Rhizome ArtBase 101 surveys salient themes in Internet art, a practice that has flourished in the last ten years. The exhibition presents forty selections from Rhizome.org's online archive of new media art, the ArtBase, which was launched in 1999 and currently holds some 1,500 works by artists from around the world. Featured works are grouped by ten unifying themes and include seminal pieces by early practitioners as well as projects by some of the most pioneering emerging talents working in the field today. Encompassing software, games, moving image and websites, Rhizome ArtBase 101 presents the Internet as a strapping medium that rivals other art forms in its ability to buttress varied critical and formal explorations.

Rhizome ArtBase 101 is currently on exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. At the Museum, all 40 works are installed on computers and some have additionally been elaborated into installations. Rhizome Members receive half price admission to the New Museum during the run of the show, June 23rd - September 10th. **Please note that as our membership is constantly fluctuating, we will submit an updated list of our Members to the New Museum admission staff each Friday over the Summer. Practically, this means if you become a Member on Tuesday of a given week, your membership will not be noted at the front desk until the following Monday.

For the duration of the exhibition, all 40 works will be available here to the general online public. Many of these works would usually be accessible only to Rhizome Members as they are located within our archives.

Projects described as DIRT STYLE counter the impulse to upgrade. Some works appropriate graphic detritus from the web in gestures that both celebrate and satirize digital pop culture. In extreme animalz: the movie: part I (2005), U.S.-based collective Paper Rad and Pittsburgh artist Matt Barton translated the outdated aesthetic of animated gifs into a sculptural installation exploring the spectacle and emotion we bring to these digital forms and their obsolescence. Here, collages of animated gifs of animals--sourced through Google's Image search--are surrounded by similarly discarded stuffed animals found in thrift stores. For Rhizome ArtBase 101, their animations are available online, while the whole piece is available only at the New Museum. www.-reverse.-flash-.-back- (2003) is an example of French artist jimpunk's deconstructed web-based work that makes use of HTML special effects, JavaScript and visual debris from the Internet. In www.-reverse.-flash-.-back-, browser windows--each a different colorful collage--pop up, stutter and careen across the screen, depriving the viewer of control including the ability to exit. In GOODWORLD (2002), New York artist Lew Baldwin uses a unique program to translate any submitted website into an abstracted field of RGB color blocks and decorative syntax. The program takes the most prominent image on a web page and turns it into a magenta abstraction, and transforms the rest of the site into chunks of other websafe colors. GOODWORLD neutralizes the web by draining content and generalizing all websites into aesthetically similar visual fields. Dirt Style works can also express nostalgia by repurposing analog technologies. In Dot Matrix Synth (2003), American artist Paul Slocum reprogrammed a dot matrix printer so that it plays electronic notes in accordance with different printing frequencies. For Rhizome ArtBase 101, Slocum accompanied the printer with an introductory sign that invites visitors to "PUSH BUTTONS TO ROCK OUT."

GOODWORLD
Lew Baldwin
US
2002

www.-reverse.-flash-.-.back-
jimpunk
France
2003

extreme animalz: the movie: part 1
Paper Rad and Matt Barton
US
2005

Dot Matrix Synth
Paul Slocum
US
2003

NET CINEMA puts film and video in dialogue with digital aesthetics such as hypertext, databases, and algorithms. Many of these works embrace the constraints of low-bandwidth. Based on Murnau's 1922 film, The Letter and the Fly (2002) by American artist Barbara Lattanzi allows users to orchestrate images, which download gradually onto the screen, into their own cinematic compositions. Similarly, SUPER SMILE (2005) by South-Korea-based duo YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, invokes multiple film genres--romance, action, noir--through the rhythm and pace of its experimental, text-based narrative. The flourishing of commercial media programs, like Flash, in recent years has seeded new possibilities for moving image online. Motomichi Nakamura's flash animations, including Bcc (2001), Drops (2003), Evoe (2004), Qrime (2000) and Walk (2005), explore the bleaker aspects of online communication, such as loneliness, violence or fear, in elegant visual narratives that graphically isolate feelings or moods. Still, some artists are more interested in a program's vulnerabilities than in its options. For his series Data Diaries (2003), New York artist Cory Arcangel tricked QuickTime into reading his daily desktop debris (old e-mails, jpegs, and Word documents) as media files, a maneuver that produced dozens of mesmeric and abstract streaming videos.

Data Diaries
Cory Arcangel
US
2003

The Letter and the Fly
Barbara Lattanzi
US
2002

Bcc (Blank Carbon Copy), Drops, Qrime, Walk
Motomichi Nakamura
Japan/US
Various

SUPER SMILE
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES
South Korea
2005

With cutting edge graphic interfaces and dependence on a player, GAMES provide a rich terrain for artistic intervention. Works, like Sheik Attack (1999) by Israeli-born artist Eddo Stern, recontextualize game narratives to reveal the social and political agendas embedded in their structure. The Intruder (1999) by Natalie Bookchin appropriates early game interfaces and gaming tactics that involve negotiation, trial and error, to tell a short love story by Jorge Luis Borges. Modification, whereby artists hack into virtual worlds to alter their landscape or action, is a form of game art that echoes the equally interventionist traditions of graffiti and tagging. In Adam Killer (1999-2001), Los Angeles-based artist Brody Condon modified the game "Half-Life" so that first person capability is restricted to killing and destruction only. Other games prepare their players for what would seem to be more "real-life" situations. For Agonistics (2005), Warren Sack imagined an agonistic dialogue as a heated language game with interactive images and exchanges. The resulting online game visualizes the actions that comprise a democratic discussion through avatars propelled by comments posted onto a public, online forum.

The Intruder
Natalie Bookchin
US
1999

Adam Killer
Brody Condon
US
1999-2001

Agonistics: A Language Game
Warren Sack
US
2004

SHEIK ATTACK
Eddo Stern
Israel/US
1999

A number of projects respond to E-COMMERCE by disturbing processes of online consumption, often through satire and emulation. Portland-based artist damali ayo riffs on the commodification of identity in rent-a-negro.com (2003), a service that offers the companionship of an African American person for a price but free of the commitment of "challenging your own white privilege." ®TMark, a brokerage firm of international workers, supports initiatives that sabotage corporate products and protocol through their online headquarters, rtmark.com. British duo Thomson & Craighead provide a counterpoint to such direct engagements of capitalist enterprise in dot-store (2002-2004), a line of goods that investigates the historical overlap between individual expression and commercial communication systems. For Shop Mandiberg (2001), New York artist Michael Mandiberg attempted to "disintegrate himself" by operating an online store in which all of his worldly belongings were up for sale. For one year, he systematically priced and sold each item of his personal possessions: his used sandwiches, underwear, apartment keys and even freelance services as a conceptual artist. Mandiberg's performance of literally "selling out" addresses the fusion of contemporary art and commerce.

rtmark.com
®TMark
International
Ongoing

rent-a-negro.com
damali ayo
US
2003

Shop Mandiberg
Michael Mandiberg
US
2001

dot-store
Thomson & Craighead
UK
2002

DATA VISUALIZATION AND DATABASES manifest relationships between informational entities that might otherwise remain invisible or even unthinkable. Created using RSG's network surveillance program Carnivore (2001-2003), Los Angeles-based programmer Mark Daggett's Carnivore Is Sorry (2001) tracks users as they navigate the Web, then compresses the sites they have just visited into an abstract, data-dense jpeg and e-mails it to them. Like an unfamiliar postcard from the recent past, the image provides an alternate representation of the trail of browsing the user has just tracked. In The Secret Lives of Numbers (2002) Golan Levin, Jonathan Feinberg, Martin Wattenberg, and Shelly Wynecoop pursued an exhaustive empirical study of the relative popularity of every integer between zero and one million. The resulting information, procured through custom software, public search engines and powerful statistical techniques, exhibits an extraordinary variety of patterns, which the artists visualized with interactive graphics that form a "numeric snapshot of the collective unconsciousness." Databases have been employed to reorganize existing arrangements into new narratives or situations. The Status Project (2005) by Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting is an in-development, online database that amasses the constituent elements from all human statuses--legal, professional, recreational, political--from official or junk forms of identity. When completed, Brandon and Bunting's database will provide an experimental framework, through which users can strategize ways to cross many types of class and behavioral borders. A project with a database structure less visibly at its core is One Year Performance Video (akasamhsiehupdate) (2004), which sources prerecorded clips of Brooklyn-based artists M. River and T. Whid of MTAA into a streaming video diptych that simulates a fictional narrative of the artists living in adjacent, identical white cells for the duration of a year. The piece is a part of their Updates series, which recontextualizes the work of seminal artists from the 60s and 70s within new media.

The Status Project
Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting
UK
2005

Carnivore Is Sorry
Mark Daggett/ RSG
US
2001

The Secret Lives of Numbers
Golan Levin, with Jonathan Feinberg, Martin Wattenberg, Shelly Wyncoop
US
2002

1 year performance video (aka samHsiehUpdate)
MTAA (M.River and T.Whid Art Associates)
US
2004

ONLINE CELEBRITY demonstrates how quickly and frequently personal behavior becomes public spectacle due to the increasing number of computer users linked to blogs or homepages. On Marisa Olson's American Idol Audition Training Blog (2004), the San Francisco-based artist exhaustively documents the pitfalls and nervous anticipation involved in her attempt to become the next American Idol. For Rhizome ArtBase 101, Olson additionally made a customized iPod (a "mopod") which archives her reach for stardom in sound clips, photos and text. In Diary of a Star (2004), Los Angeles-based artist Eduardo Navas recontextualizes selections from The Andy Warhol Diaries (edited by Pat Hackett) to connect this earlier artist's legendary self-awareness to the attitudes of today's online personas. Sourcing a moment in goth-glam music history, Irish artist Oliver Moran based his web application Virtual Richey Manic (2001) on a legendary interview during which Richey, the gloomy front man of the band Manic Street Preachers, carved "4REAL" into his forearm. Visitors to the site may re-program the engraved text as any 4-letter word, click "razor," and generate a new jpeg of Richey wearing their submission--a sort of grizzly intimacy most traditional fan sites do not achieve. The homepage for the elusive artist Mouchette (whose real identity is masked) is supposedly that of a 13-year old, suicide-obsessed Dutch girl. Her page Flesh&Blood (1998) invites observers to "finally come close to" the girl by touching, licking and whispering into the screen: the image of a young girl dragging her tongue across the computer monitor accompanies an email form that encourages visitors to contact Mouchette, find out if she is real and tell her what her tongue tastes like.

Virtual Richey Manic
Oliver Moran
Ireland
2001

Flesh&Blood
Mouchette
The Netherlands
1998

Diary of a Star
Eduardo Navas
US
2004

Marisa's American Idol Audition Training Blog
Marisa S. Olson
US
2004

With more overlap between virtual and real spaces made possible by the proliferation of wireless technologies, artists have produced a host of projects that engage the notion of PUBLIC SPACE. In [murmur] (2003), by Shawn Micallef, James Roussel and Gabe Sawhney, pedestrians can dial into a central database and enter their location to hear or share site-specific stories about their exact location. For Nike Ground (2003), the international team of artists known as 0100101110101101.org employed Internet-based marketing strategies (Web sites, e-releases) to fool the city of Vienna into believing that their beloved Karlsplatz had been acquired by Nike and was to be supplanted by a monumental Swoosh. British artist Susan Collins' Fenlandia (2004) trains a webcam on the slowing changing landscape of a British fen. Set to record one pixel per second, the accumulating image that is streamed online reflects on the passage of time and the ever-increasing demands for speed placed on telecommunication technologies. 1.1 Acre Flat Screen (2002-2003) by the international artists known as eteam is a long-ranging project that began with the artist's Ebay purchase of an empty desert lot in Utah. Considering this space and its limitless possibilities for development as analogous to their similarly blank, flat digital canvas--the computer screen--eteam set off to project an increase in the real estate's value, and proceeded to operate a snack shop and artist residency program, all of which culminated in a public auction of the land and other objects of wild west memorabilia.

[murmur]
Shawn Micallef, James Roussel, Gabe Sawhney
Canada
2003

Nike Ground
0100101110101101.org
International
2003

Fenlandia
Susan Collins
UK
2004

1.1 Acre Flat Screen
eteam
International
2002 ? 2003

SOFTWARE ART takes generative processes and code as its source material, examining these not as neutral sets of information but rather as cultural forms. Many software art projects interrogate the mechanisms of control that underlie software by destabilizing rote experiences of computing. Through its open source, cross-platform design the early program The Web Stalker (1997) by British collective I/O/D critiqued commercial software, suggesting that it is "mind control" and that skeptical computer users should "get some." Other projects downplay functionality in order to strikingly visualize certain operations that software enables. In Amy Alexander's piece theBot (2000), visitors provide search terms, which prompt a web crawler to comb the Internet in real-time and gather quotes from found texts and their corresponding URLs. The appropriated material is then recited by a computer voice and appears streaming on screen as visual poetry. Like a deconstructed search engine, theBot composes a ricocheting orchestra of freely associated information. Every Icon (1997) by John F. Simon, Jr. presents every variation of white and black elements possible on a grid, 32 squares wide and 32 squares tall (the exact size of a 1997 desktop icon). While evoking every icon imaginable through its flickering variations, the piece would take billions of years to render any sort of recognizable icon. Every Icon shows how software makes it possible to present an infinite amount of aesthetic possibilities within one canvas. For { Software Structures } (2004), C.E.B. Reas illustrated a meaningful connection between Sol LeWitt's conceptual art concerns and the related issues of mutability and translation in software art. Reas took a set of instructions LeWitt had drawn up for assistants to draw proscribed "structures," and implemented them through coding software. The result was various digital structures, which Reas then invited other artists to modify. In another gesture of interpretation, Reas translated the original software into different coding languages, such as FlashMX and C++.

theBot
Amy Alexander
US
2000

Web Stalker
I/O/D
London/Cardiff
1997

{ Software Structures }
C.E.B Reas
US
2004

Every Icon
John F. Simon Jr.
US
1997

CYBERFEMINISM has appropriated the Internet as a platform for feminist exploration, action and protest. American artist Prema Murthy's Bindigirl (1999), which parodies South Asian cyberporn sites, features a character called Bindi who laments the failure of new technologies to liberate her from constricting religious and gender identities, confronting some of the identity issues facing South Asian females. In Brandon (1998), Shu Lea Cheang uses the true story of Tina Brandon as a source for her commentary on the paranoia and distrust relating to transgendered bodies, manifested in graphic imagery from international locations on multiple screens. Part of her series of "Black.net.art" actions, New York-based Mendi Obadike's keeping up appearances (2001) considers what is uttered and what remains unsaid. When viewers scroll their cursor over the ample fields of empty text that punctuate her hypertext narrative, the words appear onscreen, revealing a previously invisible fragment of a narrative. New York artist Tina La Porta's website for Translate { } Expression (1998) describes a looping three-channel installation that constructs and deconstructs the female figure from various data. A wire-frame body is drawn line-by-line, disintegrates, and is begun anew; while two side projections scroll through code representing the body's DNA structure--illustrating the ways in which the female form is constituted by invisible data, as well as cycles of creation and dematerialization of women's bodies.

Brandon
Shu Lea Cheang
International
1998

Bindigirl
Prema Murthy
US
1999

keeping up appearances
Mendi Obadike
US
2001

Translate { } Expression
Tina La Porta
US
1998

While historicizing an emerging art practice is never simple, there are some new media artists and works that have undoubtedly created a critical and formal context for Internet art practices as we see them today. Early Net.Art, comprised chiefly of works by European artists active in the mid-late 1990s, is represented in ArtBase 101 by classic projects such as Desktop Is (1997) by Russian artist and curator Alexei Shulgin. This group project reframed the computer desktop as a platform for artistic production, inviting artists to experiment with the most basic computer interface. At the same time, it also represents an important beginning point for Internet Art in that it encouraged the creation of new projects in the context of a community connected by the web and e-mail. UK-based frontman of Internet art collective irrational.org Heath Bunting's _readme (1997) externally linked each word of a British newspaper article about him to its semantic equivalent. For example, the.com article.com was.com translated.com into.com dot.com coms.com This critically nuanced gesture foregrounded the Internet artist and his biography within an intersecting web of over 800 domain names, ranging from broken links to major corporations. Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic's History of Art for Airports (1997) is a study of the informational graphics we encounter at airports, as well as in other transportation systems. Cosic designed didactic icons, much like bathroom and exit signs, that refer to key art historical and pop cultural figures, from Cezanne, Duchamp and Andy Warhol to King Kong and Star Trek, as well as emerging Internet art figures such as. Jodi.org, Heath Bunting, and Alexei Shulgin. net.art generator (1999) is a collaborative project initiated by German cyberfeminist Cornelia Sollfrank, who commissioned four artists to build applications to comb the web for materials to automatically weave together and package into discrete HTML artworks. Each net.art generator yields radically different results, according to the search methods and search engines it uses. net.art generator raises essential questions about the medium of the Internet, specifically the issues of authorship and authenticity.

_readme
Heath Bunting
UK
1998

History of Art for Airports
Vuk Cosic
Slovenia
1997

Desktop Is
Alexei Shulgin
Russia
1997

Net Art Generator
Cornelia Sollfrank
Germany
1999