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Artforum Meets AltaVista: Rhizome Starts as an Email List, 1996

On February 1, 1996, Mark Tribe started an email list for new media artists from Berlin. Within 2 years Rhizome had moved to New York, worked out of a loft at Postmasters Gallery and become a nonprofit. It turned 30 this year.

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Rhizome began as an email list. On February 1, 1996, the artist Mark Tribe, who had spent the previous year in Berlin making art and working as a web designer, started the first Rhizome list on the Desk server in Amsterdam. A trip to Ars Electronica in Linz, reached by driving overnight from Berlin in a van full of artists, had convinced him that the people making new media art needed a place to talk. He took the name from botany, by way of Deleuze and Guattari: a rhizome is a horizontal root system, a network with no center. His own summary was shorter. "I thought of it as Artforum meets AltaVista."

The list grew fast, to about 600 subscribers in 25 countries by the end of 1996. Tribe moderated it to keep the signal high, and when members asked for a weekly digest, he obliged. The conversation, he wrote, "slowed to a standstill." People kept posting announcements but stopped answering each other, so he opened a second list, RHIZOME RAW, with no moderation at all. The noise stayed low and the writing got better. Tribe, who had moved back to the United States in March, launched the website in August 1996 as an interface to an edited archive of the lists. By December it greeted visitors as RHIZOME: THE NEW MEDIA ART RESOURCE, its name spelled out on 7 keyboard keys.

It was a business at first, with a .com address and a spinoff, StockObjects, an online image library launched in April 1997. By the end of 1997 StockObjects could no longer afford to carry it, so in early 1998 Rhizome moved under the New York Foundation for the Arts and changed its address to .org, with 1,570 subscribers across its Raw and Digest lists and a budget under $100,000. That summer it ran on almost nothing. Rachel Greene and Alex Galloway kept it going from a small loft at Postmasters Gallery, which donated the space. "The only gallery showing net art back then was Postmasters," Tribe later said. "Folding never entered my mind," he told The New York Times.

The archive came next. Because nobody was collecting net art, Rhizome launched the ArtBase in 1999 to preserve it, and in 2003 it became an affiliate of the New Museum. In 2016 it began Net Art Anthology, restaging 100 works from the history of net art, launched with a panel that included Olia Lialina and Tribe himself. The list that started on a server in Amsterdam turned 30 on February 1, 2026. Rhizome still describes itself the same way: online since 1996.

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