In 2003, Rhizome and the New Museum entered into a unique partnership. This partnership aimed to increase the visibility and recognition of digital art within the contemporary art world as well as foster new opportunities for exhibitions, programming, and preservation of digital artworks.
Installation view, “ArtBase 101” at New Museum, 2005. Foreground, MTAA (M. River & T. Whid), 1 year performance video (aka samHsiehUpdate), 2004, website with Flash.
In 2005, the New Museum, which was located in Chelsea at the time, presented the exhibition “ArtBase 101.” The show offered a curated selection of forty works from Rhizome.org's ArtBase, an online archive of new media art launched in 1999. At that time, the Museum frequently hosted digital exhibitions in its Media Z Lounge – an ideal context for an exhibition curated by Rhizome.
In "ArtBase 101", ten underlying themes were drawn out to characterize distinct areas of practice from Rhizome’s communities, which included considerable crossover with generative practice. The exhibition included Amy Alexander’s theBot (2000), Casey Reas’s Software Structures (2004), and John F. Simon’s Every Icon (1999).
In Amy Alexander's piece theBot (2000), visitors were asked to input search terms, prompting a web crawler to scour the internet for relevant quotes and their respective URLs. The gathered material was then transformed into visual poetry, which was displayed on screen, while the appropriated text was recited by a computerized voice.
With Software Structures (2004), Casey Reas aimed to illustrate a significant rapport between Sol LeWitt's concerns regarding conceptual art and the related issues of mutability and translation in software art. The piece was created using a set of instructions LeWitt had drawn up for assistants to draw prescribed "structures," which Reas implemented through coding software to create various digital structures.
John F. Simon Jr.'s artwork Every Icon (1997) utilizes a grid of 32x32 squares to represent all possible combinations of white and black elements. Although the artwork gives the impression of displaying every icon imaginable, in actuality, it would take billions of years for it to render a recognizable icon.
Amy Alexander, TheBot, 2000. Courtesy of the Artist.