Rhizome ran its 30th benefit on artist-made money
The fundraiser was the game: scrip by Cory Arcangel, Beeple and seven others, spent on a laundering sim and horse bets in a former Bowery bank.
On Sept. 23, Rhizome turned 30 inside Capitale, the Roman-temple hall on the Bowery built in the 1890s as the Bowery Savings Bank, and handed each guest a short stack of money designed by nine artists. The recap Rhizome posted listed them: Simon Denny made the $1 and Cory Arcangel the $128, while Morry Kolman's $51 came pre-mutilated, trimmed to just past the half-note threshold the U.S. Treasury sets for redeeming damaged bills. The thing to do with it was gamble.
Lombardi Investments, LLP by Inpatient Interactive, in a clip from Rhizome's recap of the benefit. It loops silently here; the original has sound. Video: Rhizome
Blake Andrews ran a live betting book on Horse Race Tests, the maze races between bouncing horse icons Andrews has posted since April 2025. Alex Declino's Wheel of Misfortunes was roulette on words instead of numbers, each winner feeding a procedural poem. Paizley Lee, whose rainbow of iMac G3s we wrote up in August, ran Mega Snake across a row of them so that each machine's age set the difficulty. Inpatient Interactive, the studio behind the forthcoming money laundering simulator Offshore, opened Lombardi Investments, LLP: guests put scrip into the financial webs artist Mark Lombardi spent the 1990s diagramming, then watched them spread on what the studio called its "proprietary Offshore Engine."
The model was a 1971 benefit by Experiments in Art and Technology, with bills by Robert Rauschenberg, Marisol and Andy Warhol, who made the $1 easy to copy because "everyone should have money." Rhizome pitched the sequel as an answer to "a new period of uncertainty for cultural funding," and I think the format was the argument: a memory institution for digital art asked for support by commissioning play, with art as the house currency. Arcangel is the hinge. In 2014 we covered the recovery of Warhol's lost Amiga drawings, with Arcangel on the team. Here Arcangel held the top note in Warhol's old game.
The dinner also honored Erick Calderon and Skawennati, whose Second Life machinima we discussed with the artist in 2021. To judge by the replies, some guests never bet their bills. They kept them.
The ARTCASH 2026 notes in ascending denomination: Simon Denny ($1), Manfred Mohr ($5), Beeple ($7), Canal Street Research Association ($10), Maura Brewer ($14/$16), Morry Kolman ($51), LoVid ($77), Genevieve Goffman ($120) and Cory Arcangel ($128). Images: Rhizome
A fundraiser run as an arcade is the kind of night that passes without a record. The free KS Radar letter keeps one: independent and experimental game culture, three short issues a week.
