"For decades, researchers have studied how online communities form shared identities and beliefs. But what about shared memories? This series explores Lore: the new modes of self-mythologization developed within network media, and the forms of history and canon stored within media artifacts that online groups produce. The memes we encounter on clearnet feeds are usually parts of larger stories, stemming from semi-private sites more conducive to worldbuilding. The affordances of different types of online space change how information is produced, circulated, and remembered across platforms. What happens when platforms enable the archival of information? What happens when they encourage collective experiences versus personal, inward-facing ones?

The way we remember the events that happen on the internet is different than reading a book. Information circulates and gets stored in a way that incorporates personal narratives as documentation, combining textuality with elements of oral storytelling. Bits of text and image serve as artifacts that help piece together complex narratives. The Lore Zone seeks to help us all understand new interesting ways of reading, writing, and remembering the internet."

Libby Marrs : https://libbymarrs.net/
Tiger Dingsun : https://www.tiger.exposed/index

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Shelby Wilson + https://shelby.cool

Maxwell Neely-Cohen is a writer, coder, and dancer based in New York City. He is the author of the novel Echo of the Boom. His nonfiction and essays have been featured in places like The New Republic, Ssense, and BOMB Magazine. From 2018-2021, he was Editor-At-Large for The Believer. His experiments with technology, video games, and performance have been acclaimed by The New York Times Magazine, Electric Literature, and The Financial Times. He was most recently in residence at Pioneer Works, CultureHub, and ENGINE. He is the Publisher of thehtml.review

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Pippin Barr is an experimental game designer and Associate Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University. He is a prolific maker of videogames, producing work addressing everything from airplane safety instructions to the nature of videogames and videogame technologies. He is a well-known figure in the independent and artistic videogame scenes, makes his source code and process documentation publicly available via his presence on GitHub. Pippin is the co-host of the podcast GAMETHING and his forthcoming book, The Stuff Games Are Made Of (2023, MIT Press), discusses videogame design from the perspective of its materials. Pippin's website, www.pippinbarr.com, organizes his diverse activities into a central location.

This event is a part of Rhizome's Office Hours, a series of informal online conversations about our work and digital art at large, hosted by Briana Griffin, Community Designer, Rhizome.

Molly Soda is a visual artist working in video, installation, interactive art, performance and print media. Her work is often hosted online, specifically on social media platforms, allowing the work to evolve and interact with the platforms themselves. Soda engages with questions of revisiting one's own virtual legacy, how we present ourselves and perform for imagined others online and how the ever shifting nature of our digital space affects our memories and self concept.

This conversation is organized in connection with Rhizome’s research on the work of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. Beginning with their meeting in 1975, the duo developed a decades-long practice that prototyped and model “new ways of being in the world” that would be made possible by virtual space and telecollaborative networks. Prior to beginning their singular and essential collaboration, both artists participated in alternative video collectives—Galloway in the Amsterdam-based Video Heads, an Rabinowitz in Optic Nerve. With the support of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, Rhizome is working to publish an unfinished manuscript by Gene Youngblood about the duo’s life and work.

Initially a photographers’ collective, Optic Nerve operated out of a basement darkroom at Project One, a “technological commune” in San Francisco’s Mission District in the early 1970s. A five-story, 84,000 square-foot former candy factory, Project One was living and working space for more than 200 artists, designers, architects, alternative media workers, and political activists–and their children.

In 1972, Optic Nerve – including Adler, Jules Backus, Bill Bradbury, Jim Mayer, and Sherrie Rabinowitz – expanded to include new members, including Sherrie Rabinowitz, and undertook their first video project. That project arose in 1972, when a young intern at KQED, the San Francisco PBS affiliate, began work on a documentary about the commune, storing his PortaPak in Optic Nerve’s space when it was not in use. When he abandoned the project partway through, Optic Nerve took over. This marked the beginning of their long engagement with alternative documentary. In 1980, Adler and several other members of the group created a new partnership, Ideas in Motion, to continue making documentary work.

The Project One documentary is characteristic of Optic Nerve’s approach – unlike the thickly satirical tone of attention-grabbing contemporaries TVTV, their editorial point-of-view is established almost entirely through observation. In one scene, they capture a meeting in which live-in tenants of the warehouse make a bad faith attempt to impose a steep rent hike on Optic Nerve’s workspace, and yet they still remained calmly circumspect.

This style carried through to Fifty Wonderful Years, which tackled the topic of the Miss California Beauty Pageant, which took place in the Bay Area against the backdrop of a growing women’s movement. Here again, they resisted the temptation to make easy criticisms, again delving into their subject matter and the people involved.

Students featured ~
Alejandra Trejo
Antonela De
Audrey Lindemann
Jessica Stringham
Josephine Kirkland
Mariana Marangoni
Mitch Kucia
Rush Johnstone
Terkel Gjervig Nielsen
Yararasita
Yufeng Zhao

ARB is co-founder of Trust, a project space in Berlin for utopian conspiracy and platform design.