Hi everybody,

Last November, I notified the Rhizome community that I would soon be stepping down as Rhizome's Director of Technology. Today, I'm very happy to announce that our next Director of Technology will be Patrick May.

Patrick comes to Rhizome with an exceptional background in both technology and in the arts. His previous position at the publishing company Source Media gives him extensive experience with developing and maintaining large, content-driven sites with limited resources, and this experience will come in handy at a highly dynamic, community-oriented website like Rhizome. He is also active in the free software and Ruby communities: He is the creator of the Ruby-Web library, and has presented at the International Ruby Conference.

Patrick is also the cofounder and Director of Programming at the Williamsburg-based artists' collective Open Ground, helping to guide the consensus-based curatorial process that furnished Grand Street with four years' worth of always surprising group shows. He is an artist himself, and his creative practice incorporates a software library he created that automatically publishes consecutive iterations of images to an artists' blog; he discussed this tool at Rhizome's second "Blogging and the Arts" panel discussion.

Being Rhizome's Director of Technology, of course, requires more than just a knowledge of programming, and more than a familiarity with new media arts. Rhizome has always been an undersized organization with oversized ambitions, and we continue to explore ways to deepen the nascent connections between art and technology. Patrick's resume hits a lot of the right topics, but what's most important is that he's able to think of the big picture--not just in terms of artworks and lines of code, but also in terms of organizations and communities. I'm confident that he will make the perfect partner for Lauren and Marisa as the three of them lead Rhizome in the future. We've accomplished a lot in the last year, and I'm excited to see what changes will come in the years ahead.

We are expecting the transition process to work like this: Patrick will come in on February 2nd, and he and I will work side-by-side throughout February as I train him in. My last day will be March 3rd, but even after then I'll still be available to Patrick & the organization in general.

I'm quite happy to leave this job in Patrick's capable hands. I hope you all welcome him as kindly as you welcomed me.

Francis Hwang
Director of Technology
Rhizome.org + + +