Rhizome (organization)

Rhizome is a not-for-profit arts organization that supports and provides a platform for new media art.

Artist and curator Mark Tribe founded Rhizome as an email list in 1996 while living in Berlin. The list included a number of people Tribe had met at Ars Electronica By August, Rhizome had launched its website, which by 1998 had developed a significant readership within the Internet art community. Originally designated a business, Rhizome became a nonprofit organization in 1998, switching to the domain-name suffix ".org.". In an interview with Laurel Ptak for the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture Archive, Tribe explains "I thought of it as Artforum meets AltaVista (AltaVista was one of the first web search engines), as a kind of bottom-up alternative to the top-down hierarchies of the art world."

Rhizome established an online archive called the ArtBase in 1999. The ArtBase was initially conceived exclusively as a database of net art works. Today, the scope of the ArtBase has expanded to include other forms of art engaged with technology, including games, software, and interdisciplinary projects with online elements. The works are submitted by the artists themselves. In addition to hosting archived work, Rhizome's digital preservation work includes conservation of digital art and updating obsolete code.

In 2003, Rhizome became affiliated with the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. Today, Rhizome's programs include events, exhibitions at the New Museum and elsewhere, an active website, and an archive of more than 2,000 new media artworks.

The organization has published one book with Link Editions, "The Best of Rhizome 2012" edited by former editor Joanne McNeil. In 2015, the organization relaunched rhizome.org with a new design created by Wieden+Kennedy.