the reflexions insider

When you’re in the business of working with technology — in our case at Reflexions Data, building web applications — it’s easy to forget about your roots.

The culture of web development is rooted in a unique blend of other more forbidable cultural legacies: those of digital art, interface design, software development, and information architecture.

The web as an experimental intersection of art and technology was best represented in its early years by publications like Wired Magazine and Mondo 2000. Editorials by technologists like Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, and Nicholas Negroponte appeared alongside expositions on cyberpunk, digital art, and virtual reality. Experimental digital artists jostled with computer scientists, techno-utopians, and post-humanists in their attempts to express the shifting landscape of the late 20th century. These trends seemed so fundamental as to provoke Wired magazine in 1998 to predict a 20-year “long boom” that would result in worldwide “hyperwealth” and a new egalitarian golden age of cultural and technological achievement (only two years later Wired’s outlook would be somewhat less optimistic, the magazine itself having been sold off to Condé Nast).

While such sentiments of the late 1990’s have been relegated to pre-dot-com anachronism and near absurdity, they have nevertheless matured and are increasingly relevant to the early 21st century, what by comparison feels like an age of measured optimism: a time when the culture of technology has gone mainstream.

This new era has its own luminaries. Rhizome, an affiliate of the New Museum, is at the forefront of where art and technology meet. Its mission statement: “Rhizome supports the creation, presentation, and preservation of contemporary art that uses new technologies in significant ways.” Located in the new home of the New Museum in New York’s Lower East Side, Rhizome is both an exhibition space and a web community for forward-thinking artists and their varied audiences.

I was recently given a tour of the New Museum’s new building by Lauren Cornell, Rhizome’s Executive Director and curator at the New Museum. The location itself is provocative, compelling some to view the museum’s new address as an example (if not a catalyst) of the gentrification of the once working-class neighborhood. But the tenements of the Lower East Side are long gone and the museum’s presence on the Bowery among second hand restaurant equipment and street vendors induces one of those “only in New York” moments (and why not pick up a used deli slicer on your way to the new YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES exhibition?). The building was designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA (photos at right).

For anyone who wants to experience the resurgence of digital art amidst the political and economic uncertainties of the 21st century, a visit to Rhizome.org or the New Museum will provide a sorely-needed return to the interplay of art and technology that’s so fundamental to our age.

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