Rhizome and the New Museum

• Series: A field of practice
• Status: public scholarship
• Institutional author: 6529 Network Museum
• Version: 1.1.1
• Publication date: 2026-08-04
• Research cutoff: 2026-08-04
• Research apparatus: primary-source register

Institutional profile

Rhizome describes itself on its current home page as an online new-media-art organization operating since 1996. The public site places artworks, preservation, commissions, editorial work, and public programs in the same web-facing program structure. Its current ArtBase account of its own history describes an archive of more than 2,200 works, including websites, software, games, code, moving images, and browsers.

Rhizome's relationship with the New Museum needs a specific description. A 2003 announcement retained in Rhizome's own archive said that Rhizome would operate as an affiliate, continue its programs under its own mission and core principles, and remain a separate organizational entity while receiving office space and administrative support from the New Museum. That is an affiliation, not evidence that Rhizome is a New Museum department or a general governance model for other museums.

Demonstrated practices

1. Commissioning and selection are native to the networked program

Rhizome's current FAQ states that commissions, online exhibitions, ArtBase accessions, and other programs are awarded through curatorial selection and open calls. The current site then presents commissions, preservation, artworks, editorial work, and public programs as navigable parts of the same public service. An online commission can begin as a program record, a public work page, and an archival candidate.

2. ArtBase records the access problem instead of hiding it

The ArtBase About page explains that early accessions sometimes consisted of links whose targets remained outside Rhizome's custody. When links became unstable, Rhizome stopped treating a link as a sufficient accession. The same page distinguishes open submission, filtered submission, and invitation-based phases; describes the 2021 relaunch with Linked Open Data and added preservation metadata; and identifies Webrecorder, Emulation as a Service, Conifer, and Wikibase as parts of the technical and descriptive work.

The institutional record demonstrates stewardship by naming the failure mode, the policy changes, and the current system. An artist's URL, a cloned capture, an emulated environment, and Rhizome's descriptive record remain distinct.

3. Preservation research is published alongside the preservation tools

In “The Making of Net Art Anthology: New from Rhizome and Google Arts & Culture” (28 January 2019), Rhizome describes the one-hundred-work Anthology through the people and systems that made it possible: Dragan Espenschied, Lyndsey Jane Moulds, Webrecorder, Emulation as a Service, Wikibase, a preservation matrix, and the public exhibition. The article treats restoration, emulation, research, exhibition, and publication as one project. Its public preservation matrix gives each work a status and notes, leaving “archived” as a condition that still requires explanation.

The article is a historical account of a 2019 project, not a guarantee that every tool or service remains unchanged. Its demonstrated method is specific: publish the access route, the preservation decision, and the toolchain together.

4. A hosted-service exit is documented as an operational and access event

Rhizome announced in “Conifer Twilight Announcement” (15 December 2025) that the hosted capture-and-editing service would be discontinued in June 2026. Its 6 May 2026 process notice records that new accounts and subscriptions had closed in December 2025 and that paid subscriptions stopped in May 2026. At that date, replacement of the platform with a read-only “tombstone” application remained scheduled for June. The 22 May webinar recap describes a beta tombstone app, default access to existing collections, WACZ export, Browsertrix transfer, self-hosting, redirects, and deletion. It also names losses caused by the replayweb.page transition, including full-text search, multiple bookmark lists, and legacy remote browsers.

The current Conifer landing page says that creating and modifying collections was disabled before the service's June 2026 discontinuation. These public sources establish the hosted-service exit and the available migration paths; they do not establish that every collection has migrated successfully or that every replay is behaviorally identical.

Close reading of public scholarship

The ArtBase page for My Boyfriend Came Back From the War uses an unusually useful three-part structure. It first describes the work's operation: nested browser frames divide into smaller frames as the visitor clicks, producing a changing mosaic. It then separates variants and access routes: an outside link, a cloned version with a last-known capture date, and an emulated environment with its own date and association. Finally, it keeps artist attribution, descriptive tags, and preservation metadata visible as different kinds of information. The prose is compact and operational. Browser behavior is described as behavior; the emulation and original external link retain separate identities.

The longer Making of Net Art Anthology essay has a different voice: first-person institutional narration, named staff and partners, and a sequence that moves from the Anthology's closing moment to the practical work of research, emulation, and publication. Its exact passages name tools and decisions. It also carries the promotional and time-bound frame of a 2019 partnership announcement. Read with the current ArtBase and Conifer records, it is a documented project history whose tools and service assumptions require current verification.

What the Museum should adopt

• Give each network-native commission a public work page, an exact creator and collaborator record, a current access route, and a separate account of external links, captures, emulations, and dependencies.
• Treat accession as a decision about custody and reproducible access, not as the discovery of a URL. Record whether the Museum holds the file, a capture, a runtime, a token, or only a permission to link.
• Publish preservation state work by work. A status matrix, retained capture package, method note, and runnable toolchain are more useful than an undated “archived” label.
• Make hosted-service dependency visible at intake. For each work, record export formats, replay software, redirects, private/public state, migration options, known feature loss, and who is responsible when the service changes.
• Keep the chain record, rights record, technical constitution, and public interpretation linked but distinct. Rhizome's ArtBase history shows why access, description, and custody cannot be inferred from one another.

Where the analogy ends

• ArtBase is a long-accumulated archive with more than 2,200 works, changing accession policies, and uneven historical documentation. A new museum cannot reproduce that history by copying its labels or adopting its tools.
• Webrecorder, Conifer, EaaS, Wikibase, WACZ, and open-source software still require maintainers, hosting, rights permissions, version control, and migration labor. “Open source” is not a preservation outcome.
• The Conifer transition is evidence that a public hosted service can end while collections remain technically accessible through a new replay layer. It is not evidence that all future migrations will be complete, lossless, or free of new dependencies.
• The New Museum affiliation supplies a particular administrative and exhibition context. It is not a general model for legal structure, governance, or institutional autonomy.
• The 2019 Anthology essay documents a completed project and its stated preservation approach. It should not be used as current evidence for service availability, current staffing, or current access without a live check.

Sources

Access date for every source below: 2026-08-04.

Revision history

• 1.1.1 — 2026-08-04: pre-publication review separated the completed May subscription closure from the June platform-replacement plan and retained the current service notice as a distinct source.
• 1.1.0 — 2026-08-04: hostile audit revision; corrected New Museum relationship, replaced the stale About link, added claim-level sources, close readings, and the May/June 2026 Conifer exit and migration state.