Rhizome (institutional practice) — Rhizome ArtBase — emulation-based preservation program

2005

Artists: Rhizome (institutional practice), Dragan Espenschied (preservation director, 2014-2019) · Year: 2005 · Medium: Institutional preservation program — emulation-based restoration of net-art works whose original runtime environments have deprecated · Substrate: oldweb.today browser emulation; archived JavaScript and Flash environments; systematic preservation of ArtBase collection · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Rhizome / New Museum Rhizome had been operating as a mailing-list and website since Mark Tribe founded it in Berlin in 1996, had moved to New York in 1998, and had been the central English-language forum for net.art criticism and artist community through the medium's formative decade. In 2005 Rhizome formally launched the ArtBase preservation program — a systematic effort to archive, document, and sustainably host the emerging canon of net.art works, many of which were already beginning to break as browsers, plug-ins, and server software evolved past them. The ArtBase was unusual in that it treated preservation as a genuinely difficult artistic-curatorial problem. Early net.art works were built for specific browser configurations (Netscape 3, Internet Explorer 4), used plug-ins (Shockwave, Java applets, Flash) that were losing support, and relied on external live sources (specific APIs, specific databases, specific domain registrations) whose infrastructure was aging out. Straightforward "archiving" in the library sense — make a copy and store it — did not preserve the works. Rhizome had to develop methods for what the librarians call "functional preservation": the work had to still work. What emerged from ArtBase over the subsequent fifteen years is one of the most important case studies in digital-preservation theory. Rhizome has developed, in collaboration with the New Museum and with technical partners (Webrecorder, founded by Ilya Kreymer out of Rhizome's technical staff), a set of preservation methods — browser emulation, container-based deployment, explicit dependency documentation — that have become the de facto standard for preserving net-based artwork internationally. The ArtBase currently holds several thousand archived works. Its 2005 formal launch is the hinge moment in this archive because it is when the preservation problem stopped being hypothetical. Rhizome continued to operate as a non-profit through the 2010s and 2020s, has housed the Net Art Anthology (2016–19), and remains the principal English-language institution for net-art research. The executive director since 2012 is Michael Connor. Lore The ArtBase was, in its earliest form, a more modest project than its current institutional status suggests. When it launched in 2005, it was essentially a set of working agreements between Rhizome staff and a few dozen artists who had agreed to let Rhizome archive their work; the technical preservation infrastructure came gradually, over the next decade, as specific works started breaking and the Rhizome staff had to work out how to fix them. Ilya Kreymer joined Rhizome in 2015 specifically to build Webrecorder, which allows Rhizome and other institutions to preserve dynamic web content in ways earlier archive tools could not. Webrecorder spun out as a standalone project in 2017 and is now used by major research libraries worldwide. Sources • Rhizome — Net Art Anthology (Rhizome / New Museum, 2016–19). • Rhizome ArtBase — rhizome.org/art/artbase/. • Espenschied, Dragan; Rechert, Klaus (eds.) — Preserving Complex Digital Objects (Facet Publishing, 2014).