Rhizome Presents “The Art Happens Here,” Opening January 22 at the New Museum

Dating from 1985 to the present, the works in “The Art Happens Here” make use of a wide range of mediums—including websites, software, sculpture, graphics, books, and merchandise—and represent a historical perspective on the breadth of net art practice. The artworks also offer distinct approaches to a central problem inherent in net art: how to come to terms with a dynamic, rapidly changing network culture while also actively participating in it.

Among the works on view will be Shu Lea Cheang’s Garlic=RichAir (2002), an interactive online trading game and performance in which garlic functions as currency in an imagined postcapitalist future; Alexei Shulgin’s 386 DX (1998–2013), the world’s first cyberpunk rock band, which performs MIDI and text-to-speech renditions of musical hits; Sister Unn’s (2012), an installation by Bunny Rogers and Filip Olszewski based on a mysterious storefront in Queens that led passersby to an equally enigmatic website, exemplifying the links between real and virtual space; and a new restoration of Mark Tribe’s Starrynight (1999), a landmark artist-made interface to Rhizome’s listserve archives that Tribe created with Alexander Galloway and Martin Wattenberg.

Zachary Kaplan, Executive Director of Rhizome, added, “‘The Art Happens Here’ and the ‘Anthology’ synthesize Rhizome’s two-decades-plus trajectory as a champion of born-digital art and culture; net-focused research and scholarship, digital preservation leadership, and our powerful affiliation with the New Museum are all represented.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue edited by Connor with Dean, which will include entries on each of the one hundred artworks in “Net Art Anthology” along with contributions by Josephine Bosma, Paul Soulellis, manuel arturo abreu, and others.

Thoma Foundation provided major support for this exhibition and publication. The Foundation has been lead partner for the entirety of the “Net Art Anthology” initiative.