Rhizome is pleased to announce increased funding for its Commissions Program. This year, eleven emerging artists/ collectives have been awarded commissions, for a total of $23,000, in support of new works of Internet-based art. The commissioned works will be presented on Rhizome.org and at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as archived in Rhizome's online archive, the ArtBase.

The commissioned artworks were selected by Rhizome members and a jury composed of Suhjung Hur, Curator, Art Center Nabi; Rudolf Freiling, Curator of Media Arts, SFMoMA; Marc Garrett, CoFounder and CoDirector of Furtherfield; Christina Ray, Founder and Director of Glowlab and the Conflux Festival; and Lauren Cornell and Marisa Olson of Rhizome. Rhizome members awarded three of the eleven commissions including our first ever Community Award, a new category created to support projects that enhance participation and communication on Rhizome.org. This award went to conglomco.org (Tyler Jacobsen & Kim Schnaubert) for zHarmony (see below for details).

The Rhizome Commissions program is supported, in part, by funds from the Greenwall Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Additional support is provided by generous individuals and Rhizome members.

08 Commissions online at: http://rhizome.org/commissions/2007/

Descriptions and proposal urls are below.

Add Art ---- Member Selection
By Steve Lambert with Evan Harper at Eyebeam OpenLab
AddArt is a Firefox extension which replaces advertising images on web pages with art images from a curated database.
http://www.addart.eyebeam.org/

Eavesdropping
by Jack Stockholm
http://www.oddible.com/eavesdropping/rhizome/
Eavesdropping is a networked audio system designed for guerilla performance to raise awareness of our ambient communication in public spaces. This project highlights the intentionality and exhibitionism of bringing our private actions into the public sphere.

Ebay-Generator
by UBERMORGEN.COM (ALESSANDRO LUDOVICO and PAOLO CIRIO)
http://www.ipnic.org/Ebay-Generator /commissions/rhizome_commission.html
Ebay-Generator will generate songs based on the public data mined from Ebay sellers and buyers. Users' rating, sold objects, times and frequency of transactions and other data will be automatically transformed into a structured text, which a supercollider-application will use to generate music and lyrics.

JELLOTIME.COM
by Rafael Rozendaal
http://jellotime.com
JelloTime.com will be a website with a single flash animation. You will see a green plate with a red Jello dessert. When you touch the jelly with your mouse, it 'wobbles'. It will shake and make a strange sound, the more you pull it, the more it will shake. I really want to emulate the feeling of jelly, something between solid and liquid. A feeling that is very familiar in real life that might seem strange on a computer screen.

Phrenology
by Melanie Crean with Chris Sugrue and Paul Geluso
http://melaniecrean.com/rhizome.html
Phrenology will investigate the perception of space, whether real, virtual or imagined, though writings created by incarcerated women in a workshop the artist will teach at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility . The piece will consist of a series of 360 degree photographic panoramas that interconnect through text included in the environments. Viewers will be able to move through the different environments to read the women's writing in a form of spatial poem, accompanied by an experimental sound track based on the text.

Remote Instructions
by Lee Walton
http://www.leewalton.com/remote_Instructions.html
Remote Instructions is a web-central project that will utilize both the communication capabilities of the web and spectatorship of its users. From a central hub, Lee Walton will collaborate with strangers globally via the web and orchestrate a series of video performances that will take place in real cities, neighborhoods, villages and towns around the world. A Remote Instructions website will be created to host video projects and promote networking among collaborators.

Second Life Dumpster
by eteam
http://meineigenheim.org/dumpster/
In Second Life each avatar has a trash folder. Items, that get deleted end up in that folder by default. The trash folder has to get emptied as often as possible, otherwise the avatars performance might diminish. But, where do deleted things end up? What are those things? Second Life Dumpster will explore these questions by starting and maintaining a public dumpster in Second Life for the duration of one year.

ShiftSpace - An OpenSource Layer Above Any Website
by Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv
http://www.shiftspace.org
While the Internet's design is widely understood to be open and distributed, control over how users interact online has given us largely centralized and closed systems. ShiftSpace is an Open Source platform that attempts to subvert this trend by providing a new public space on the web. By pressing the [Shift] + [Space] keys, a ShiftSpace user can invoke a new meta layer above any web page to browse and create additional interpretations, contextualizations and interventions using various authoring tools.

VF, Virta-Flaneurazine-SL, Proposal for Clinical Study ---- Member Selection
by Will Pappenheimer and John Freeman
http://www.willpap-projects.com/VF/VirtaFlaneurazineSL.html
Virta-Flaneurazine-SL is a potent programmable "mood changing" drug for Second Life (SL). A member of the "Wanderment" family of psychotropic drugs; when ingested it automatically causes the bearer to aimlessly roam the distant lands of SL for up to a full day. As the prograchemistry takes effect, users find themselves erratically teleporting to random locations, behaving strangely, seeing digephemera and moving in circuitous paths. Many users report the experience allows them to see SL freed from its limitations as a fast growing grid of investment properties.

The Wrench
by Knifeandfork (Sue Huang and Brian House)
http://knifeandfork.org/rhizome_submission/
The Wrench will recast Primo Levi's The Monkey's Wrench into a mobile phone text-message exchange between participants and an artificially-intelligent agent. Taking place over the course of a week, the dialogue is not pre-determined; it employs Knifeandfork's nonlinear narrative software engine. The system is intended to present a convincingly human agent within a realtime plot progression. The AI will have specific, dynamic narrative goals for each interaction, designed to intertwine the lives of the character and participant through the ubiquitous yet restrictive communication channel of text-messaging.

zHarmony ---- Member Selection
by conglomco.org (Tyler Jacobsen & Kim Schnaubert)
http://conglomco.org/zharmony/
zHarmony is an addition to Rhizome that will combine the Compatibility Matching System of online relationship services like eHarmony with Rhizome's existing database of artists. zHarmony will produce a unique artist profiling system that can automatically match artists with like-minded collaborators (or groups of collaborators) based on multiple points of compatibility.