in this new medium,» says Tribe in an interview with Randy Adams of TrAce. «I still consider it very much of a grassroots community with a non-hierarchical structure. We have institutionalized to some extent, but we are still driven by core principles of manyto- many communication and inclusiveness.» [27]

Rhizome is definitely the most successful art platform on the Internet ever. It gets millions of hits a month and has thousands of members. One can wonder, however, whether one can still speak of a community and collaboration when «there are probably 100 lurkers for every participant». [28] The number of members and the hierarchies which do develop unwittingly inside such an organization, despite attempts of democratizing selection processes (like creating super-users to help edit or gather information), made (as Tribe admits) Rhizome turn into something of an art institution, with all the positive and negative consequences that come with it. The selection of art works for the Rhizome database alone has been a topic of heated discussions for quite some time.

Rhizome has proven to be a very powerful model for

representation and self-promotion for many of its members, but we are far from a definite judgment on its structure and benefits. I sometimes wonder whether we can ever overcome some of the flaws inside the social and economic processes that are caused by the instability and the inevitable management structures within collaborative art projects. We are still at the beginning of forming a constructive criticism for them; something which projects the size of Rhizome and nettime certainly might help accelerate.

New diversity: Sarai, Furtherfield, Netartreview, Empyre

The lists and platforms described in this section so far were all initiated before 1997. Since then most mailing lists and other representation or discussion platforms online have shied away from defining themselves as social sculpture or other interdisciplinary art forms. The ever growing number of people online in combination with a growing number of platforms, Web sites and mailing lists has also scattered discourses and created a diffusion of new media art scenes.