The Download
The Download is a series of Rhizome commissions that considers posted files, the act of downloading, and the user’s desktop as a space for exhibition.
Series Titles
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Sabrina Ratté’s Activated Memory is a video based on animated photographs of different Montreal parks. Activated Memory is a journey through a serene landscape where the trees and fields are at once surreal and familiar. Through the use of video feedback, 3d animation and color manipulations, the pictures render a new kind of space, a virtual world where only fragments of “reality” subsist. Music composed by Roger Tellier-Craig. -
Hapax Phaenomena is a collection of historically unique images discovered by Google image search from collaborators Clement Valla and John Cayley. The fragile and tenuous Phaenomena are organized into subcategories within the five folders; 1_discordant_wonderfulness; 2_nondurable_megabyte; 3_inventive_monetarism; 4_patriotic_leaseback; and 5_diatomic_roach. Each Phaenomena is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity, a screenshot of its moment of global and historical singularity taken by one of the artists. -
In the 1971 experimental landscape film, La Région Centrale, atop a remote mountain in North Quebec, artist Michael Snow shot his footage with a camera attached to a robotic arm programmed to never rotate the same way twice. The result of the camera’s programatic movement oscillates between moments of representation and abstraction, overwhelming the viewer’s everyday sense of landscape with a cosmic and non-human perspective of space and time. La Région Decentralized is an infinite, self-playing video game remix of Snow’s seminal film by new media artist Rick Silva. In this piece, Silva digitally recreates the setting of the original film within a ... -
On January 27th, 2011 Egyptian authorities succeeded in shutting down the country’s international Internet access points in response to growing protests. Over one weekend, a group of programmers developed a platform called Speak2Tweet that would allow Egyptians to post their breaking news on Twitter via voicemail despite Internet cuts. The result was thousands of heartfelt messages from Egyptians recording their emotions by phone. My love for you, Egypt, increases by the day is one short from an experimental film that presents selected Speak2Tweet messages prior to the fall of the Mubarak regime on February 11, 2011 and juxtaposes them with the ... -
www.luckyluckydice.com is an 1990s internet-style animated GIF banner ad. At 51 MB, the animation runs approximately 3 minutes – a file size too large for dial-up internet speeds of the era the spam imagery and text are derived. Preying upon insecurities and human emotions, spam and pop-ups can ensnare users in its phishing traps and advance-fee schemes. By appropriating these malicious images into an animation of an absurd size and duration, James Howard renders spam emails from his junk folder completely functionless. -
Vlog Artifacts is an image generator that connects to YouTube and loads random segments of recently uploaded HD videos by self-described vloggers (video-bloggers). The project induces keyframe-dropping glitches while the video is decoding, and then algorithmically selects a still image from the outcome of this process. Due to the nature of H.264/MPEG-4 motion compression, which renders individual frames based on transformational info from other keyframes encoded in the video, the glitchy high-resolution snapshots often possess an almost painterly aesthetic. When the generator successfully causes a glitch by forcing the decoder to skip these keyframes, the image can often reflect distorted visual data ... -
American Cypher is a suite of projects that respond to American stories about race and DNA. The first module of this project was a sound installation commissioned by Bucknell University, inspired by Thomas Jefferson (the 3rd US president) and Sally Hemings (his slave and, as DNA tests confirm, mother to his children). The piece that we’ve made for the Download series is a performance score. The image in the video was recorded in the basement of Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello, in Charlottesville, Virginia. -
Mimicking the form of a graphics pack that users can download in a number of online marketplaces (or rip from black market torrent sites and filesharing communities), Altmann offers up a range of world class effects and elements from her own projects that can be used and repurposed to add extra value to yours. While operating as a collection of “useful” files that give away some branding elements of her work and invite bootlegging, this directory also serves as commentary on the tropes, back-end labor, and values of audiovisual production, which in many ways mirror other class, culture, and market ... -
Birth, Art Gallery, Death is a minimalist triptych in the form of a screensaver package by Elna Frederick, an obscure artist from Computers Club. With white as life and black as death, each screen saver panel marks a stage in the cycle of consciousness. Birth is the genesis of consciousness through a birth canal of white arriving out of darkness. Art Gallery, where black is conspicuously absent, is the finite enclosure of a lifetime. Its contents are the thoughts and creations arising in consciousness; representations of life. Death, represented by black slowly descending upon a white screen, is ultimately a ... -
The Sole Ripper is a digital book containing a 1:132 scale architectural view of a fictional pedestrian roller coster modeled for an empty lot in Manhattan discovered by Kristin Lucas on Google Maps. The architectural plan arrives fragmented and out of order, given its shape through a process of software conventions and workarounds. It is a visual corollary to the download process in which files are broken down into packets and transmitted over internet pathways from one computer to another, and reconfigured at their final destination. Only, Lucas leaves the task of file reconfigurability open to the viewer, and opts ... -
Pond Type transforms the QWERTY keyboard into a hauntingly beautiful musical instrument for digital poetry. Inspired by Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos’s “Pulsar,” the artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain designed a ripple typeface for an exhibition of the poet’s work for the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. For The Download, they combined the typeface with sound to create an interactive version of Pond Type. After selecting any text or poem, the viewer is instructed to type slowly and wait for each word to vanish before typing the next. By deliberately slowing down the urge to type quickly, the artists ... -
>get >put – an exhibition download contains the work of six uploaders and downloaders produced for >get >put at little berlin in Philadelphia, PA. >get >put is an exploration of the interplay between the physical, social and digital spaces of networked culture. Installed as a series of digital compositions anchored in spatiotemporal objects, the work focuses around the fundamental shared behaviors of ‘downloading’ and ‘uploading’ that support our networked world. The exhibition exists in two parts – as digital compositions installed in HTML for this download, and as physical pieces produced for the exhibition’s installation. -
GIF PAK (2012) is a special collection of 24 animated gifs from paperrad.org, the influential collective Paper Rad’s website. Created during a time that predated the social web, Paper Rad’s website functioned as a nexus for the collective’s fans and followers. The site was regularly updated with new images and animations by its members, and it was common for followers to revisit the site to witness its evolution. The GIF PAK features some of the site’s greatest gifs including background images, popular cartoon characters, and promotional materials for tours and gallery shows. This collection was curated by Jacob Ciocci following the preservation of ... -
ECCOS is a modification of the soundtrack from an Ecco the Dolphin gameplay video found on Youtube. Wilson contextualizes ECCOS as furniture music: not a centerpiece, but a backdrop for thought and other activities. The project utilizes an input output system, in which he employs the simple “change speed” and “echo” effects in Final Cut Pro and pushes them to their maximum values. Wilson has diagrammed the process, relating it to kindred experiments like Brian Eno’s Discreet Music. In that spirit, ECCOS seeks–and finds–a limit within the music itself. -
For The Download’s first free and open project, Deanna Havas offers a solution to earn back your membership donation once required to access The Download. By participating in Havas’s Affiliate Program (2013) the user can set up their own affiliate website to generate traffic to its host site, deannahavas.com. As an affiliate publisher, you will be reimbursed relative to how much traffic you drive to the site, which is calculated via metrics like pay per click and cost per impression. The package includes a small website, banner ads, and media ready to use for your microsite as well as step by step ... -
We See In Every Direction (2013) a Web browser for collaborative, synchronized surfing by Swedish artist Jonas Lund. Browsing the Internet is typically an intimate and personal experience for just one person, but in We See, users traverse online information streams in a collective surfing environment. Users can type, click and change URLs in real time together; they can jockey for control of the browser–akin to fighting for the TV remote–or choose to sit back and let their friends take care of the surfing. Like many of Lund’s previous online works, the piece opens up the walled-off spaces of the Internet for ... -
It’s tempting to call sorry to dump on you like this.zip a pornographic work, since an actual porn collection is embedded within it—the artist’s own archive of men accumulated in fifteen years of web browsing. But these JPGs serve only as a substrate: thin scaffolding for an epic textual work that hangs loosely from the files. -
The .stl and .obj files contained within Material Speculation: ISIS/Download Series (King Uthal) are the first 3D models of a lost artwork openly published by Morehshin Allahyari. -
Wakeling calls Incantations for the Birth of a Network “a proto-script for a film,” a story that traces the invention of the computer and the atomic bomb as precursors to the internet. As of January 2018, this work has been taken offline. -
Empathy, digital labor, and new ways to serve and care on the network are the subjects explored in Elisa Giardina Papa’s Technologies of Care. -
To create his image-based narratives, Cooper arranges found GIFs into vertical sequences, two or three at a time, and then stacks them into tall columns, which are scrolled. -
to_oblivion.zip laments the death of Reyhaneh Jabbari, who was convicted and hanged in Iran on October 25, 2014 for the alleged murder of her rapist. -
!!!Sección A R T E [No. 11+Rhizome] launches simultaneously as a download on Rhizome and as part of El Paquete Semanal, a weekly collection of media distributed via an in-person file sharing network in Cuba. It will be archived permanently on the former, but overwritten within seven days on the latter.
