RHIZOME

Mark Tribe / Alex Galloway

A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus

Rhizome is the botanical term for a kind of stem that burrows underground, sending out shoots and roots. Rhizomes connect plants into living networks. Rhizome.org is a non-profit organization that supports the international new media art community through online services and offline events.

Rhizome was founded in February 1996 in Berlin at a time when the international new media art world was fragmented into local communities and lacked a common platform for the exchange of ideas and information. While festivals such as Ars Electronica and DEAF (the Dutch Electronic Art Festival) did enable people working in this field to share ideas with each other and the public, we saw an opportunity to use the Internet to facilitate a critical dialog that was more accessible, inclusive and ongoing, and to build community across geographical and cultural borders.

We began with an email list focused on the intersection of contemporary art and emerging technologies, and email remains at the center of our activities, the glue that binds our community together. Email lists are still among the most important and effective forms of online communication. Our email list is now available in three modes: Rhizome Raw, Rhizome Rare and Rhizome Digest. Raw is totally unfiltered. Rare is filtered into four channels from which users may choose. Digest is a weekly filtered newsletter.

Our Web site http://www.rhizome.org is an online platform for the presentation, interpretation and preservation of new media art. It also serves as a resource for information about Rhizome.org and as a gateway to our email services. The site’s key features are our artist-created Splash Pages; the TextBase, a library of indexed texts selected from the email lists; the Art- Base, an archive of net art projects; and alt.interface, a series of interface artworks including Every Image, Spiral and StarryNight. Our site’s use of open source technology and functional design approach reflect our overall emphasis on community access and transparency.

Unlike most print and online magazines, which employ a vertical hierarchy to disseminate content from a few producers to many consumers, Rhizome is a grassroots community: a horizontally distributed, many-to-many network. It is in this sense that Rhizome is indeed rhizomatic.