Rhizome

Thanks to everyone who stopped by Solar Web Art ☼day last weekend at ! ⌨️✍️🖌️🎨

This event presented ASCII artworks made by students at public schools across NYC as part of our “solar web workshops” educational program, funded by grants from Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation and The New York City Cultural Development Fund.

☀️At the event, guests of all ages were also invited to create their own ASCII art, either from their drawings or using digital tools. All resulting artworks were then acquired by the “Museum of ASCII Art”, a website hosted on Rhizome’s solar server.

🫶⌨️Special thanks to the artists Adel Faure (), Abbey Foreman (), and Mindy Seu () for giving us permission to present their ASCII artworks during the event!

If you’re interested in viewing ASCII art made by K-12 students, visit the link in bio! We’ve also uploaded our lesson plans and resources to this site for those interested in making their own ASCII artworks. 🔗🔗

Thank you to all of the participating schools; Solar Protocol: Tega Brain, Alex Nathanson & Benedetta Piantella; our colleagues at the New Museum, our teaching artists Enne Goldstein () & Yasmeen Abdallah (); David Lee for the technical support, and ONX for lending us equipment for the event.

Returning to the same room at the where the program began in 2010, this year’s 7x7 took place in a markedly different context: a world deeply shaped by the scale and ubiquity of the tech industry, alongside the reopening and expansion of the New Museum and its landmark exhibition, New Humans: Memories of the Future.

Across seven collaborations, participants overcame the challenge of creating something new, utilizing abstract systems and addressing how agency can be reclaimed within the complex structures that make up the modern technological world. Documentation from the event is now up on rhizome.org!

⭐️Neema Githere (.back.theinternet) x Mercy Mutemi () proposed the kinternet: a technology of repair, rooted in grief, rage, slowing down, and connecting with one another in the present.

🫯Disintegrator (.integrator) × 邊界 BiānJiè (.systems) reframed the interface as boundary conditions that draw apart and hold together, making new relations legible. 

🧬Agnieszka Kurant (.kurant) x Emily Ertle, Jenn Leung () and Michael Levin explored synthetic organisms and “home worlds,” asking how mortality, environment, and constraint might generate intelligence. 

🎧Debit () x Saarim Zaman () introduced Toolpa, an open-source framework for building and sharing AI-powered musical instruments intended to be as accessible and extensible as React. 

📇Karyn Nakamura () x Lucas Gelfond () gave a satirical presentation on AI marketing and model interpretability, questioning our ability to truly understand the inner workings of AI models. 

👾Andrew Thomas Huang () x Stephanie Zhang () imagined a speculative world centered around the Shen, a creature from Chinese mythology, but set 500 million years in the future through a distributed network of living intelligence. 

📚Caleb Rimtobaye (AfrotroniX) (.beat) x Josiah Hester suggested machine unlearning through small language models designed to preserve and rehearse languages outside colonial infrastructures.

How does ASCII art support a more sustainable approach to making art on the web? ☼모 ✐ᝰ .ᐣ

Join us on Sunday, June 28 at the for Solar Web art ☼day, a day-long event exploring the versatility of ASCII art as both an expressive and environmentally-friendly art form. This event is all ages and free with museum admission `⎚⩊⎚´ -✧ .ᐟ.ᐟ

Guests of all ages will have the opportunity to create their own ASCII artworks and contribute them to a solar-powered website. Original ASCII artworks made by NYC public school students in Rhizome’s solar web workshops will also be on view!

☼ This event accompanies Rhizome’s ongoing educational program in NYC public schools, which uses the concept of the solar web to teach students about digital art and its impacts on the environment. 

Learn more and get tickets at the link in bio! ⫘

Artist Morry Kolman () discusses traffic-camera selfies 🚦, making art out of a cease and desist letter he received from the NYC department of transportation ✉️, how data reflects the human need for attention 👩‍💻, and more with Isabella Haid () in our latest Artist Profile. Read the full interview at the link in bio! ✍️🧑‍⚖️

Presenting… Post-Containment! ✨

Come celebrate an incredible 7x7 day for rhizome with a beautiful night of sound and visuals ~ hosted by at

Co-hosted by , , , .nyc
w/additional curation from .systems + .back.theinternet

Artist Maura Brewer () discusses vacationing at tropical tax havens in her 2024 video essay “Offshore,” art-backed loans, how being a Private Investigator informs her artistic practice, and more with Katie Lane() for our latest Artist Profile. Link in bio to read the full interview!

1- Still, Maura Brewer, “Offshore” (2024). Single-Channel Video, 33:11. Courtesy Maura Brewer.

2 & 3- Still, Maura Brewer, “Jessica Manafort” (2020). Single-Channel Video, 18:01. Courtesy Maura Brewer.

4- Still, Maura Brewer, “Private Client Services” (2021). Single-Channel Video, 19:18. Courtesy Maura Brewer.

Announcing the lineup for this years 7x7! Returning May 16 at

🟠 Artist and Engineer Karyn Nakamura () ✖️ Lucas Gelfond (), Software engineer at A24 Labs.

🟠 Research-driven platform 邊界 BiānJiè (Ian Margo and Alexandre Montserrat | 世然 (.systems), ✖️ Disintegrator (.integrator)(Roberto Alonso Trillo, Marek Poliks (Remote), Hugh Scott-Douglas), independent think tank sitting in the widening gaps between technological, theoretical, and creative states of art.

🟠 Conceptual Artist Agnieszka Kurant (.kurant)✖️ Michael Levin, professor at Tufts University studying the emergence of form and function in living systems; Emily Ertle, Ph.D. student at Tufts University; and Jenn Leung (), researcher and creative technologist working at the intersection of synthetic biology, real-time simulation, and living neural systems.

🟠 Debit (), composer, producer, and performer ✖️ Saarim Zaman (), Creative Technologist and cofounder of ITM.

🟠 Artist and filmmaker Andrew Thomas Huang ()✖️ Stephanie Zhang (), artist, scientist, and researcher who works with life as a medium.

🟠 Neema Githere (.back.theinternet), Artist, curator and founder of Relational Architecture Practice Studio Nkisi  ✖️ African litigator and human rights-in-tech architect Mercy Mutemi () ( joining remotely).

🟠 Afrofruturist icon Caleb Rimtobaye (AfrotroniX) (.beat) ✖️ Josiah Hester, Associate Professor of Interactive Computing and Computer Science at Georgia Tech and Director at the Center for Advancing Responsible Computing.

➡️ Learn more about the participants at 7x7.rhizome.org (link in bio)

7x7 2026 is made possible by Fuser 👤(), Onassis ONX 👤(.onx), Jehan Chu & Jeannie Vu, and Gray Area 👤(). ⭐️ 7x7 education programs are made possible by Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation. Rhizome’s program is made possible by Teiger Foundation () and New York State Council for the Arts with the support of Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Are you a part of a community in NYC that has been censored on social media, tracked by FLOCK cameras, or has been threatened by targeted surveillance tactics? As a part of The Counterstructural Commons program, presented in collaboration with , beck haberstroh () is presenting a series of events with (.zip) and invited guests that bring together communities with shared surveillance risks. We’ll talk about who is collecting our information and strategize through teach-ins and zine-making. If you’re interested in participating in any of these events, please RSVP at link in bio! Title font is “i am your worst fear; i am your best fantasy / FIRST GAY AMERICANS” that created, inspired by protest signs from the 70’s.

Save the date: 7x7 returns to on May 16, 2026. Seven artists and seven technologists work together in pairs to “make something new,” presenting the results at a public conference.

This year’s edition is curated by Rhizome with collaborators Neema Githere and 邊界 .systems (Ian Margo and Alexandre Montserrat | 世然), who will also participate as artists. Taking up the theme of “containment,” 7x7 2026 draws inspiration from the acclaimed exhibition “New Humans” and the 2000 essay “Container Technologies” by Zoë Sofia to explore complex systems—biological, computational, and relational—through interdependence, curiosity, care, and contingency.

7x7 2026 is hosted at the New Museum and made possible by Fuser, Onassis ONX, Jehan Chu & Jeannie Vu, and Gray Area. The Counterstructural Commons residency is made possible by Mozilla Foundation. 7x7 education programs are made possible by Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation. Rhizome’s program is made possible by Teiger Foundation and New York State Council for the Arts with the support of Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Early bird tickets on sale today! Full lineup coming soon.

Graphics by Tiger Dingsun (.dingsun)

Thank you to everyone who joined us on March 22 for SCREENTIME at during its opening weekend! See the full list of works at the link in bio. 🎬

On view for just one day, Rhizome presented a special screening of eleven video works from artists in ArtBase, our archive of born-digital art. The fully sold-out screening convened excited museum-goers, members of Rhizome’s Community, artists, and more.🤹‍♂️

🧐First established in 1999, the ArtBase contains over 2,000 works of net art, including some of the very first artworks to use the internet as an artistic medium. For SCREENTIME, Rhizome accessioned two new video works to ArtBase: “Died in your arms tonight (Shell’s Place Page 29)” by Olia Lialina, and “Reenactment of Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s Imponderabilia” by Eva & Franco Mattes ().

👯Artists include Silvio Lorusso (.lorusso), Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Skawennati (), Mark Fingerhut (), JODI, Eva & Franco Mattes (), Paul Slocum (), Martins Kohout (), Anne de Vries (), Takeshi Murata (), and Olia Lialina.

1- visitors watch SAMSUNG by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Photo Credit:
2- A New Museum security staff member guards the video work Moonwalk by Martins Kohout.
3- SCREENTIME poster design by Program Design & Title Cards by Ruby Miller ()
organized by Kayla Drzewicki ()