ewsba.se
Earlier this week, Rhizome, the 30-year-old digital art nonprofit that has been affiliated with the New Museum since 2003, announced a pilot program with its internal video hosting platform video.rhizome.org, and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). Rhizome hopes to offer VRO, as it’s known, to other digital arts organizations and artists as an alternative to commercial video platforms like Vimeo.
“We think offering artists video hosting is something that could be meaningful for people in the community right now,” Michael Connor, Rhizome’s executive director, told ARTnews. “With the way that the web is going, it’s harder and harder to run a platform the way Vimeo operated a decade ago.”
Rhizome initially set up VRO in 2022, but their plans to offer the technology to others in the digital arts community kicked into high gear this summer following a breakdown in the relationship between Vimeo and EAI, a video and new media distributor with a collection of thousands of digital artworks by over 200 artists.
The trouble started in May, when EAI began receiving emails, which EAI executive director Rebecca Cleman believes were AI-generated, flagging their account for community guideline violations. Karl McCool, EAI’s distribution director, told ARTnews that the two works Vimeo initially flagged were Barbara Hammer’s 1970s films Dyketactics and Women I Love, two of EAI’s most requested films.
EAI wasn’t completely caught off guard by this, McCool explains. He’d heard from colleagues at similarly sized arts organizations, like Collectif Jeune Cinema, a French experimental film distributor, and Visual AIDS, which supports HIV+ artists, about issues they were having with Vimeo. And in December, Connor says he told Cleman to “watch out for Vimeo,” having also heard about problems with streaming controversial or explicit media.
Despite EAI’s repeated attempts to get in touch with Vimeo to explain the history and value of Hammer’s, and others’, artworks, neither McCool nor Cleman was ever able to speak with a real person at the company, and their account was shut down over Memorial Day weekend.
EAI finally connected with someone at Vimeo about a month later, and the account was temporarily reinstated—once they took down the videos that had been flagged by artists like Ellen Cantor, Carolee Schneemann, Peggy Ahwesh, and Alex Bag, in addition to Hammer.
ARTnews reached out to Vimeo, but did not receive a response about their policy for removing videos or suspending accounts by press time.
“One thing that struck us,” said McCool, “is that a lot of the videos were works by women. Because we know the catalogue inside and out, we know that there’s a lot of work by men that is arguably far more explicit. And those things weren’t flagged … I don’t know that they were deliberately targeting women, but it was really notable what they didn’t pick up on, like the two films of Bruce Nauman’s testicles, or the many films of Vito Acconci completely naked doing sexual sorts of things, or the two Lawrence Weiner films that are full of unsimulated sex.”
EAI proactively removed these videos as well, since their contact at Vimeo explained that the account would be reinstated only once. By this point, EAI was already working with Rhizome on the new platform and planned to transition away from Vimeo as soon as it was ready.
Cleman and McCool trace their recent issues with Vimeo to the company’s $1.38 billion acquisition by Bending Spoons, a tech conglomerate that also owns WeTransfer, Eventbrite, and Airtable, in the fall of 2025. It was then that Vimeo’s business model shifted significantly, Cleman wrote in an email to ARTnews, with a majority of their workforce being dismissed in favor of AI replacements. McCool explained that he and others at EAI reached out to contacts at Vimeo they had been in touch with as recently as a few weeks or months prior, and all had been let go.
McCool credits Rhizome with “heroic” efforts over the summer to build an alternative to Vimeo using PeerTube, an open-source video platform, that addressed all of EAI’s specific needs. “We couldn’t just use PeerTube like an alternative version of YouTube,” McCool explained. “We needed Rhizome’s help to build a version that was tailor-made for us. We had to ensure that videos could be embedded on our own website with certain digital rights management protections in place. We had to make sure these works aren’t easily copied or pirated. We had to have good captions in place. There were all these different considerations that we needed Rhizome’s help with.”
Rhizome delivered on building the service—pro bono, McCool notes—and EAI is now able to host their videos via VRO. Connor plans to continue advocating for the importance of independent infrastructure in keeping digital artwork reliably available online. “Rhizome is still a nonprofit,” Connor said. “We’re not trying to run a video-hosting business. But the work our developers did for EAI is really easily replicable if we have other institutions or artists that need their own channels. We see hosting artist videos as mission-aligned work.”