microgrants 2024
Artists, thinker/tinkerers, game-makers, creative hackers, digital archaeologists, code poets and dreamers: Rhizome gives small annual grants to people like you, to support new online projects. No experience is necessary – just review the guidelines, submit an idea, and we will review it in collaboration with guest jurors (Mindy Seu, Chia Amisola, and Tega Brain).
It's been 10 years since we began offering microgrants as a part of our Commissions program. When the program first began, 'microgrants' was described as “a commitment to browser-based art at a moment when art contextualized within the frame of digital culture fill(ed) galleries worldwide.” Ten years on, we've seen many new waves of communities that develop around an interest in art on the web. Rhizome wants to make it feel possible for anyone to host their own website or learn to use the web to tell their own stories.
A creative web for everyone.
Awarded grants will...
- Receive Feedback from peers, rhizome staff, and jurors
- Share progress via our email list, social media, discord, etc.
- Be considered for future rhizome programming
Submit to one of the following categories:
Nature Cycles
Imagining lighter alternatives to an over-developed and resource intensive web, inspired by rhythms found in nature.
- “Natural Cycles”, in collaboration with Solar Protocol, rewards the creation of resilient resources, minimal use of external dependencies, open source development, non-predatory attention environments, and repairable network structures that escape the commercial internet. Imagining technology that’s held accountable for its physicality, including geopolitical issues, environmental emergencies, and levels of access.
- Inspired by rhythms of nature, “Natural Cycles” encourages the web to go local, take a moment to rest and recharge, to expand and contract, to repurpose and translate.
- From “slow tech” to “low tech”, from “tiny web” to “solar web”
Lost Web Histories
Gathering experience or research-based stories of “lost” media, forum discoveries, niche communities, and personal collections.
- “Lost Web Histories” is dedicated to uncovering and preserving hidden narratives of the internet's past, with a special focus on non-commercial websites, “homemade” webpages, and personal histories and collections.
- Lost Web Histories gathers stories of “lost” media and discovered files from sources such as forums and blogs and diverse community-driven digital spaces and communities that have been overshadowed by commercial platforms.
- The program encourages a variety of approaches, from academic research to personal storytelling.
Desktop Performance
Diving through file structures, browser windows, and automated triggers for the purpose of live performance via a screen.
- We’re in the age of performance; from webcam ballets and to the worlds of live steaming and VJing. Even a screen-recorded lecture can dive in and out of our file systems in ways we could never imagine. The cursor as an actor that traces along the paths of the internet. Experiences that only happen when ‘played’ within the complex ensembles of hardware and software, audience input and feedback, and external libraries and APIs.
- Do we need cursors? Keyboards? Can we script narratives for operating systems?
- “Desktop Performance” seeks applicants interested in performance that involves components such as sound, images, browsers, folder structures, application windows, etc.
Money as Medium
Breaking out of dominant global systems of exchange and value to bring into focus narratives related to alt-systems.
- Money as a “universal” system for expressing value has long prioritized speculative views of the world based on antiquated methods of measuring and storing information. Types of exchange and value creation between people and communities become increasingly complex as people express themselves across networks that blur the boundaries of what a “community” is. What do we collectively value that escapes the traditional marketplace?
- As our current notion of individual ownership and intellectual property becomes overwhelmingly challenged by modern technologies, how do we begin to negotiate new forms of trust and value-creation on both local and global scales?
- What are our new modes of survival?