Mark Tribe — Rhizome is founded

1996

Artists: Mark Tribe · Year: 1996 · Medium: Mailing list, journal, archive, conference series · Substrate: Email, later the web · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Initially an email list; later affiliated with the New Museum Mark Tribe started Rhizome in 1996 as an email list for people making and writing about net art. The list grew. A journal followed, then a website, then an archive. By the early 2000s Rhizome was affiliated with the New Museum in the Bowery, which gave it physical headquarters and institutional backing. Today it operates as a department of the New Museum and continues to be the field's institutional memory. The reason Rhizome matters more than most art organizations of its size is the ArtBase — a growing archive of born-digital artworks that the institution has been preserving since 1999. Net art is a medium whose works rot. Browsers change, media codecs deprecate, Flash dies, web servers go offline, domain registrations lapse, the specific versions of HTML and JavaScript a 1996 piece needed to run are no longer emulated by any shipping browser. A work of net art from 1998 is at risk of simply ceasing to exist, not because anyone destroyed it but because the substrate it ran on has quietly been replaced. Rhizome's response to this has been to emulate. The ArtBase contains working, browsable versions of net-art pieces running in browser environments that replicate the software stack of the work's original release. You can visit a 1997 Flash piece in a modern browser on Rhizome's site and see it functioning as it did in 1997, because the institution has done the preservation labor required to make that possible. This is technically harder than it sounds. It requires archiving not just the work but the entire software stack beneath it. Rhizome's Net Art Anthology — a curated 100-work canon, published serially from 2016 through 2019 — is the closest thing the field has to a definitive history. Every major net artist of the 1990s is represented. The anthology is the reason any literate conversation about net art is possible today, because it is the place the conversation can start from. The institution has been quiet and durable. It is a model for how a small organization can outlast the media its artists work in. The NFT era, which has not yet built a comparable preservation infrastructure, is going to need one. Lore Mark Tribe started Rhizome in 1996 as an email list for people making and writing about net.art. Within a decade it had become the de facto institutional memory of the field — the ArtBase, a growing archive of born-digital artworks; the Net Art Anthology, a curated 100-work canon published 2016–2019; and the Seven on Seven conferences, pairing artists with technologists in one-day collaborations. Rhizome is affiliated with the New Museum in the Bowery. Almost every piece in this era's section is preserved, at least in part, because Rhizome decided to preserve it — the alternative was obsolescence as browsers, formats, and hosts silently failed. Sources • Rhizome.org • New Museum — Rhizome collaboration • Rhizome Net Art Anthology (2016–2019)