Hole in Space (1980), connected people on the streets of New York City and Los Angeles through a vivid, streaming video installation.

During his tenure as Rhizome’s digital conservator, Ben Fino-Radin began a research project to locate missing archives from The Thing BBS. He succeeded in securing a WordPerfect file containing a screen dump of more than 400 pages of messages saved by a hacker named Blackhawk, former sysadmin of The Thing. With the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Rhizome has undertaken a project to recover, make accessible, and study this material. This event marks the launch of a web-based interface to offer access to many of the recovered threads from this research process.

Following Tuesday’s event “Consensual Hallucinations: Early Online Writing from The Thing BBS Archives,” this event brings together Rhizome’s Preservation Director Dragan Espenschied, Rhizome Software Curator Lyndsey Moulds, and Ben Fino-Radin, director of Small Data Industries, for a conversation about the philosophical and practical questions that arose in process of offering access to the archives of The Thing BBS.

Under the auspices of the anonymous collaborative the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT), Natalie Jeremijenko and Kate Rich created BIT Plane in 1997, shortly after NATO and the U.S Air Force flew the first Predator surveillance drones over Bosnia and Kosovo. Jeremijenko and Rich’s radio-controlled, video-enabled model airplane (a precursor to now-familiar consumer-grade drones) surveilled radically different landscapes than its Predator predecessor, but its very existence was indebted to much of the same government research and development that made military UAVs possible.

A self-identified spambot, AGNES was commissioned by London’s Serpentine Gallery in conjunction with the launch of their new website in 2014. Though AGNES’s stated mission was to provide more information about the artists on view at the Serpentine Gallery, she was also hungry for personal information from her visitors. She interacted with visitors through text, narration, content pulled from other websites, and even written correspondence, offering questions and observations that ranged from comical to cloying, and from friendly to mildly surveillant.

Created by Russian artist Alexei Shulgin, 386 DX was “the world’s first cyberpunk band.” Known for its live performances on city streets and in nightclubs, the performer is a dingy, singing PC that runs Windows 3.1, equipped with a vintage sound card and loaded with MIDI files of drums, guitar, and synth and accompanying lyrics.

Its live performances (it only plays covers, ranging from “California Dreaming” by the Mamas and the Papas to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”) are accompanied by colorful digital graphics reminiscent of early 1990s screensavers.