Today, we are proud to unveil the new rhizome.org.
Designed by Laura Coombs and Mindy Seu, and developed by Mark Beasley, our new home on the web serves as an interface to Rhizome’s many activities, past and present, and debuts a new identity for the organization. Where our 2015 website heavily emphasized Rhizome as a curated online publication, the new site acts as a flexible navigation tool for a wide range of activities, not only articles. These are expressed in our nav bar, which describes our activities and offerings:
Rhizome is the home of born-digital art and culture since 1996. Learn about us and our #preservation, #commissions, and #7x7 programs. Explore #artworks, #publishing, community, and events, online and IRL.
Mindy and Laura drew considerable inspiration from Rhizome’s history. One key reference was a 2001 logo designed by Markus Weisbeck and Frank Hauschild of Surface.de and introduced by Rhizome in 2001. Billed as “the world’s first generative logo,” it was rendered anew each time it was viewed, based on the IP addresses of the last four visitors. The new logo evokes the form and function of the previous iteration, responding to the distance of recent website visitors from Rhizome’s office in New York City.
The new rhizome.org elevates tags—previously appended at the end of Rhizome articles, and underutilized across the site—as a central design feature and organizing principle. The design team did a deep dive into the history of tagging, considering their uses on websites such as del.icio.us, and considering longstanding questions about the language we use to talk about born-digital art. The goal was to use tags to create connections among new and old content, encouraging both rapid searching and casual wandering. With this new focus on tags, we spent time cleaning up, merging, and fixing typos in tags, but tagging is a process – we plan to continue using tags to offer new journeys through our archives in the future.
The redesign also considers Rhizome’s history as an online community, and gives new focus to the ongoing activity at rhizome.org/community. For years, as social media empires have risen and fallen, Rhizome’s users have continued to visit this board to share and find out about jobs, events, and opportunities in the field of born-digital art. In this revamped section of the site, we’re testing out a calendar function, which we hope will only make this a more valuable resource.
“This new site offers a powerful foundation for our next chapter,” Co-Executive Director Makayla Bailey observes. “When Michael Connor and I began our tenure last fall as joint leadership team, we had a goal of making Rhizome more legible. We wanted to find ways to tell the story of our deep connection to digital culture, while looking ahead to continue supporting new kinds of artistic practice and experimentation. Our new site and logo allows us to do just that.”
Laura and Mindy are both longtime collaborators of Rhizome. Laura is the Senior Designer at the New Museum and teaches Graphic Design at Princeton University. She has led on branding and design for many Rhizome events in her role at our affiliate. Mindy is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art. We’ve been thrilled to support Mindy’s Cyberfeminism Index by presenting it as part of our First Look exhibition series, as well as hosting a recent book launch.
What you see today is just the beginning. And with that in mind, if you’d like to support Rhizome as it embarks on filling this new site with art and ideas, while caring for a rich history of art and ideas, please make a contribution today.
This website redesign was made possible with funds from Rafaël Rozendaal's 2021 Endless Nameless gift.