free registration required so i've pasted below, but you should go to
the site and look at the adverts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/30/arts/design/30ARTS.html

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September 30, 2002
Digital Artworks That Play Against Expectations
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL

Ada1852 is a digital docent. She conducts tours of the online-art
site Rhizome.org by replying to questions that are typed and
transmitted over the Internet. Through these exchanges, she can
respond to a visitor's interests and suggest viewings of specific
Internet-based artworks, and then supply links to the pieces.

Like a human museum guide, Ada1852 occasionally departs from the
scripted commentary to make oddly personal remarks. During a recent
chat session, the virtual character was asked about a site and
replied, "Perhaps I am slipping into madness."

Ada1852 is the creation of Christopher Fahey, a New York artist who
rewrote an existing artificial-intelligence program so that its
bland, computer-generated conversations with people would seem less
mechanical. "I did not want to build a person whose primary function
was to be a nonperson," Mr. Fahey said. By giving Ada1852 a
personality that verges on the disturbed, he is subverting many
notions about artificial intelligence.

Mr. Fahey's troubled tour guide is one of five online-art projects
commissioned by Rhizome.org, a nonprofit organization in New York.
(The new works were to be put online today at
rhizome.org/commissions. Starting Wednesday , they also can be seen
at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo.)

With more than 16,000 members, Rhizome is among the most popular
virtual communities devoted to the digital arts. It is an online-only
meeting place where participants can announce new artworks, request
technical assistance or debate obscure issues. (Other sites that
focus on digital culture include nettime.org and bbs.thing.net.)

But while most virtual groups are content to carve out a comfortable
corner of cyberspace, Rhizome continues to expand its domain.
Commissioning the five new works cost $20,000, a substantial sum for
such a young genre. Rhizome also has started to sell Internet
services to its members, and has a partnership with the New School in
Manhattan to offer online-education courses about new-media subjects.

These initiatives are something of an accomplishment for a nonprofit
digital-arts group that a year ago wasn't sure it would survive the
double whammy of the collapse of the dot-com economy and the cutbacks
in arts grants after the attacks of Sept. 11. Mark Tribe, Rhizome's
founder, said it had been living from grant to grant.

Gradually, though, Rhizome has acquired an aura of respectability
that Internet entities rarely achieve. As a result, Mr. Tribe, 35, is
less concerned that his donors - including the Rockefeller, Jerome
and Warhol Foundations - will desert him. "Things are rosier now," he
said.

Karen Helmerson, director of the electronic media and film program at
the New York State Council on the Arts, said of Rhizome: "They're
definitely established. Straight out of the gate they were
demonstrating leadership in the field." She said the agency would
support Rhizome for a third year. Rhizome, which has an annual budget
of $440,000, has also turned to its members for donations, mounting
an annual fund-raising campaign modeled after those for public
television. Despite the widespread conviction that everything on the
Internet should be available free, the site's members contributed
$25,000 last year.

Mr. Tribe founded Rhizome in 1996 while in Berlin. An artist
interested in the Internet, he realized that at that time the only
way to monitor developments and trade ideas was to attend the
digital-art conferences in Europe. He said, "It just seemed like, we
all have e-mail, we all have access to the Web, there should be some
sort of online space where this kind of exchange could take place."

So Mr. Tribe started an electronic mailing list and about 100 people
joined. He soon moved to New York and like innumerable dot-com
entrepreneurs set up a Web site. Mr. Tribe said: "It was a time of
incredible optimism. There were a lot of people who, like me, truly
believed in the transformative potential of the Internet."

Rhizome began as a commercial venture. But by 1998 Mr. Tribe saw that
this approach was doomed and applied for nonprofit status. "I turned
away from the money before it turned away from me," he said. "Some of
my friends were worth hundreds of millions of dollars briefly on
paper, and I'm one of the few who still has a job."

Rhizome takes its name from the botanical term for a rootlike
structure that grows horizontally, and Mr. Tribe envisioned the site
as a grass-roots endeavor. Anyone can post messages on the site, and
the content is uncensored.

This openness is not always a delight. For every notice about a new
artwork or a forthcoming conference, there are a dozen sophomoric
messages. One writer noted last week, "I just discovered that you all
seem to be addicted to insulting each other over a safe distance."

As Rhizome has expanded, it has been criticized for being too
populist. Ms. Helmerson praised Rhizome for making digital art
accessible to general audiences, but not everyone thinks this is so
great. Josephine Bosma, a sound artist in the Netherlands and a
longtime Rhizome contributor, said the site "might be a nice pool of
information on developments in the digital arts, but it lacks
critical perspective."

Rhizome may prove to be a valuable resource for historians, however.
With nearly seven years of messages in its archive, it documents the
Internet's chaotic birth as an aesthetic medium. Someone interested
in, say, cyberfeminism in the arts could search for the phrase and
receive two dozen links to artworks, interviews and reviews.

Rhizome's database for digital artworks contains more than 700
entries of variable quality. Many of the entries are merely links to
other sites, but 200 of them are digital duplicates of the original
pieces.

This ArtBase, as Mr. Tribe calls it, provides the raw material for
another of its new commissions. "Context Breeder," a clever work by
the New York artist John Klima, invites viewers to select four works
from the ArtBase. These four choices prompt the appearance of another
group of four, and the two sets of four are "crossbred," creating a
third set of four works. Pieces that are chosen most frequently
become stronger and appear more often on the screen, making them and
their "offspring" more likely to be chosen in the future, while
rarely chosen works will become extinct.

This is cultural Darwinism applied to the Internet. But is Rhizome
itself strong enough to survive? Ada1852 had a ready answer, "Why
not?"

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