At the end of this year, Adobe will stop supporting the proprietary Flash Player software, and it will quickly disappear from web browsers.

To prepare for this watershed cultural moment, Rhizome is running a small fundraiser to fund necessary technical infrastructure to allow for future access to Flash works in the Artbase. This is a major issue, becuase hundreds of works in the Artbase use Flash, often in ways that cannot be accessed via in-browser emulation or other existing approaches. (Read more about problems and approaches to Flash preservation in this article by Dragan Espenschied.) 

On December 31 at 6pm EST, we will host a live play-through of favorite Flash-based works from the Rhizome Artbase and from partners like the Cartography of Latin American Digital Literature research project. The event will be hosted by Rhizome’s artistic director Michael Connor and software curator Lyndsey Moulds, who will be joined by special guests as we tween into the last hours of the last decade of Flash.

The schedule will be something like this:

6pm – Welcome and Introduction

615pm – Flash in the ArtBase with Michael 

645pm – Miltos Manetas

715pm – Jason Edward Lewis and Skawennati

745pm – Lyndsey’s Flash picks

815pm – Cinemathèque Flash 

9pm – Yael Kanarek

930pm – Flash in Latin American digital art and literature

10pm – ???

Find us on Rhizome’s Twitch channel to join in, and please pitch in if you are able via the donation box below! Donations toward our $5,000 goal will be accepted before the event and until we are off the air – so don't wait to pitch in, if you are able.

Image: Lesson plans: learning stalls (2003) by Darrin Martin and Torsten Zenas Burns