Rhizome Editions, “The Shadowbanned“
Minted on Zora
Founded in 1996, Rhizome is a significant platform and memory institution for digital art. This open edition, the first NFT that we have minted directly, is an opportunity for holders to demonstrate their support for Rhizome on-chain.
The work is based on a document that a funder sent to Rhizome after they canceled a major grant, citing unspecified content in our archives. When we sought clarification for their reasons for the cancellation, we were sent a 100-page PDF, with nearly every word redacted. We wanted to turn this moment into an opportunity to recognize our most valuable source of support—our community—and so we invited artist Yoshi Sodeoka to re-interpret the PDF as an NFT artwork. Sodeoka removed the last identifying information from the document, and turned it into a looping animation, visualizing the density and absurdity of the grant cancellation.
Without Rhizome’s cutting-edge work, digital art would lose an entire ecosystem of preservation, innovation, and artistic expression, on and off the blockchain.