Rhizome Collaboration Redux
1. I gained access to the administrative account of Rhizome's servers and made 2 posts on rhizome.org titled “Owning Online Art” 2. I gained access to the administrative Rhizome email account and the email account of Rhizome's Executive Director, and I released a number of emails and documents related to Rhizome receiving funding from the Arts Council of England.I've uploaded the emails and documents and screenshots along with an essay detailing what I think they mean HERE. I recommend downloading and sharing it ASAP before the cat and mouse game of takedown/re-upload kicks in. Please be aware that it is written with an anti-Rhizome voice. I may be opinionated, but I think Rhizome's behaviour regarding their ACE funding was disgusting. I also think their TED Talk vision for the future of digital art represents an extremely conservative, corporate, and sad face of what might be in store for art in the UK. I made this artwork partially as some small attempt at electronic resistance (I'd heard that the 90s are back). I called the first part of the work Owning Online Art because in computer vernacular I “owned” Rhizome and all the online art they've got. I found it interesting to consider this type of ownership against the forms of online art ownership advertised on Rhizome via things like Paddle8 and the Phillips auction. It also struck me how Rhizome owns its art: somewhere in a rented Amazon Web Services rack, certain memory locations are allowed to be art and some are not. This is done through normal Artworld/institutional conventions but as these conventions are expressed in code and code doesn't follow the conventions of an Artworld, institutional structures become a bit more malleable. Understanding that meant I was able to redraw the boundaries of where art existed on Rhizome's own servers as I saw fit. It was a very stressful performance for me and I made sure not to get carried away. While I had admin access to every Rhizome user account, the entire Artbase, their mailing lists, their source code and everything running on the server itself, I simply made a couple posts and published some emails. I hope everyone takes this as another instance of the same old lesson: if you use weak passwords you will be a collaborator with network-based practices. It also begs the question of why an organisation stupid enough to use its own name + DOB as the password for most of its services (rhizome1996) is considered fit to be a major custodian of digital art? However most of the attention will focus on the emails. I decided to release certain emails because I found it interesting that the Arts Council of England violated their own funding policies and gave UK public money to an individual who was not “resident in the EU at time of application”, in this case Rhizome's Executive Director. I released Rhizome's internal 2013 financials because I found it interesting to learn that Rhizome's community support is so small and dropping, that they receive over a quarter of their funding from HTC, that they receive funding from Deutsche Bank, etc. I invite you to read everything yourself and draw your own conclusions about the importance of any of it, although I believe that regardless of interpretation it's of a general benefit to artists in the UK that the information is now public and open for discussion. There are many other possibly interesting things and I posses somewhere north of 10,000 other emails and documents I've yet to go through. Rhizome's extremely close ties with Wieden + Kennedy, the agenda of a board dominated by VC's, advertisers and art consultants, their internal criticisms of certain artists and arts organisations, “seeding” HTC phones, their targeting of newly wealthy techies, their offering to do talent spotting for galleries because “we made Ryan Trecartin's career”: it seems a very particular strategy and learning directly from Rhizome's playbook has been a fantastic education. However I don't know if more of that education needs to be reflected in the project, or if I even posses the skillset to do it safely. It could be beneficial for artists and students of digital culture looking to understand how this system works at a rather critical time. Or it might be fluff for voyeurs and that's all I am. Rhizome's silence on the matter was also striking: tech style best practice is to publicly acknowledge a breach, its scope, and your response. Perhaps I could goad them into it through more releases but I'm unconvinced of its further power as an Artwork. I do feel confident in the work thus far. The performative nature of the work was very real for me. The ontological questions of digital art ownership and "unauthorised" code I think are valid. The limited email release of clearly dodgy & possibly criminal behaviour explored post-Snowden privacy and politics. I took a 6 months break to let things simmer down and my intentions are now to find a permanent online home for the work as it stands, then submit it for inclusion in the Rhizome Artbase. I will try to participate in any discussion of the work on this thread although I am using a temporary email account. For discussion that needs to be more secure you could tweet your request with #jiggawebz93 and I'll try to find you and your PGP key. All the best JIGGAWEBZ93
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