In the Instagram post, Chan, seen sipping from a mug that matches the statue’s color, playfully commented, “The more of me the better?” The statue’s design, with its flowing silver garment, looks like a mashup of ancient Roman Sculpture and the T-1000 from Terminator 2. According to Zuckerberg, the inspiration came from the former: he captioned the photo “bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife.”

The sculpture features a reflective silver robe wrapped around a blueish green figure that brings to mind a photoshop-smooth version of the weathered and oxidized copper of the Statue of Liberty in New York. The statue’s striking color and size led to a flurry of online comparisons to characters from “Avatar” and jokes about Zuckerberg being the ultimate “wife guy.”

Zuckerberg and Chan met in 2003 while both were students at Harvard. They have been married since 2012 and share three daughters.

Arsham has worked across sculpture, architecture, drawing and film to explore his concept of “fictional archaeology” He most recently opened the exhibition “Phases” at Fotografiska New York earlier this year and he has long been represented by Perrotin. Last month, Arsham was accused of violating national labor laws by employees of his studio, according to a complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board.

Meta AI, an AI laboratory owned by Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta Platforms responsible, was started as a research laboratory in 2013. Make-A-Scene aims to “realize AI’s potential to push creative expression forward,” according to a recent Meta AI blog post.

“Our model generates an image given a text input and an optional scene layout,” reads the report. “As demonstrated in our experiments, by conditioning over the scene layout, our method provides a new form of implicit controllability, improves structural consistency and quality, and adheres to human preference.”

Generative art, or art that has been made using autonomous systems, has its roots in the 1960s when artists like Vera Molnar and Grace Hertlein began using computers to aid their practice.

However, the idea of making art through some kind of chance emerged much earlier. As technology has developed, the field of study has undergone dramatic shifts “in who can make generative art, how they make it, what it looks like, and even the themes and topics that it is capable of addressing. Because the tools and the work are tightly coupled, the history of generative art can be seen as a history of developments in software and hardware,” Jason Bailey wrote in an article for Art in America in January 2020.

Considering Facebook’s Artist-in-Residence program coupled with Meta AI, the unveiling of the Make-A-Scene program hardly emerges as a shock.

“To realize AI’s potential to push creative expression forward, people should be able to shape and control the content a system generates,” reads the blog post. “It should be intuitive and easy to use so people can leverage whatever modes of expression work best for them.”

Researchers used human evaluators to assess images created by the AI program. “Each was shown two images generated by Make-A-Scene: one generated from only a text prompt, and one from both a sketch and a text prompt,” explains the post.

The addition of the sketch feature resulted in a final image that was more aligned by 66.3 percent with the text description, the post said. For those who do not wish to draw, however, the sketch option is not necessary to generate an image; users can choose to use solely the text-only descriptions.

While the software is not yet available to the public, it has been tested by employees and select AI artists Refik Anadol, Sofia Crespo, Scott Eaton, and Alexander Reben.

“I was prompting ideas, mixing and matching different worlds,” noted Anadol. “You are literally dipping the brush in the mind of a machine and painting with machine consciousness.”

Meta program manager Andy Boyatzis, on the other hand, “used Make-A-Scene to generate art with his young children of ages two and four. They used playful drawings to bring their ideas and imagination to life.”

Meta has increased the potential resolution of Make-A-Scene’s output four-fold up to 2048-by-2048 pixels since the report’s release. Additionally, the company plans to provide open access demos but has not yet announced a release date. Until then, those curious about the developing technology will have to wait until October, when the project will be discussed at the European Conference on Computer Vision in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Tableaux vivants, literally living pictures, have become a popular shelter-in-place pastime, driven by museum hashtags, like #gettychallenge, that prompt people to re-create iconic masterpieces and post their versions online alongside the originals. With museums and galleries in the United States shuttered, tableaux vivants keep people connected to art in an immediate, physical way. Though the results are viewable on Instagram and Twitter, the process of staging a tableau also represents something of a counterweight to the torrents of instantly accessible digital content that museums have churned out in recent weeks. Why rely on a virtual experience of art when you can be the image yourself?

Contemporary tableaux vivants revive a practice that originated among the Enlightenment-era aristocracy and then peaked in popularity in the nineteenth century as a parlor game designed to instill players with an appreciation for Art. Instead of prim Victorian moralizing, my friend’s image offers the irony of bringing life and innocence into Shahn’s visual condemnation of state brutality. But even with the lighthearted tone, the tableau amplifies rather than diminishes the gravity of the painting. Tableaux vivants may be relevant again today precisely because they offer a way, however indirect, to connect the experience of isolated life indoors to the dread outside.

Hazel Lavery (wife of the painter Sir John Lavery) performing as Bitticelli’s Primavera at the Picture Ball Held at the Albert Hall, London, 1913.

On a formal level, Shahn’s angular modernist composition lends itself well to clunky living room constructions, but the paintings most often pantomimed in recent weeks tend to be instantly recognizable masterpieces of Western art. Lap dogs perform as the Christ child, and average adults pose as so many tormented Jesuses. Lots of people have cast themselves or their pets as Girls with Pearl Earrings. For some users, the museum challenge is an opportunity to send nudes under the guise of a quasi-sophisticated cultural exercise. (The Birth of Venus appears to be as popular a model now as it was for Victorian teens in the 1860s.) The medium also affords genuine opportunities for education: Opera singer and writer Peter Brathwaite has highlighted African diaspora figures in European and American art. And while figurative paintings composed in linear perspective are most readily reconstructed for the camera, tableau vivant sources also include Persian miniatures and modernist abstractions.

When it comes to assessing tableaux vivants, production value is beside the point. In fact, employing pro lighting setups to replicate chiaroscuro or real satin to evoke Renaissance finery feels almost like cheating. Ingenious substitutions count for more: the beach towel that becomes Napoleon’s flowing red cape as he crosses the Alps, the wooden ruler that becomes a ruler’s scepter. Tableaux vivants offer a home-school lesson in semiotics, with wry substitutions revealing the mechanisms of pictorial meaning.

The best pandemic tableaux vivants come from Russia, where a Facebook page devoted to art in isolation has become a clearinghouse. All the searing filicidal anguish Ilya Repin depicted in Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (1885) comes through in an image of a man cradling a mountain bike in disrepair. One woman re-created John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52) by lying in her bathtub fully clothed and half-submerged in water. A quarantine stockpile of onions and packaged foods stands in for the riverside foliage Millais depicted in his Shakespearean scene.

Left, Ilya Repin’s Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581, 1883-85. Right, a tableau vivant of the painting.

In another widely circulated tableau, French health-care workers in scrubs and PPE gather around a long table to evoke Leonardo’s Last Supper. Rather than merely replicating paintings, such images transform their sources by allowing traces of the pandemic—both physical and psychic—into the scene. The playful demeanor with which the actors have adopted poses and gestures may itself be the facade, masking underlying anxiety.

In confronting the strange horror of a contemporary global pandemic, thousands have turned to models offered by classical oil paintings and five-hundred-year-old frescoes. The impulse to create a tableau vivant shares something with the efforts, now cliché, to compare dramatic journalistic photos to Renaissance paintings, and shots of deserted cities to Edward Hopper’s realist compositions. Tableaux vivants invert the logic of these memes, as individuals reverse-engineer the sources, contorting their bodies to a template: the visual equivalent of karaoke or lip syncing. (In fact, there is a good chance of encountering social media tableaux vivants as part of a feed that includes clips from TikTok.)

While not exactly cool, the tableau vivant revival manages to avoid being hopelessly corny— which had been the art form’s fate for decades. In the mid- and late nineteenth century, well-heeled young people in the United States turned to Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine for inspiration on how to pantomime a scene. While the ultimate purpose was to engender “a love for and appreciation of art,” as one writer put it in 1860, the activity also entailed shedding restrictive clothing in favor of flowing classical robes. At a socially restrictive time, tableaux vivants struck a delicate balance between homework and transgression.

Top, a tableau vivant of John Everett Mill’s Ophelia, 1851-52. Bottom, the original painting.

Over the years, the practice stagnated, losing whatever rebellious edge it might have had. The annual Pageant of the Masters, part of the Festival of Arts in Laguna Beach, California, has kept the flame of Victorian seriousness alive since 1932. The Orange Country institution features lavish productions in which dozens of heavily made-up performers arrange themselves on, in, and around elaborately constructed stage sets to replicate the work of canonical artists. (The Pageant’s excess was skewered in an episode of “Arrested Development,” with the hapless George Michal Bluth posing in denim cutoffs in the role of Adam from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling.) If the event goes ahead this summer as planned, the theme will be “Made in America.” The playbill promises dozens of living compositions, from Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) to Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) to The Last Supper, a virtuoso rendition which concludes the proceedings every year. The Pageant of the Masters’ organizers describe their work in an earnest tone, presenting the event as an opportunity to learn about key figures from art history in a beachside community that had little access to original works back in the 1930s. Still, there are aspects of the production—the caked make-up, the flamboyant posing, the hints of nudity—that can’t always be contained within an educational mission. Despite the noble aims and prim appearances, the specter of camp travesty haunts the Pageant of the Masters.

The relationship between high art and tableaux vivants has always been marked by tension and ambiguity. As Caroline van Eck argues in her 2015 book Art, Agency, and Living Presence, the rise in popularity of tableaux vivants among the European elite—Goethe famously chronicled the moment in his novel Elective Affinities (1809)—coincides with the birth of the modern museum. If the museum codified a detached, rational mode of viewing aesthetic objects, the tableau vivant reverses this ideal: an embodied experience of art that inherently celebrates excess, drama, irony, and play. Just when the earliest art historians sought to analyze distinctions between artistic mediums, tableaux vivants offered a motley art form, closer to theater (and cinema, as later critics would observe) than to the paintings and sculptures that players sought to replicate.

Tableau vivant of Carl Larson’s Outdoors Blow the Summer Winds at Pageant of the Masters, Laguna Beach, 2005.

Today, digital technology puts new kinds of pressure on the conventions of viewing art in museums. Rather than merely looking at a painting in a gallery, any visitor with a smartphone can now pose with the work and record the moment for posterity. (In pre-COVID times, museum Instagram tags featured numerous images of people posing in front of a figurative artworks while replicating depicted gestures.) Though museum selfies have become a convention in their own way, they are also frequently derided as narcissistic and anti-intellectual, with the screen mediating an experience of art in a gallery that was once supposed to offer direct communion. But as Rob Horning notes in an article in Even magazine, “this critique sets up an untenable separation between our screens and our lives.” Courting mass “engagement” with art—an important part of many institutions’ missions—means accommodating audiences glued to their devices. “In the past two decades, museums largely moved from presenting their collections to facilitating relational experiences,” Horning writes, “and now their attempts to capitalize on the popularity of mobile phones and social media are causing a new shift: from orchestrated physical togetherness to an aloneness together.” Tableaux vivants shared on social media represent the culmination of trends that were already transforming how museums engage viewers. But this push for “relational experiences” also leads to outcomes that are in many ways antithetical to the traditional museum project. The viewer who once came to the gallery to look at art is now a producer, placing themselves at the center of art appreciation. Digital reproductions of masterpieces come to look less like sanctified images belonging to a rarefied Culture and held as property by wealthy institutions, and more like schema that can be reconfigured by the public, their essential elements swapped in and out—or infused with life.

A model posing in a re-creation of Sir William Q. Orchardson’s Marriage of Convenience at Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach, 2006.

The pandemic quickens a shift toward “aloneness together,” but it also clarifies which images have the power to circulate widely. In a time before viable reproductions of artworks, tableaux vivants were a medium for transmission, giving visual form to written descriptions of paintings by critics like Diderot. Today, the typical format of posting a tableau vivant alongside its source does more than acknowledge the inspiration: the juxtaposition also reads as a head-to-head challenge. The worldwide popularity of the tableau vivant trend suggests which side is winning. Any common reproduction of The Last Supper might be too banal to share—a reproduction of an overfamiliar work in a sea of identical reproductions. But an image of doctors on the front line reanimating a scene redolent of death and betrayal? That goes viral.

Still, the substitution of living figures for a painting requires a trade-off. While making a painting appear half-alive, the participants in the exercise risk appearing half-dead themselves, subsumed by the static image. One nineteenth-century critic described Goethe’s tableau vivant scenes as having been conjured by Medusa’s head, freezing the actors in place. Tableaux vivants have drawn comparison to the uncanny of wax museums and melancholy death masks. Roland Barthes characterized photography in general as “a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.” While tableaux vivants have offered cover for nudity and a space for relaxing social mores, the practice has also afforded opportunities to reflect on horrors that could not otherwise be acknowledged in refined company. During the years in which Goethe was writing, Classical scenes of betrayal and murder offered an indirect outlet for anxieties about the French Revolution.

Left, a tableau vivant of Ben Shahn’s The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1931-32. Right, the original painting.

Living figures may make familiar images more compelling, but pathos is the most effective social media accelerant. If fidelity and production value matter little in a tableau vivant, then intensity of feeling is key to the format’s success at communicating in an isolated world. Homemade tableaux are steeped in irony, of course, but how could it be otherwise? Those of us who aren’t on the front lines of this pandemicta are witnessing its horrors at a distance and through screens. An art of guises and poses, of shared images and collective experience, of half-death and half-life, may be the ideal format for confronting this strange trauma in isolation.

#WeTheNipple Campaign.

COURTESY SPENCER TUNICK AND THE NATIONAL COALITION AGAINST CENSORSHIP

In response to recent campaigning and an action staged with photographer Spencer Tunick, the National Coalition Against Censorship said Facebook has agreed to convene a group—including artists, art educators, museum curators, activists, and employees—to consider new nudity guidelines for images posted to its social-media platforms.

The NCAC said it will collaborate with Facebook in selecting participants for a discussion to look into issues related to nude photographic art, ways that censorship impacts artists, and possible solutions going forward.

Facebook’s decision to reevaluate its nudity policies comes on the heels of a nude art action outside the company’s New York headquarters on June 2, when some 125 people posed naked in front of Facebook’s building as Tunick photographed them as part of the NCAC’s #WeTheNipple campaign, which called on Facebook to update its nudity rules.

In a statement, Tunick said of social-media platforms like Facebook and Instagram (which Facebook owns), “The work I’m allowed to post is fundamentally different from the work I make. To me, every pixelated nipple only succeeds in sexualizing the censored work. As a 21st-century artist, I rely on Instagram. It’s the world’s magazine and to be censored on it breaks my spirit.”

In April, the artist Betty Tompkins expressed similar sentiments regarding her temporary ban from Instagram. She told ARTnews at the time, “What I realized, which I don’t think I ever have before, is how embedded Instagram is in our professional life.”

In a statement announcing the prospect of a change in policy issued on Wednesday, the National Coalition Against Censorship said it “looks forward to working with Facebook to tackle the challenges of serving diverse communities and develop policies that recognize the value of one of their core communities: creative artists.”

MPK 20, as this building is known, was designed by Frank Gehry to realize Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of an open and interconnected office. Angled rows of desks line the center and edges of its gently zigzagging concourse. Conference rooms are housed in boxy volumes of varying shapes and sizes that crop up at irregular intervals. An exterior wall of one of the bigger ones is covered with an assemblage by Ethiopian artist Elias Sime, who routinely gathers old computer parts from a massive outdoor market in Addis Ababa. For his Facebook fresco, he arranged pieces of circuit boards and casings in undulating fields of green and brown, banded with braided wires and arabesques made of keyboard keys. By a stairwell, Maya Hayuk painted a rhomboid pattern in shades of pink, green, blue, and brown, extending its stripes around the square open shaft with her roller until the cans of paint ran dry.

These works were produced under the auspices of Facebook’s Artist in Residence program. Artists selected by Facebook’s curators (there is no open application process) spend time on campus and create site-specific installations, receiving production budgets and generous stipends to do so. Nearly six hundred projects have been realized at this point, not only at the corporate headquarters in Menlo Park but at Facebook offices in Seattle, Austin, Dublin, Hong Kong, Melbourne, and elsewhere. The fruits of FB AIR can be thought of as a corporate art collection; like the works in such collections at other organizations, they confer prestige by positioning Facebook as a patron of the arts. (FB AIR’s curators aim to support local artist communities, though the Menlo Park headquarters hosts international artists as well as those from the Bay Area.) But other corporate collections tend to hold paintings and prints that decorate walls and can be moved (or sold off). The art at Facebook lives and dies with the rest of the office; if the company moves, the work may be lost.¹

Elias Sime’s relief sculpture, 2018, reclaimed electrical wires, circuit boards, and other components on panel. Courtesy Facebook Art Department. Photo Mariah Tiffany.

FB AIR also professes goals and ambitions beyond good corporate citizenship. “Art is an important part of Facebook’s story,” Zuckerberg wrote in the introduction to a book celebrating FB AIR’s fifth anniversary. “And like our products and the community we’re trying to build, I want our offices to feel like a work in progress.”² The sight of artists using their hands and tools to make works of art reminds Facebook’s employees that they are creating something too. Dina Pugh, manager of Facebook’s art programs in the Americas, whom I met at the company’s New York office, told me that art encourages employees to do their work with “more empathy, more humanity.”³ Gehry designed MPK 20 and 21 as long, connected, loosely unspooling ribbons, allowing foot traffic to flow casually through the uneven terrain of conference cubes and desks. Walking from one part of the office to another is a bit like scrolling a Facebook Timeline. A work of art here, to extend the analogy, is like a thought-provoking post.

Facebook has invested substantial resources in cultivating that experience for its employees. But there’s nothing like it—beyond what happenstance brings—in the space it has built for its users. If Facebook is an engineer of social interactions, and it recognizes the importance of art and creativity in social space, then why doesn’t it incorporate that insight into the design of its product?

FB AIR was launched in 2012 under the direction of artist Drew Bennett. Five years earlier Bennett had painted murals in a four-story building on Facebook’s first campus, in downtown Palo Alto. (He followed in the footsteps of David Choe, who in 2005 spray-painted another one of Facebook’s buildings in Palo Alto with comic book–like figures and fuzzy, airbrushed patterns in exchange for shares that were valued at $200 million seven years later when Facebook went public.) Bennett later said he felt lonely while painting the offices by himself; he thought that a company with a mission to connect people should foster collaborative art-making. He isn’t just a painter but a “placemaker” who builds spaces for social interaction. For an early show at the San Francisco gallery Triple Base, he built out the walls with drywall and carved into them to make an environment where he invited local musicians to play. He designed outdoor showers and composting toilets for the home of Lawrence Rinder, director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Since high school Bennett has been friends with Chris Cox, Facebook’s longtime chief product officer (he resigned this past March), and he made interlocking picnic tables for Cox’s backyard wedding in 2011, as well as a row of tents so guests could camp out on the property overnight. After that, he was invited back to Facebook to advise on the placement of art in its offices in a more deliberate way.

FB AIR’s launch came on the heels of Facebook’s 2011 move from Palo Alto to Menlo Park, to a cluster of buildings on the shore of the San Francisco Bay that previously housed the headquarters of software company Sun Microsystems. Bennett pushed Facebook past the street art that its twentysomething founding fathers gravitated toward, though he kept some of street art’s playfully rugged aesthetic and soft bro sensibility. One of the first residents was David Wilson (a frequent collaborator of Bennett’s), who designed and printed invitations to hang out with him in the salt marshes abutting Facebook’s campus. The invitations had drawings of the flats, detailed directions to the meeting site, and chummy hints of what to expect: “Grab a bike and in 15 minutes you’ll be transported from desk to salt crystal communion. Major.”

An invitation designed by David Wilson, 2012, Sumi ink on paper. Courtesy Facebook Art Department.

Bennett’s ideas were a good fit for the social space that Facebook wanted to create. It had renamed its new Menlo Park address “1 Hacker Way,” and refurbished the campus as “Disneyland for Hackers,” a fake town square with theme-park architecture. As they go from their desks to meetings, employees who work on what’s now called the “classic campus” can pop into a shop for a coffee or an ice-cream cone, get a bike fixed or pick up their dry cleaning. All these goods and services are provided free. (I was eager to see this for myself when I visited Facebook in February, but I was allowed inside only MPK 20 and 21, which opened in 2015 to the west of 1 Hacker Way.) Architecture critic Alexandra Lange compared the layout of the classic campus to the offices of Apple and Google, and dubbed this kind of space a “dot-com city.” Twentieth-century corporations built offices as islands of rationalized order, turned away from the chaos of the city. While the big tech companies of the twenty-first century still isolate themselves from urban environments, they try to simulate the serendipity of cities in the hope that this controlled chaos will spark innovation.⁴

Gehry’s design of the new office buildings doesn’t mimic Main Street like the classic campus does. But the gentle curves of the concourse beneath the building’s exposed pipes and wiring represent a more focused, less literal attempt at conjuring moments of spontaneity. The site-specific art of FB AIR is part of that effort. So is the office’s folk art—if the term “folk art” can be applied to the creative whims of software engineers who make six-figure salaries straight out of college. At Facebook they call it “space hacks.” I saw loose canopies of icicle lights creating a festive atmosphere over some desks. Other areas were decorated with flags and stuffed animals. A window in MPK 21 hosts a monumental Pikachu cobbled from Post-it notes. (Pugh, the curator in New York who values art in the office as a source of humanity, hates space hacks. Near an elevator bank at the company’s Park Avenue office there’s an assemblage of Beanie Babies in the shape of the “f” in Facebook’s logo, and Pugh is horrified by the possibility that someone might think she chose to hang it there.)

Maya Hauk’s mural, 2015, latex house paint. Courtesy Facebook Art Department. Photo Robert Divers Herrick.

Employees also leave messages and drawings in colored chalk on blackboards that hang along some corridors. It’s a little infantilizing, sure, but what else would you expect from a company that feeds its employees and does their laundry? Several people had left dutiful handwritten responses to the prompt “Why do I show up?,” printed on colorful posters for an internal campaign to encourage employees to reflect on their work. But not many people had actually shown up when I was there; most had taken advantage of Work from Home Wednesday.

I spoke to Anthony Discenza, an artist who had a residency at Facebook in 2015, and he said one of his strongest impressions from his time there was the lack of engagement on the part of employees. He tried to talk to employees to get material for various potential text-based projects, but he had a hard time getting past pleasantries. This could have been because of the critical, antagonistic nature of his work; one of his ideas was to make a piece from Facebook users’ last posts before deactivating their accounts. But no one would help him access this material. In the end, one of the prompts from a survey Discenza wanted to distribute among employees—why aren’t we talking about_____—was painted on a wall.⁵ It’s still there, and employees complete it, leaving notes about serious topics (like the water crisis in Flint, Michigan) and frivolous ones (barbecue).

Travis Meinolf, who describes himself as an “action weaver,” spent his 2015 residency sitting outside behind the ice-cream shop on the classic campus, making a blanket on a handheld loom. He observed that being at Facebook is like being on Facebook: people would notice what he was doing and sometimes make a comment (for instance, about how their relatives in India or Germany wove on similar looms) or give a thumbs up, but rarely would they accept his invitation to take part in the weaving. He made a zine based on the experience, listing the reactions as comments in a thread, and counting the thumbs up he got as likes.⁶

FB AIR has since shifted toward commissioning installations and murals that are more focused on craft, texture, and materials, rather than relational projects of the sort that Wilson, Discenza, and Meinolf attempted. If engagement is so minor, why does FB AIR even continue? Why has it been franchised to Facebook’s global network of offices? Urban theorist Richard Florida has argued that “cities without gays and rock bands” can’t attract talented workers, that creative subcultures are necessary for metropolitan areas to thrive.⁷ If the dot-com cities simulate urban space, then FB AIR simulates the presence of a creative class—all the more important when tech wealth is making San Francisco unaffordable for artists, who have been decamping to cheaper cities like Los Angeles and New York.

View of Travis Meinolf’s Web of Truth blanket, 2015. Courtesy the artist.

The beautiful dream of authentic experiences of art in the office can’t keep up with corporate goals to maximize growth. And so FB AIR shrinks to a recruiting tool, like the brochure copy about a museum on the campus of an engineering school—understood by most of the people there as a prestigious amenity rather than a serious endeavor.

Eventually, Bennett felt this. “Being an artist at a corporation doesn’t really work,” he said. He left the company last fall. The program got too big, and he was frustrated that all his time was spent on management and logistics rather than working with art and artists.⁸ Facebook’s staff ballooned nearly eightfold in the time he worked there, from 4,619 at the end of 2012 to 35,587 at the end of last year. Facebook is growing still. The kind of placemaking that interests Bennett can’t scale at that rate, if it can scale at all.

No video art has been commissioned for FB AIR. How are coders supposed to find solace by looking at yet another screen? But despite Facebook’s curatorial indifference to media artists, media artists have taken an interest in Facebook. In 2011 Ed Fornieles started Dorm Daze, an interactive drama that played out in a Facebook group. He scraped photos and other information from profiles of students at the University of California, Berkeley, and used them to create profiles for characters who conform to subcultural stereotypes: the frat boy, the goth, the overachiever, and so on. He enlisted friends and actors to take on these profiles, and loosely scripted scenarios of unrequited love, closeted romance, crime, and violent hazing rituals as the basis for their improvisations. Every status update and direct message advanced the story. Fornieles captured these interactions and presented them in subsequent videos and installations. He had experimented with shaping behavior before; for Animal House (2011), an event he organized as a master’s student at the Royal College of Art in London, he assigned roles to guests based on American college movies and egged them on to go wild at a bacchanalian party. He saw Facebook as a platform where people self-consciously perform identity, conforming to (and outdoing) expectations to attract attention. The most active participants—the ones who relished conflict and leaned into stereotypes with gusto—quickly became his drama’s stars.

Constant Dullaart is a Dutch artist whose projects have examined faith in social media metrics, the blind acceptance of counts of likes and friends as indices of value. (I was an unwitting guinea pig in 100,000 Followers for Everyone [2014], when he distributed two-and-a-half million fake followers among the Instagram accounts of two dozen artists, curators, critics, and dealers.) For The Possibility of an Army (2015–16), commissioned by Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Dullaart generated thousands of fake Facebook profiles and assigned them names from the ranks of the Hessians, German mercenaries hired by the British to fight in the American Revolution. Friends in Dullaart’s network started getting requests from people with odd, old-fashioned names, many of whom had identical profile pictures showing dorky prepubescent boys. His project attracted media attention, and after an article appeared on the BBC website, Dullaart’s Hessians began to disappear, presumably deleted by Facebook. He never deployed his army to sway opinion, but succeeded in pointing out the potential to do so.

Barry McGee’s installation, found and original drawings, photographs, prints, and paint, 2015. Courtesy Facebook Art Department. Photo Robert Divers Herrick.

Works like these provoke reflection on what Facebook does. Dorm Daze hits on what makes Facebook exhausting—the pressure (often self-imposed) to maintain an exaggerated image. Dullaart’s vision of foreign mercenaries waging battles for attention on an American platform was an uncanny harbinger of the campaigns to influence US voter behavior a year later. The conversations that these projects push are tougher than the gentle ones fostered by FB AIR. They also violate Facebook’s terms of service by using fake profiles. Fornieles said that as Dorm Daze went on, it got harder to maintain; around 2012, Facebook got more vigilant about deleting fakes. By 2015, Dullaart was a seasoned client of bot farms, and his Hessians’ profiles were linked to unique telephone numbers so they could be verified according to Facebook’s protocols. But even so, most of the soldiers died. More than its supposed values of connection and conversation, Facebook prioritizes policing user activity to preserve the appearance of integrity for the data it sells.

I don’t use Facebook. I signed up in 2007 and deleted my account a few months later. I preferred the noisy mess of MySpace, with its customized backgrounds, profile-page theme songs, and sporadic, free-form blogging. But at that point I had just moved to New York, and I needed to keep up with the scene. By that time MySpace was deserted, so I reluctantly went back to Facebook. It never got better. Twitter and Instagram at least reward wit and style to some extent, but Facebook’s interface is so bland and banal that it encourages the shrillest rants, the smarmiest self-congratulation. Things got worse in 2016 as the presidential campaign wore on. I deactivated the day before the election. A few months later, I downloaded my data and deleted my account altogether, again.

Facebook has always been a target of criticism, for its destructive impact on the journalism industry, for its manipulation of user behavior and consent, and so on. But only in the last two years has the company’s leadership taken that criticism seriously. It’s harder to brush off detractors by boasting you “move fast and break things” when you’ve broken things so badly that you have to appear before Congress. Zuckerberg and his comrades seem to have realized that their mission of “making the world a more open and connected place” is rife with risk, extremely vulnerable to exploitation by malicious interests. This probably has something to do with the fact that the company’s mission is in fact to make behavior more surveilled, more predictable, more monetizable.⁹

Posters on view in Facebook’s Analog Research Lab. Courtesy Facebook Art Department.

In its first decade, Facebook took a stridently neutral stance regarding political statements on its website, professing a libertarian belief that truth would beat its competition in the marketplace of ideas. But the positions with the most effort behind them win (as Dorm Daze showed), and the ones where this effort is supported by money and bots do even better (as The Possibility of an Army showed). Meanwhile, the platform’s official neutrality is a stark foil to art at Facebook, which tends to promote progressive ideals. When Jessica Shaefer, the current head of Facebook’s global art program, led me through MPK 20 and 21, she said she was proud to have brought in Aravani Art Project, a collective of trans artists from India. Their bright murals in a cafeteria feature the slogan gender free. Shaefer said this provoked conversation among employees, some of whom complained about “liberal views” being forced on them. A productive dialogue followed. This, she said, is what FB AIR is supposed to do.¹⁰

FB AIR’s companion program is the Analogue Research Lab, a print shop with a Risograph printer—a machine beloved by zinesters because it approximates the look of screen printing—where designers in residence make posters that employees can hang by their desks and in common areas. Fred Turner, an academic who studies the influence of countercultural ideas on Silicon Valley business models, wrote an article on ARL, trying to make sense of the proliferation of progressive iconography, like portraits of Dolores Huerta, an organizer for farm workers’ unions, and Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress. He found that Facebook wants employees “to imagine a polity in which individual character and ethnic diversity—as opposed to electoral process and institutional bureaucracy—will be the foundations of a good society.”¹¹ By that measure, it’s not surprising that the leftist posters exist alongside ones that have more libertarian or motivational slogans, like move fast and break things and stay focused and keep shipping. Discenza said that, during his residency, those posters seemed more popular among employees than the ones with progressive messaging.

Even if some leftist ideas penetrate the imaginations of Facebook’s employees, they won’t necessarily impact the platform’s design. The encounters FB AIR allows between artists and engineers are casual and conversational. This makes it different from residencies at other tech companies, where artists are put into direct contact with developers. Autodesk, a company that makes software for engineers, architects, and animators, asks its resident artists to work with unreleased products and seeks feedback from them; thus the artists get to have input in the making of tools they may later use in their work. At Microsoft, artists who make immersive and interactive projects are invited to collaborate with the company’s research teams.

Anthony Discenza’s wall text, 2015, acrylic paint and Post-it notes. Courtesy Facebook Art Department. Photo Robert Divers Herrick.

Viewed in this light, FB AIR looks like a missed opportunity. It was conceived as a social experiment at a company whose business drives social experimentation. A company that engineers interaction launched a residency program that, at least in the beginning, invited artists concerned with forms of interaction. But it never really listened to them, or treated them as researchers, or provided a framework for a meaningful exchange of ideas with its teams.

Yet this “missed opportunity” is probably not so much a tragic misstep as a revealing insight into what Facebook really is. When, at the start of this essay, I asked why Facebook doesn’t apply the same principles to its digital products that it does to the organization of its office environment, I was being a little disingenuous. I agree with the critics who argue that Facebook’s product is not its platform but its users, and that it needs to do only the minimum to keep them online in order to surveil them and extract sellable information about their behavior and preferences. Beyond its function as a distraction, art has no place in that at all.

¹ For a detailed discussion of Facebook’s art program in the historical context of corporate support for the arts, see Fred Turner, “The arts at Facebook: An aesthetic infrastructure for surveillance capitalism,” Poetics, vol. 67, April 2018, pp. 53-62.
² Mark Zuckerberg, Introduction, Open Form: Art at Facebook, 2012–2017, Menlo Park, Calif., FB AIR, 2017, p. 1.
³ Interview with the author, New York, Mar. 26, 2019.
⁴ Alexandra Lange, The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism, Moscow, Strelka Press, 2012, loc. 77.
⁵ Phone interview with the author, Mar. 24, 2019.
⁶ Phone interview with the author, Mar. 28, 2019.
⁷ See Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, Basic Books, New York, 2002. The “gays and rock bands” line was used as a subheading in a related article in the May 2002 issue of Washington Monthly magazine.
⁸ Interview with the author, Oakland, Calif., Feb. 21, 2019.
⁹ For an extensive critical analysis of Facebook’s business model, see John Lanchester, “You Are the Product,” London Review of Books, vol. 39, no. 16, Aug. 17, 2017, pp. 3–10.
¹⁰ Interview with the author, Menlo Park, Calif., Feb. 20, 2019.
¹¹ Turner, p. 54.

This article appears under the title “Alternate Timeline” in the May 2019 issue, pp. 82–89.

Petra Cortright, VVEBCAM (still), 2007.

COURTESY RHIZOME

Five years ago, Rhizome, the New York–based nonprofit that has devoted itself since the mid-’90s to the promotion, and later to the preservation, of digital art, took up a cause: the deletion of a video by YouTube.

The video itself is inoffensive. A young woman stares impassively at the screen as various cheesy animations pop up—pizzas, lightning bolts, hearts, ice cream cones, kittens. Artist Petra Cortright made the piece in 2007 when she was a student at Parsons in New York; she had just bought a $20 webcam, and was experimenting with its software. When she posted the piece to YouTube she attached tags from an SEO list she’d come across. Some were banal—san francisco, diego, jose, taco bell, border patrol, mcdonalds, KFC, trans fat; others weren’t—tits, vagina, sex, nude, boobs.

As a result of having those tags, over the next four years, Cortright’s video got some 60,000 views and numerous comments, many along the lines of “I can’t believe I just wasted two minutes of my life watching this.” A number of viewers were disappointed that the video didn’t match how it was tagged. “They would comment, ‘I thought this was going to be a sex tape of Britney Spears,’ or something,” Cortright told me by phone from her studio in Los Angeles. So she started commenting right back at them about this video and the dozens of others she made in the late 2000s in what she calls a “trolly” voice. “Some of the stuff I said to people I can’t even say out loud,” she said. “Just super offensive. I got very interested in the vernacular of YouTube, and the way people talked to each other.”

Cortright, who is now a celebrated artist with gallery and museum shows behind her, didn’t initially intend that video to be an artwork. “I was so concerned with making the work,” she said, “that I didn’t give a shit whether it was in a gallery or anything like that. I was not even on that planet of thinking.” But by the time it had lived on YouTube for a while, it became one. She called it VVEBCAM. Today, it is considered to be among the first artworks to use YouTube—and social media, in general—as a medium. It doesn’t show up in more than a handful of academic papers and even fewer exhibitions, but it has achieved legendary status in certain circles. The piece consisted of not just the video itself but its surrounding elements—comments, views ticker, and the other trappings of YouTube. It was as married to its social-media setting as Richard Serra insisted his site-specific sculpture Tilted Arc (1981) was to the Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan.

“So many net artists, at the time these works are being made, don’t even consider them as pieces,” she said. “I can definitely say that about [VVEBCAM].”

Petra Cortright’s VVEBCAM (2007), as archived on Rhizome’s ArtBase.

COURTESY RHIZOME

And then, in December 2011, it disappeared. YouTube seemingly sided with Cortright’s critics, citing a violation of its community guidelines, specifically its “policy against spam, scams, and commercially deceptive content,” as the deleted-video notice read. It was, as Cortright would later characterize it, YouTube’s “shift to cracking down on content.” Cortright appealed the removal to the streaming service on the basis of VVEBCAM’s being an artwork, but was denied.

Cortright emailed Rhizome about the situation. Within two days of the video’s deletion, the organization had added Cortright’s original video file, which was still on her hard drive, to its ArtBase, a collection started in 1999 to combat the disappearance of web-based artworks that was happening even then. Today, the ArtBase comprises more than 2,000 works, which are freely accessible on the Rhizome website.

Rhizome’s archival version of VVEBCAM sought to approximate the appearance of its presentation on YouTube, giving it the look of the service’s video player. But there was no way to retrieve all those comments, never mind fully re-create the YouTube interface, complete with a snowballing view count. The frustrating case of VVEBCAM pushed something forward that the team at Rhizome had been considering: What if there had been a way for Cortright to record what she was doing online? What if artists could preserve the VVEBCAMs of the future themselves?

Ironically for a field so young, net art, new media art, post-internet art, born-digital art—or whatever you’d like to call artwork that is dependent on, engages with, or is influenced by digital technologies, networks, and the social and cultural practices that surround these infrastructures—has a legacy problem. Imagine being a painter trying to explain to a younger artist how influenced you’d been by certain works of de Kooning, but there was no longer any way to experience those works. “When I started working in net art,” said Rhizome’s artistic director, Michael Connor, who first learned of Rhizome at a bar around 1999 from an early staffer there, “I would meet people who had been in the field a bit longer and they had this sense of pain that they would share about works they had really loved and wanted to explain to me, but they couldn’t very easily convey why they were important, because the work wasn’t accessible.”

Rhizome’s executive director Zachary Kaplan and founder Mark Tribe.

MADISON MCGAW, BFA.COM/COURTESY RHIZOME

Rhizome turned 20 this year, but there is a saying among its inner circle that it’s older than the Metropolitan Museum of Art in internet years. There’s a certain logic to this. Because the web runs on novelty, Web 1.0—the term used to describe the early days of the internet when it was closer to a document-delivery system made up of static web pages—can sometimes seem more distant than the 19th century. Last December, on the eve of Rhizome’s anniversary, it received one hell of a present in the form of a $600,000, two-year Mellon grant—the largest grant it had ever received—to continue developing a tool called Webrecorder that could revolutionize the way online artworks are preserved for future audiences.

It’s a big step for an organization that has in some ways eluded definition, mainly because it has deftly adapted to the rapidly changing pace of technology and the internet. Rhizome has been called a lot of things over the years. The first mention of Rhizome in the press, in October 1996, in the Life section of USA Today, said, “the site bills itself as part search engine, part art forum.” Specifically, Rhizome’s founder, artist Mark Tribe, thought of it as Artforum meets Altavista, a search engine of yore. In 1998, in an article in CyberTimes, a section of the New York Times that was then on the web, Matthew Mirapaul referred to it as “an internet locus for freewheeling discussions about new media art.” By 2003, the Times described it as “an internet site where digital artists can exhibit their online projects and crow about their status as art-world outsiders.”

Rhizome’s current executive director Zachary Kaplan prefers to call it “the leading contemporary art and technology institution or early born-digital art institution.” Ben Fino-Radin, the organization’s former digital conservator (now a media conservator at MoMA) describes it as “a rather amorphous institution, which is almost an oxymoron. It’s an institution on the internet”—for a certain subset of the art-tech world, at least—“but in the real world it’s something much cooler than that. There was this moment of transition from being this kind of based-out-of-a-loft, crusty, cyber-punky thing to, now, something affiliated with a museum.” (Rhizome is now an “affiliate in residence” at the New Museum in New York.) Like the medium to which it has dedicated itself, Rhizome had for so long worked outside the system. At a certain point, it moved in.

Rhizome’s homepage (then rhizome.com) in December 1996, as archived by the Wayback Machine.

COURTESY MARK TRIBE

Rhizome began life in Germany, in 1996, as an email list. Tribe, an American and then 29, was living in Berlin after getting his MFA, and was making what he has variously called “relational art projects” and “art events.” He’d created his first website in the summer of 1994, while in grad school at the University of California, San Diego. “I loved it,” he said. “I really connected with the medium in a way that I hadn’t with other new media forms.”

In Berlin, where he moved in 1995, Tribe had a day job as a web designer at a company called Pixelpark. In June of that year, Tribe and a group of artists drove overnight in a van to the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria. With the theme “Welcome to the Wired World,” the event looked at how “cyber culture is expanding into data highways.” Among the speakers were Tim Berners-Lee, the English computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web in 1989, and the American art collective Critical Art Ensemble. “Who will be the hitchhikers and hijackers of the information superhighways?” the symposium’s description read. “Surfing in digital data net-worlds will facilitate new forms of social interaction.”

Back in Berlin, Tribe started thinking about how he could facilitate idea sharing between artists outside the insular world of museums and galleries without the need to travel to these festivals. “It occurred to me that using the internet we could create a more bottom-up, grassroots scenario in which artists could talk freely with one another, a kind of meritocratic environment where the most interesting and relevant work and ideas would filter up,” Tribe told me in his studio, a tidy space in Long Island City. It was an idea that was in the air in the net art community, which was still a very small milieu, with a significant portion of its thinkers and creators based in Eastern Europe. Tribe set up an email list, and named it after a term from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, one of the only books he had brought with him to Berlin. “It just seemed like the perfect name to capture that idea of a grassroots network that would flip the logic of Artforum on its head.” He checked to see if the domain name was free and quickly registered it.

What Tribe was doing wasn’t exactly new. Other organizations across the world had started creating online venues for net art. There was The Thing, which German artist Wolfgang Staehle launched as a bulletin board system in New York and Cologne in 1991, and subsequently turned into a site for art and dialogue. There was äda’web, started in 1994 as a kind of outgrowth of The Thing, and dedicated to commissioning artists like Jenny Holzer and Lawrence Weiner to do online projects. Set up in 1995, Nettime, also a mailing list, prided itself on its fierce independence and positioned itself against the idea of using the internet as a free-market platform, a stance promulgated by Wired magazine.

What would eventually set Rhizome apart from these sites and its other early competitors was its archive, the ArtBase. From the beginning, Tribe was interested in creating an archive. He knew the internet would expand exponentially, and that trying to cover it comprehensively with a set of dedicated staff writers and curators was unrealistic. He wanted to understand and create a record of the online landscape. Initially, that meant archiving the conversations that were happening across the email lists “to see what people at that time were saying about [net art]. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to go back to the Cabaret Voltaire and listen in on those conversations that Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball were having about this thing they were calling Dada,” Tribe told me. “It just seemed like if you were trying to create an online community it was almost like an online community waiting to happen.” The archival version of the list functioned on an early form of metadata structure, the information that is embedded in every form of digital content and is now a web standard, that Tribe and his team had devised. Rhizome was set up to host an online conversation and, at the same time, record it.

After launching Rhizome, Tribe moved back to the States in 1996 and ran the site as a for-profit out of an office in New York. A sister company Tribe had founded shortly thereafter called StockObjects was footing the bill, having received around $3 million from angel investors. (Tribe had pitched Rhizome to them as a magazine for new media artists, with StockObjects being a stock library populated with clip-like art to be created by the artists in the Rhizome community.)

It was around this time that Rhizome started to become more than just an email list and website, helping foster a burgeoning community both on- and offline with a growing editorial arm that sought to provide context and support for digital-based art. Tribe hired Rachel Greene, who emailed him after sitting in on one of his pitches at a publishing house, as editorial director. Greene and Tribe commissioned artists to create new works, which the site hosted as splash pages, and planned exhibitions both on the website and in museums. Rhizome was, as Greene put it, “a publication and an arts advocacy organization and a social system,” all at once.

Alex Galloway and Mark Tribe in the Rhizome offices on Mercer Street, September 2001.

COURTESY MARK TRIBE

In 1998, concerned that there would be pressure from investors to turn Rhizome into a commercial magazine or fold it entirely, Tribe spun it off as a nonprofit. Already, some of the early net art sites had shut down, like äda’web, which was discontinued in early 1998 after coming under the umbrella of AOL. (It lives on as an archive in the collection of the Walker Art Center.) Tribe wanted to make sure Rhizome would survive.

That summer, the site went into a kind of unofficial hibernation. Tribe was still working at StockObjects, and Greene ran Rhizome with another employee, Alex Galloway, out of a small loft inside Postmasters Gallery, then in SoHo. Postmasters cofounder Magda Sawon, who mounted the earliest cited gallery exhibition of digital art, “Can You Digit?,” in 1996, was an early supporter of the art Rhizome championed. “When they were starting, the power was just in having this community because these people didn’t have any community, really, so it became this kind of magnetic place,” Sawon told me.

For Tribe, turning Rhizome into a nonprofit was lucky timing: In 2000, StockObjects, which hadn’t yet become profitable, folded, one of the many casualties of the dot-com bubble burst.

Rhizome’s early history tracks with what many consider the golden age of net art, roughly from 1993 to 2001. In 1996, Slovenian artist Vuk Cosić made his first net art work, Net.Art Per Se, a website that replicated CNN’s web interface but instead documented a conference that took place in Trieste, Italy, in May 1996, laying out the basic features of early net art. These were, as Rachel Greene describes them in Internet Art, her 2004 history on the subject, “a serious engagement with popular media, a belief in parody and appropriation, a skepticism toward commodified media information, and a sense of the interplay of art and life.”

Heath Bunting, a British activist who started the website and server irational.org in 1994, made his way through graffiti, telephone, and fax art, and community radio before arriving at the internet. “There’s only so much you can do with a pen and paper in the age of electronic media,” Bunting told me by phone from London. “So I started slowly clawing my way up through the history of electronic media and finally got on to the internet, so I could compete with mainstream narratives and nation-state institutions.” He would become known for combining analog and digital practices, making street art by tagging a URL throughout London and the U.K.—on sidewalks, in subway and train stations—at a time when the character sequences “https://” and “.org” would have been unfamiliar to the average passerby.

Bunting met Greene and Galloway at a conference in Berlin. “They were newcomers and talking about this new platform,” he said. “I was a bit skeptical because at the time we had kind of just escaped from platforms, like CompuServe or AOL. The internet was offering to overthrow these kinds of wall guarders.” At the time, in the early days of the web, most artists and technologists maintained their own servers to access the internet and host their websites and online projects.

Heath Bunting, _readme.html, 1998.

COURTESY RHIZOME

But Bunting took a liking to the Rhizome reps, and recognized the need for some support system behind what he was doing. In 1998, he made _readme.html, now seen as a seminal piece of early net art. “Part of the ethos of net art was to be quick and dirty, so I remember being on the train, and I had this idea. I met my friend and asked him if I could use his computer, and I made the work in about 20 minutes.” What he created was a basic web page displaying an article about him, with almost every word hyperlinked to a corresponding one-word URL. The piece was playing with identity and self-identity in terms of online representation. “That was a big concern at the time, with people talking about avatars and online identities. And I was trying to escape my minor celebrity, trying to find a way to give up the negative side of being well-known and disappear back into a local area, or the forest,” Bunting said. In essence, the work is similar to early spam, as each hyperlink directed the user to something practically nonsensical; Bunting had found a way to subvert online conventions by feeding into them.

And while Bunting was, perhaps unconsciously, committed to keeping this site up and running for the foreseeable future, other early net art works had started to disappear. The most oft-cited work in this case is Akke Wagenaar’s 1995 Hiroshima Project, which looked at the legacy of the Hiroshima bombing; it was presented at Ars Electronica that same year. (The original version went offline shortly thereafter, in early 1996.) It was in this context that Tribe began to think about the preservation of these web- and browser-based works. In 1999, with help from Galloway, who had become Rhizome’s lead developer, and Jennifer Crowe, an artist and curator, Tribe created the ArtBase, which has become the largest collection of historical and contemporary digital-based and born-digital artworks in the world. “A lot of the work that was being created was really ephemeral and not being preserved,” Tribe said. “We were talking about this stuff, but often the stuff was vanishing. Somebody could stop paying the bills on their internet hosting service and a systems administrator could delete art history with the click of a mouse. We wanted to give artists a place to put their work for safekeeping.”

In its original conception, the ArtBase was closer to a database with two ways of preserving works: cloned objects, in which artists would handover zip files of the original work to be hosted on rhizome.org; and linked objects, which would simply direct visitors to the still-accessible projects on their original domains. Tribe, Crowe, and Galloway came up with a taxonomic, metadatic structure—similar to what had been developed for the archive of the Rhizome email lists—for describing all the works in the ArtBase: title, artist, year of production, URL, technology and file type, and a short description.

At first, some artists were skeptical about giving work to Rhizome to preserve. Rhizome was American, and it had been a dot-com, for profit. Then there were other artists who just didn’t think preservation was part of the spirit of net art. From the beginning, Tribe wanted to ensure that the organization was not making a curatorial statement on what should be preserved in the archive. As long as a piece dealt with the internet in one way or another, it was added to the collection. (Rhizome has since ended this practice; today, additions to the ArtBase are by invitation only.)

Bunting’s _readme.html is now in Rhizome’s archive, but he can’t recall precisely how it got there. “We pioneers in the field weren’t angling for a career,” he said. “We didn’t have gallery representation, we didn’t have tenure at universities, we weren’t interested. We were just doing our stuff and living day to day.”

An archived announcement on rhizome.org.

COURTESY MARK TRIBE

Rhizome had just begun to archive net art as the heyday of the form drew to an end. Galloway himself wrote an essay called “net.art Year in Review: State of net.art 99” for the journal Switch. “Net-dot-art is dead,” he declared, noting net art’s inclusion in Documenta 10, in 1997, and the upcoming 2000 Whitney Biennial, as signifiers of its demise. “Net.art was the product of a particular technological constraint: low bandwidth. Net.art is low bandwidth through and through.…As computers and bandwidth improve, the primary physical reality that governed the aesthetic space of net.art begins to fall away.”

Rhizome, too, was changing. The organization had been fluctuating between being flush with grant money and on the verge of missing payroll. David Ross, then director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a member of Rhizome’s board, suggested an institutional partnership to ease these financial woes, and he helped broker one between Rhizome and the New Museum in Lower Manhattan, where Tribe had previously organized a couple of shows in the museum’s Z Media Lounge, including a survey culled from the ArtBase. In September 2003, Rhizome became a kind of organization in residence at the New Museum. Having an affiliate dedicated to net art under the institutional umbrella of the New Museum further helped indoctrinate net art into the mainstream. Tribe took a seat on the museum’s board, and Lisa Phillips, the museum’s director, took a seat on Rhizome’s. Rhizome remained a separate entity, but Phillips invited the staff to meetings with the curatorial and education teams. Today, Rhizome’s offices are located within New Inc, an art-tech incubator run by the New Museum that occupies a floor of a building on the Bowery. The museum owns the building and will soon renovate it, but for the moment it looks nondescript by comparison with the gleaming, futuristic confection next door, which houses the museum’s galleries.

Tribe left not long after the arrangement with the museum was finalized, secure in Rhizome’s stability. (He is now chair of MFA Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York.) Greene replaced him as executive director but stepped down herself in 2005. Her replacement, Lauren Cornell, helped further incorporate Rhizome into the New Museum’s programming, elevating net art’s acceptance in the art world as a result.

When Cornell started, the world of online art had yet to recover from the dot-com crash. (It was around this time that exhibition spaces like the Z Media Lounge, and others at major New York museums that had cropped up around the new millennium, had started being quietly discontinued.) “I was at a point where I felt I had to make a case that this field was really different and exciting because there had been a larger withdrawal of support,” Cornell said.

Cory Arcangel, Lauren Cornell, and John Michael Boling at a Rhizome benefit.

COURTESY LAUREN CORNELL

At the same time, a new generation of artists—like Cory Arcangel, Oliver Laric, and Jon Rafman—was showing, as Cornell put it in her introduction to Mass Effect, a recent anthology she co-edited about art that engages with the internet during the post-dot-com period, that “the future of net art would be the dispersion of the category’s legacy into a wide range of practices: open-source sharing, gallery installations, live performances, cinema screenings, talks, and publications.” In other words, these artists were still operating independently from the institutions that had failed to fold early net art into their exhibitions and programming.

In making Rhizome relevant to these emerging talents, “I did alienate maybe a few of the older, long-standing Rhizome members,” Cornell told me, “because I was really interested in expanding the reach of the organization. It was really a different point [from today]. Now there are a lot more organizations that support digital art, or post-internet art, or whatever you want to call it. When I came in 2005, there weren’t. There was just a void.” She invested more in the editorial and commissioning programs, and organized exhibitions that demonstrated how the field was changing. She also brought Rhizome’s online conversations into the real world with “Net Aesthetics 2.0,” a series of discussions in 2006, 2008, and 2013 where artists, curators, and technologists could discuss the changing field. And in 2009, she started, with the help of a few Rhizome board members, the annual Seven on Seven conference, which pairs seven artists with seven technologists for one-on-one collaborations. The conference, which wrapped up its eighth edition this past May, is perhaps what Rhizome is most well-known for in the wider art world, as it has generated well-publicized projects including artist Taryn Simon and computer programmer-cum-hacktivist Aaron Swartz’s Image Atlas (2012).

It was during Cornell’s tenure that Rhizome took major steps to improve the conservation of digital art. As the digital world expanded, it was also unwittingly erasing its past. Cornell appointed Ben Fido-Radin the organization’s first digital conservator. (“I think maybe I was the first person in the world with that title,” Fino-Radin said.) A big part of his job was searching existing web archives, like the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine, and grabbing any content and re-adding them to the works on Rhizome’s servers.

The landscape in which Rhizome was operating had changed dramatically. “The internet was now not a new medium but a mass medium,” Cornell said. “A generation of artists had grown up using it, and it had become commonplace in many people’s lives. My role was to chart this shift.”

Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections, 2014, as archived on Rhizome’s ArtBase.

COURTESY RHIZOME

By the time Cornell stepped down from Rhizome in 2012—in order to take a curating job at the New Museum—there was a heightened interest in net art practices among institutions, galleries, and audiences. Other organizations had also sprung up around emerging digital art, including the magazine Triple Canopy, the collective DIS and their stock-image library, and the internet art–focused And/Or gallery.

“There was a real explosion of interest in net art practices and artists interested in technology, or working in the context of technology—the areas Rhizome worked in over the years,” said Heather Corcoran, Cornell’s successor. Rhizome’s new role in the field it helped popularize was unclear.

Rhizome had worked over the past 15 years to preserve digital works in the ArtBase after they had started disappearing, but now the organization started to take a preemptive approach, looking to create new technologies to address preservation problems as—and even before—they arise.

One of the current challenges in digital preservation is addressing how the web has evolved since it was originally conceived in 1989. Not only have social media and easy access to the internet wrought incredible change in our daily lives, but web pages have become dynamic feats of software that require real-time user interaction—something that would have been impossible back then, given the constraints of low bandwidth. The work Rhizome is trying to preserve is not a static set of documents. “We don’t think of anything we are conserving as a thing or a stable entity,” Dragan Espenschied, Rhizome’s current digital conservator, said. “Internet and network-based art is the most extreme type of artifact that you might want to archive, because many websites or projects that happen on the web have blurry borders. So you can’t quite define an objecthood. Some are changing all the time, so you can’t nail down a definitive version of the artwork.”

Within Rhizome, there were discussions about how to take on the current wave of internet art. The newest preservation challenges were coming from social media, where some of the most interesting works were popping up. “There really weren’t that many tools to save things from a site that the artist doesn’t own, like Instagram or another social media site,” Corcoran said. Unlike in the early days of the web, when artists maintained their own servers and wrote their own codes and scripts, many projects could no longer be handed over as zip files.

Espenschied was convinced that the best approach to create these digital, archival artifacts, what he terms “high-fidelity capturings,” was to have a proxy intercept and record the bytes of data that are transmitted from the servers of complex websites, like Facebook or Twitter, to a user’s browser, where they appear as clean, simple-looking web pages. This thinking, spurred by another web-based loss, this time in Facebook comments, led Espenschied to get in contact with developer Ilya Kreymer, who had worked on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and had created a project called pywb, that was still in its rough stages of development but was conceptually exactly what Rhizome was looking for.

Together, Espenschied and Kreymer produced a service now called Webrecorder, a tool that conserves video, audio, and complex Javascript found on most websites, including social media sites. (Webrecorder had a beta launch in April 2015, and was officially released in full to the public this August.) Espenschied in particular sought out new works and projects that could challenge their existing capturing practices. “Art is, in general, a very good field to test tools in,” Espenschied said, “because art has never followed the rules and this generates edge cases all the time.”

The index page for the early blog VVORK, as archived using Rhizome’s Webrecorder.

COURTESY RHIZOME

One of the first works to enter the ArtBase as a Webrecorder artifact—all 392.5 GB of it—was an entire website, VVORK, a pre-Tumblr image-and-video-heavy blog founded in 2006. The next step in Rhizome’s archival pursuits was to pull work off a major social media site. In early 2014, L.A.-based artist Amalia Ulman took on a persona to create Excellences & Perfections, the Instagram-based story, told over five months, of a girl who moves to Los Angeles and has an Instagram-perfect life. She detailed her travails, including breast augmentation, and racked up hundreds of followers, likes, and comments before revealing the whole project to be a performance, a work of fiction. Often regarded as one of the first major works to use Instagram and its community as a medium—much like Cortright’s VVEBCAM—it has been exhibited internationally within the past year. By October 2014, Rhizome had successfully archived Excellences & Perfections in its Instagram context. With YouTube, Instagram, and later, Twitter, solved, only one social-media giant remains: Facebook, with some 1.65 billion active daily users. While Webrecorder is somewhat functional with Facebook, the recordings are still not quite there. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s still too complex,” Espenschied said while giving me a tour of the Webrecorder software in Rhizome’s offices. “Facebook is kind of the Holy Grail of this.”

Rhizome may look like David to Facebook’s Goliath, but the organization has a survivor’s spirit. In terms of the original net art websites, it is the last one standing. And at least philosophically, social media has taken over the role that Rhizome played in the ’90s as an email list and in the 2000s, during the rise of blogs, when its posts drew numerous comments. “The web has changed,” said Kaplan, who became executive director last fall when Corcoran stepped down. Connor, Rhizome’s artistic director, has said the Rhizome of the past—even the recent past—was something like a social network before such a thing existed. Now the internet is, as Cornell and others would put it, a mass medium. The kinds of conversations that might once have taken place on Rhizome are now happening across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And whereas on Rhizome those conversations would be preserved, on those sites, wide swaths of information disappear regularly. Rhizome has become a kind of protector of data, trying to preserve the moment—and technological atmosphere—of the day, as it did when it was archiving email exchanges.

It’s easy to think of Rhizome, being based online, as ephemeral, but Kaplan thinks of it as the next in a line of great New York art institutions, starting with the Met and moving on through MoMA, the Whitney, and the New Museum. Rhizome started when net art did; as the internet evolved, so did Rhizome.

“It’s hard to step back and imagine what it was like back then. It was very different,” Rachel Greene, who is now an art adviser based in Seattle, said of her time at Rhizome. “None of us predicted the way technology was going to become such a force, in the same way that none of us predicted that the art economy was going to explode the way that it has and that wealth and inequality were going to increase so much. There are so many things that none of us anticipated. It seems like a naive time, in retrospect.” These days, she said, “my life motto is ‘spend as little time with technology as possible.’ ”

VIA GOOGLE

A Manhattan socialite has accused her Swiss banker ex of stealing their $25 million art collection, including works by Basquiat and Warhol. [New York Post]

On the high-tech restoration of the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. [Citylab]

Meet Artbit, the Shazam of artwork. [Haaretz]

A Dutch artist has been creating thousands of fake Facebook profiles, each named after a soldier who fought in the Revolutionary War. [BBC]

Collector Stephen M. Salny has donated 48 works on paper by artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Joseph Albers, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Damien Hirst, Jasper Johns, Sol Lewitt, Brice Marden, Robert Motherwell, and Sean Scully to Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum. [Brandeis]

The Brooklyn Museum faces controversy after renting out space to a real-estate conference. [Artforum]

Than Hussein Clark at Futura in Prague. [Contemporary Art Daily]

VIA MEDIATE

An art professor’s Facebook post against gun ownership has caused a mass panic among members of the NRA. [Mediaite]

Art historian, critic, curator, and Courtauld professor Sarah Wilson has won the AICA Honorary Award for Distinguished Contribution to Art Criticism. [Artforum]

Art dealer Andrew Butterfield may have discovered a lost Donatello—a 2.5 foot-tall wooden sculpture of a putto (cherub). The piece will be on display at Moretti Fine Arts starting October 30. [The New York Times]

Read about the architectural legacy of Pizza Hut restaurants. [Hyperallergic]

ArtReview has named Manuela and Iwan Wirth the most powerful figures in the art world. [BBC]

Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain in Cologne. [Contemporary Art Daily]

Luxury hotels have basically become fine art galleries. [Financial Times]

Painting with bacteria! [CNN]

On Aug. 27, the Romanian parliament passed a law in a closed-door session that resolved to go forward with the Rosia Montana gold mining project (headed by Gabriel Resources, a Canadian Corporation) despite 15 years of debate and opposition by activists concerned that the pollution to the environment caused by cyanide used in the process would be catastrophic and that the promised jobs would turn out to be few in number. Protests against the law, the project and the corruption linked with it have erupted internationally, with activists of different political backgrounds, from progressives to nationalists. The protests demand that the law be rescinded and the ministers responsible for pushing it forward fired.

Perjovschi spoke to A.i.A. via e-mail about his role in the protests, the ways his drawings have been used, and questions of copyright versus copyleft.

OLGA STEFAN What do you think brings all these protesters together as a unified front against this particular initiative, while other protests against political corruption, and even what was called a coup in 2012, did not have the same force?

DAN PERJOVSCHI In only one year, the current government (considered center-left, it came to power after the anti-austerity protests in 2012 brought down the center-right government of Traian BÄ?sescu) managed to do everything possible to piss people off. I was also involved in a student Occupy movement (in Cluj and Bucharest) in March. The students’ requests were legitimate (they asked for space for debate, a committed budget, etc.). The government totally ignored this. And then, when this law custom-made for a corporation was given the green light, young people went to the streets. The core group of protesters are activists who have been fighting this project for 15 years. I also think the theme is precise enough (stop the cyanide mining in Rosia Montana) and universal enough (protect nature, our mountains and our country) to unite yuppies, anti-capitalists, anarchists, artists etc.

STEFAN You have always been politically engaged and have made work that through the use of irony and humor has criticized specific and general issues in current events. Recently you have devoted your activism to the Rosia Montana cause by posting drawings about this issue on your Facebook page (which is followed by thousands) and sharing documentation of the protests from various parts of the world. What impact have you had, and is it realistic to think that artists can have an impact on political events through their artwork?

PERJOVSCHI For some time, I have been sliding from the institution wall to Facebook walls. I have found it to be an interesting space. My drawings mean something beyond “art.” I can have a more objective and precise look at the events I comment on. During the student Occupy protest, I posted a drawing, and if somebody on the ground identified with it, he/she could use it. The students downloaded them and put them all around the amphitheatre they occupied. It was one of my best “shows.

Now, with Rosia, I also deliver some statements to help people to focus on the issues. They replicate them on big banners or download them and stick them on their T-shirts. I really feel I have a role. I am not on the front lines (this is not my revolution), but I can support and show some solidarity with this new generation. In January 2012 the protest was quickly politically manipulated. This time almost all media was bought by the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation (Gabriel Resources) so at first they turned a blind eye. Then when social media took the news and spread it, the old media had to report. And they tried to throw dirt at the protesters but it did not stick. The protesters outsmarted the “power,” using bikes to move around and plastic bottles to drum in the big boulevards, and they kept everything peaceful and creative to psychologically disarm the police.

STEFAN How do you deal with copyright issues, or do you prefer the copyleft approach? How does your distribution model affect your practice? 

PERJOVSCHI This time, for these protests, it’s copyleft but only for activist and communication purposes. If I see somebody selling a T-shirt I will sue them.