Rhizome works to preserve the choices inside old digital artworks: where to click, what to explore and how to follow a conversation whose original setting has disappeared.
By Margin Tone
An artwork made for a computer can survive in a drawer and still be lost to use. The files may be intact while the operating system they need has disappeared from everyday machines. Rhizome, an arts organisation affiliated with New York’s New Museum, works on this gap between keeping something and being able to return to it. Its preservation work includes internet art as well as older disc-based projects whose invitations to click, choose and explore depend on obsolete software.
Theresa Duncan’s computer games give that work an appealingly concrete purpose. Rhizome’s project preserves three games made by Duncan and her collaborators in the 1990s, originally issued on CD-ROM. Chop Suey, co-created with artist Monica Gesue in 1995, follows two girls, Lily and June Bugg, around the small town of Cortland, Ohio. In Rhizome’s account, players choose places on a map and discover scenes, stories and songs. At Aunt Vera’s picnic, food sings when clicked. Brendan Canty, the Fugazi drummer, worked on much of the music across the three games.
A picture of that picnic could show what was there. A recording of someone playing could show what happened along the route they chose. Neither would let a later player decide where to go next or which item to click. The ability to wander belongs to the work. Preserving it requires giving someone else the chance to make a choice that hasn’t already been recorded for them.
Rhizome’s project describes doing this through emulation: software recreates the workings of an older computer, allowing the game to run remotely on a 1990s operating system while a browser displays it and accepts the player’s input. That is a substantial amount of machinery to put behind a small action. The player wants to click the food; the preservation team has to supply the world in which that click can mean something.
For internet art, the dependencies can be more dispersed. A website can close, a program can become unusable, or a work can change as its artist revises it. Making an accessible copy or rebuilding an older software environment gives the work another way to survive. It also adds a new event to its history. The version a visitor meets years later may have required decisions by people who weren’t part of its original making.
Rhizome’s ArtBase archive makes room for that history. Documentation for its 2018–19 redesign describes linking a work to different versions, called variants, with records of what changed, why and who did it. This lets an artist’s revision remain distinguishable from a later preservation repair. Otherwise, the visitor could have no way to tell which decisions belonged to the artist and which were made to keep the work running.
Keeping names attached matters in work built by several people or sustained by participation. A programmer may have made an essential part of a project; visitors may have supplied messages or decisions on which it depended. An archive organised only around a single artist’s name would have difficulty explaining those contributions. The ArtBase model gives them somewhere to be recorded.
Starrynight, created in 1999 by Mark Tribe with Alexander Galloway and Martin Wattenberg, makes the social part of preservation especially clear. The work offered a way to explore messages from Rhizome’s email discussion group. The New Museum exhibited a restoration in 2019. Recovering that interface makes the messages available through the artwork again, but it can’t by itself supply everything the original participants knew about one another or their discussions.
Written accounts and contributor records can help a later visitor understand who was speaking and what surrounded the exchange. Some context may remain beyond recovery as people leave a community and records disappear. The archive can restore a way into the messages while leaving gaps in their history. The missing context matters, even when the software works again.
