Mark Tribe of Rhizome presented STARRYNIGHT, a navigation system based on the metaphor of a starry night sky. Rhizome provides an archive of writing and art objects based on new media art, as well as the famous email list. STARRYNIGHT is an aesthetic representation of a menu which accesses the rhizome archives. When you scroll across the STARRYNIGHT screen, text appears which relates to the articles included in the archive. If you click on the corresponding star, an article archived by Rhizome will appear. Each time a new person clicks on these stars, they become brighter. Constellations appear between articles with related topics.

Q: Please describe your project. What are the key issues and concepts of your project?

MT: Rhizome.org strives to foster communication and critical dialog within the new media art community, to present new media art to the public, and to preserve new media art for the future. Since 1996, Rhizome.org has hosted two email lists focused on new media art. These lists have played a significant role in the development of a critical discourse around new media art in general, and net-based art in particular. Selected texts from the email lists are edited, indexed and entered into a searchable online database accessible via our Web site. This archive now contains over 1,500 texts, and represents the most comprehensive archive of critical writing related to new media art.

STARRYNIGHT is an attempt to make this archive accessible in a new and interesting way. Upon launching the STARRYNIGHT Web page, you see a dark night sky scattered with hundreds of stars. Each star represents a text, its brightness determined by the number of times the text has been read. You can click on a star to read the text, or select a keyword to see a constellation that connects related stars. You can use these constellations to find other related texts, and in doing so, follow your interests through the vast array of ideas and information in Rhizome text archive.

Q: How do you position your work within the context of "Life Science"?

MT: I'd be reaching if I tried to claim a significant connection between STARRYNIGHT and life science.

Q: What is your impression of Ars Electronica so far? Have you seen anything that you are particularly interested in?

MT: All in all, it was a great festival. I especially liked the relaxed atmosphere at openX --definitely a warmer vibe than the Museum of the Future. Looking back, the one project that stands out in my mind is Rachel Baker and Heath Bunting's Superweed. Superweed is radical. Unlike Eric Paulos' biological weapon automat, which is cool but really just a simulation, this is the real deal. They gave me a little ziplock baggie of the seeds, and I'm now transformed into a potential agro-genetic terrorist. The shit is dope--I wonder what the customs officer would have made of that baggie of little brown seeds at JFK?

Q: Is this project representative of your body of work or is it different in some way?

MT: I think STARRYNIGHT is representative both of Rhizome.org's work and of my own work as an artist. On the first level, it's consistent with our MO at Rhizome.org in that it's all about enabling access to information, and in that it was produced through a collaborative effort by a group of people working together on the net. On the other level, the level of my own art practice, it follows from projects like CARPARK and Vietnamese Ingredients, which were both about re-ordering and re-visualizing stuff. In the case of CARPARK, it was cars and parking as a social practice. In Vietnamese Ingredients, it was food and immigration/cultural hybridity. In STARRYNIGHT, it's information: texts, metadata and usage patterns. In the end, all three are about finding ways to transform unremarkable stuff into an opportunity for aesthetic experience, which is my take on making art. Another commonality is that it's collaborative. Most of my work has been collaborative.

Q: What are the structures and support systems that allow you to do your work?

MT: Structures: the Internet, HTML, PERL, Java, WindowsNT, MacOS, Linux...

Support systems: the Rhizome community, my working relationship with Alex Galloway

Q: As an artist working in a technological or scientific crossover, are you developing alliances and working relationships with commercial or corporate research and development venues?

MT: Now that you put it that way, I see Rhizome.org as a non-commercial corporate R&D venue. But I think you were asking more about places like XeroxPARC or Interval Research, and in that case the answer is no, we haven't worked with any of them.

Q: How do you envision art in the future regarding new technologies, new science and a new millennium? How do you envision your work in this context?

MT: Artists have always been "early adopters" of new technologies. I think I've been drawn to the Internet as a space for art making because it's still relatively un-codified. The precedents are few and far between. In this sense, I think of myself less as an artist than a researcher or experimenter. When we were in grad school at UCSD, we used to do these 500-level "independent research projects" in which we got academic credit for making art. So instead of saying we were "making art" we started to say that we were "doing research." So my plan for the next millennium is to continue my research.

Q: How do you think the social dynamic of the network art community unfolds when we are together here in real time?

MT: It was nice to see people in the breakfast room first thing in the morning before they'd had their coffee. Unguarded.

Switch V5N3 - Interviews from Ars Electronica '99 by Paula Poole