[rhizome]
In our presentation of The best of the 2 Worlds, rhizome represents a "second take", an approach to the subterraneous geology of the model of communication that irrigates the net.art community.
From our point of view, it is not enough to try to understand the communicational and creative processes through models set up by the Art-institution. It is not a question of copying the model of the 'temporary exhibition' or of 'art curatorship', nor of proposing a selection of the Top 10 newest net.art works, or proposing a particular line of questioning or theme and sounding out which works and artists best illustrate it.
It's rather, as we understand it (in that what interests us is to display the formal and linguistic specificity of net.art), a question of respecting and adapting to this new communicative practice's own rules of public addressing, of accepting them and proceeding in line with their own specific dynamics.
In this sense, we don't present our rhizome as a "selection", but rather as the effect and transversal result of an experiment in communication developed according to the dynamics of the net.artistic community itself. In this second take, our role has been restricted to listing (in the order in which we received them) all the proposals that were sent to us spontaneously by those who wished to do so, in response to our proposal to the net.community regarding our intentions, concerns and interests.
We'd like to believe that this (non)selection provides a way of looking at another world, the undercurrent of communication that flows below and above any hierarchisation of the nodes. A landscape among many other possible landscapes, which is merely the effect and result of this multidirectional, rhizomatous interaction, operated in the heart of the net.community itself. We believe that therein lies its interest, and as such we offer it for display in the public domain provided by the net.
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As it is -we hope- obvious, the title of this "section" is an explicit hommage to Rhizome databases as well as to the writtings of Deleuze-Guattari.