initiated in 2011. She also coordinates major organization initiatives like Rhizome's Seven on Seven Conference, manages all community aspects of Rhizome's site, and is the liaison for all member affairs, individual and organizational. Beginning in the summer of 2012, she has programed and coordinated Rhizome events including New Silent Series. Previously, Zoë was a volunteer assisting with the new site launch and spearheaded the revision of the ArtBase collection management policy, and came to the organization via the Museum Studies program at Tufts University.
BIO
The Download: Kristin Lucas
Screenshot of The Sole Ripper in Google SketchUp, courtesy of the artist
This month The Download features Kristin Lucas's digital book The Sole Ripper (2012).
The Sole Ripper is a digital book containing a 1:132 scale architectural view of a fictional pedestrian roller coster modeled for an empty lot in Manhattan discovered by Lucas on Google Maps. The architectural plan arrives fragmented and out of order, given its shape through a process of software conventions and workarounds. It is a visual corollary to the download process in which files are broken down into packets and transmitted over internet pathways from one computer to another, and reconfigured at their final destination. Only, Lucas leaves the task of file reconfigurability open to the viewer, and opts for an alternative view that features a 352-page vertical drop and bears likeness to a filmstrip. Recalling Luis Borges's hyperreal map that was as large as the empire itself from "On Exactitude in Science," Lucas's plan for The Sole Ripper is too large to see in its entirety even when reassembled.
The Download gives a first look to great art for Rhizome members. Start your own digital art collection by becoming a member today.
Kitchen Table Coders Presents: Learn to Code From an Artist Workshop
Kitchen Table Coders Panel Discussion from Rhizome on Vimeo.
Last Friday, Rhizome hosted a panel discussion on code literacy in the arts including Amit Pitaru of Kitchen Table Coders; Vanessa Hurst of Girl Develop It and Developers for Good; Jer Thorpe, artist and educator; Sonali Sridhar of Hacker School; and moderated by Douglas Rushkoff, educator and author of Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age.
Kitchen Table Coders workshops in the New Museum Theater
Following the panel, Rhizome hosted five Kitchen Table Coders-style workshops Saturday afternoon in the New Museum Theater. Twenty-five eager coding novices came to get a crash course in Processing with some of New York City's most talented programmers; Amit Pitaru, t3db0t, David Nolen, Jer Thorp and Rob Seward. The Kitchen Table Coders host intimate workshops around a kitchen table in their Brooklyn studio on any topic the attendees choose.
Jer Throp introducing Processing to his students
Participants learned the basics in Processing, an open source programming language for visual art.
t3db0t demonstrating Arduino
More advanced students had the opportunity to sit down with t3db0t to take their Processing skills to the next level with Arduino to create interactive electronic objects.
Thanks again to all the panelists, Vanessa Hurst (Developers for Good), Sonali Sridhar (HackerSchool), Amit Pitaru (Kitchen Table Coders) and Jer Throp (NYTimes and ITP), and our moderator codevangelist Douglas Rushkoff for a stimulating conversation about code literacy. And big thanks to Nick Hasty, Director of Technology for Rhizome, who was instrumental in making this event happen. I look forward to organizing more code and hacker workshops in the future!
Introducing the Rhizome Tumblr
We're pleased to announce that Rhizome is now on Tumblr! Over the last 16 years, Rhizome has amassed an incredible collection of images, videos, and more from memebers of our community. On RHIZOME DOT ORG we we'll bring to light this great content and more right to your dashboard.
The Download: Elna Frederick
Still from Art Gallery
This month The Download features Elna Frederick's screensaver triptych Birth, Art Gallery, Death (2012).
Birth, Art Gallery, Death is a minimalist triptych in the form of a screensaver package. With white as life and black as death, each screen saver panel marks a stage in the cycle of consciousness. Birth is the genesis of consciousness through a birth canal of white arriving out of darkness. Art Gallery, where black is conspicuously absent, is the finite enclosure of a lifetime. Its contents are the thoughts and creations arising in consciousness; representations of life. Death, represented by black slowly descending upon a white screen, is ultimately a representation of life.
The Download is accessible to all Rhizome members. Start your digital art collection by becoming a member today.
The Download: James Howard
Rhizome is pleased to announce London-based artist James Howard is featured this month on The Download.
Still from www.luckyluckydice.com (2012)
Utilizing spam that lands in his junk email folder and pop up ads, Howard appropriates the deceitful images and text in his collages highlighting the emotional tiggers that trap users. Rhizome members can download www.luckyluckydice.com (2012), a 51MB animated GIF of 1990s internet-style advertisments; a file size too large for dial-up speeds, but now easily viewable in any internet browser once downloaded. Rhizome editor Joanne McNeil interviewed him last year about the images he collects:
Images in online scams and phishing schemes can seem as artificially generated as the text — like botnet generated folk art. But there is a human hand at work. What do you think is the human element that draws people into these schemes?
People are like machines - their brains react to temptation like a computer does. Most people are able to recognise a scam, but if someone pulls the right string, sooner or later all that subconscious stuff inside you is going to lead you down the wrong path. Scams get people by playing on insecurities, desires, fears, greed, whatever - it's uncontrollable and causes one in a thousand people to make a snap decision and pay up.
What do you consider the visual clues of this kind of kitsch of deception? Any interesting patterns or trends you've spotted over the years of collecting examples?
Squashed grinning businessmen looking into fisheye lenses, sunsets over serene oceans, happy families, sexy nurses- it's an endless and totally recognisable global visual language. There's a gruesome image of someone hooked up to a life support machine that keeps landing in my junk-mail folder these days -it always comes from a new person, with ...
BY
