Rhizome and EAI Launch Artist-Controlled Video Platform After Vimeo Censorship

Rhizome, the 30-year-old digital art nonprofit affiliated with the New Museum since 2003, has launched a pilot program with Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) to host artists' videos on its internal platform video.rhizome.org, offering the field an alternative to commercial hosts like Vimeo.

The move accelerated this summer after Vimeo shut down EAI's account over Memorial Day weekend. The trouble began in May, when EAI started receiving emails — which executive director Rebecca Cleman believes were AI-generated — flagging community guideline violations. The first two works flagged were Barbara Hammer's 1970s films Dyketactics and Women I Love, two of the distributor's most requested titles.

"We think offering artists video hosting is something that could be meaningful for people in the community right now," Rhizome executive director Michael Connor 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."

What happened to EAI's Vimeo account?

EAI, which distributes thousands of digital artworks by over 200 artists, had warning signs. Distribution director Karl McCool had heard of similar troubles from Collectif Jeune Cinema, a French experimental film distributor, and Visual AIDS, which supports HIV+ artists. In December, Connor told Cleman to "watch out for Vimeo."

Despite repeated attempts, McCool and Cleman never spoke to a real person at Vimeo before the shutdown. About a month later, EAI reached a human contact and the account was reinstated — on the condition that flagged works by Ellen Cantor, Carolee Schneemann, Peggy Ahwesh and Alex Bag, alongside Hammer, come down. ARTnews received no response from Vimeo by press time.

"A lot of the videos were works by women," McCool said. "We know that there's a lot of work by men that is arguably far more explicit. And those things weren't flagged … 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 those titles too, since Vimeo said the account would be reinstated only once.

Why did Vimeo change?

Cleman and McCool trace the breakdown to Vimeo's $1.38 billion acquisition by Bending Spoons — the conglomerate behind WeTransfer, Eventbrite and Airtable — in the fall of 2025. Cleman wrote that Vimeo dismissed a majority of its workforce in favor of AI replacements. When EAI reached out to contacts they had spoken with weeks earlier, all had been let go.

What does this change for digital art?

Rhizome built the EAI solution on PeerTube, the open-source platform, over the summer — pro bono, McCool notes. "We couldn't just use PeerTube like an alternative version of YouTube," he said. "We needed Rhizome's help to build a version that was tailor-made for us" — with embedding on EAI's own site, digital rights management, piracy protections and captions.

Connor stresses Rhizome is not entering the 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," he said. "We see hosting artist videos as mission-aligned work."

The caveat: one nonprofit's pro bono build is not yet field-wide infrastructure. But for institutions weighing their reliance on commercial platforms, VRO now exists as a working model.