About Rhizome 2001 VHS

This informational video from 2001, recently unearthed in the archives, is a nostalgic reminder of Rhizome's roots. Though the VHS format is near obsolete, our history will never be, and we maintain the same international and community-driven spirit today as seen in this video.

Since 1996, Rhizome has evolved and refreshed many times over. From email list-serv to thriving non-profit, the organization always strives to bring together an international and diverse community. We hope to reinvigorate and re-engage the international community featured on our website by bringing our programs and events abroad. By hosting programs in other cities, Rhizome can promote artists and communities beyond New York City in more meaningful ways.

However, we must raise the necessary funds in order to realize our goals in 2013 and beyond. Every year we rely on our community to contribute to our operational budget in ways that grants and sponsorships cannot. Please consider contributing to the Community Fundraiser today. Your donation is a vote of confidence as we grow our programs in the next year.

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Last Thursday, Ben and I took a field trip to check out Rhizome's physical archive. Tara Hart, the New Museum's Digital Archivist, showed us where the Rhizome files are stored in the museum's archive located next door at 231. We had about an hour before we needed to get back to work, so we took couple of boxes and dug right in. This was fun departure from the usual day to day activities around the office. Here are some gems we found from our trip:

In a binder labeled "Rhizome Ads", a record of advertisements from various art and technology publications.

(from Leonardo, Vol. 33 Number 2, 2000)

I love the selling points here. Starrynight search interface -- Amazing!

We also found a bunch of folders labeled by month and year which held articles about various artists involved with Rhizome, new media art calls, opening invitations and other ephemera. Flipping through, I came across this great hand written postcard from Mouchette.

(Found in a folder labeled October 2001)

In another folder, I found this Xeroxed announcement for Cory Arcangel's Whitney Artport commission.

(circa 2002)

There are over twenty-something boxes to go through, who knows what we'll find next. I promise to keep you updated!

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In this series of posts, we will be reblogging content from Rhizome's Archives, available here. This interview with Cornelia Sollfrank, conducted by Florian Cramer, comes from Rhizome's former publication, the Rhizome Digest. It was published on March 31, 2002. You can peruse old editions of the Rhizome Digest here.

Big thanks to Rhizome's curatorial fellow Natalie Saltiel for help with this post.

Date: 3.15.2002 From: Florian Cramer (cantsin AT zedat.fu-berlin.de) Subject: Hacking the Art OS--Interview with Cornelia Sollfrank Keywords: net art, hacking, gender, design

[This is the English translation of the original-length German interview. Copyleft and publication data is given at the end. -FC]

Hacking the art operating system

Cornelia Sollfrank interviewed by Florian Cramer, December 28th, 2001, during the annual congress of the Chaos Computer Club (German Hacker's Club) in Berlin.

I have questions on various thematic complexes which in your work seem to be continually referring to each other: hacking and art, computer generated, or more specifically, generative art, cyberfeminism, or the questions that your new work entitled 'Improvised Tele-vision' throw up. And of course the thematic complex plagiarism and appropriation - as well as what can be seen as an appendix to that, art and code, code art and code aesthetics.

Surely code art and code aesthetics are more your themes than mine. I think I should be the one asking the questions here. (laughter)

...no, this refers very specifically to statements made by you, for example in your Telepolis interview with 0100101110111001.org, which I found excellent because of its rather sceptical undertones. If that really is more my area though, then by all means we can bracket it out of the interview.

No, no. I didn't mean it like that. Quite the opposite in fact. However that is what is so interesting and difficult about the relationship between these complexes - and which I often find myself arguing about. A lot of things appear to run parallel, or better put, one invests more in one area for a particular period of time, then returns back to something else. To keep an eye on how these various activities link together is not easy.

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In this series of posts, we will be reblogging content from Rhizome's Archives, available here. This interview with John F. Simon, Jr., conducted by Jon Ippolito, comes from Rhizome's former publication, the Rhizome Digest. It was published on March 23, 2002. You can peruse old editions of the Rhizome Digest here.

Big thanks to Rhizome's curatorial fellow Natalie Saltiel for help with this post.

Date: 3.12.2002
From: Jon Ippolito
Subject: Code As Creative Writing--An Interview with John F. Simon, Jr
Keywords: software, programming, design

This interview took place in January 2002, on the occasion of the Guggenheim's acquisition of John Simon's Unfolding Object. More info at http://www.guggenheim.org/internetart.

Jon Ippolito: You've been working on or near the cutting edge of digital art since the mid-1980s, when you were programming image-processing routines for CCD [charge-coupled device] photography. Yet you often cite sources of inspiration from the world of pen and brush rather than the world of pixel and browser, and I see some of these influences of Modernism-for example, the influence of Paul Klee in your plotter drawings [1994-95] and Sol LeWitt in Combinations [1995]. What is it about those artists that speaks to you?

John F. Simon, Jr.: I am interested in analytical approaches to creativity. A new technology doesn't erase a life's work of thoughtful, creative production. The ideas are bigger than the medium. There are many examples in art history where artistic practice could be described as algorithmic-an approach to experimentation by rule making, including LeWitt and Conceptual artists in the 1970s also Paul Klee in the 1920's along with many other Bauhaus professors.

An even older example would be Dominican priest-scholar Sebastien Truchet's 1722 work on the use of combinations in tile design. His study uses square tiles of two colors that are divided diagonally. He assigned a letter to each of the four possible orientations of this kind of tile. He then made lists of letters describing the sequence and orientation for laying out the tiles. The lists functioned like instructions or programs for constructing the design. Craftsmen would pick a pattern out of his book and use the lists of letters as assembly instructions. Another even older example would be the analytical techniques used in the design of the Alhambra and in much Islamic art.

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