The artist duo Jodi unleashes three sinister browsers on the PCs of Internet users
Believe that your computer is a rational machine? A number cruncher that automatically does what you tell it to do? Jodi want to prove the opposite. The computer art that the Dutch-Belgian art duo has created since 1995 transforms the PC into an unpredictable, frightening machine with a sinister life of its own.
When one views their website or downloads any of the software work they have produced in recent years, the art immediately begins to wreak havoc on the desktop. You see bits of text flying around. Fragments of the computer interface, which look as if they have been put through a meat grinder, float across the screen. Windows flickering around as if they wanted to play tag with the user. If the computer blows up? No, just a few lines of code running amok, don’t worry.
Now Joan Hermskerk and Dirk Paesmans, the artists behind the net art project – the first two syllables of their first names form the Internet nom-de-guerre Jodi – have again cooked up some unpleasant stuff. Their latest work is a series of sinister browsers that are half art project, half working programs. They have the strange names .nl, .com and .co.kr and take over the monitor as soon as they are started. Do not even try to use them, they already do it themselves. Thanks for asking.
All three automatically connect to arbitrary Internet addresses belonging to the domain space that the titles of the work indicate. Not that you would notice, because the programs show the data they download from these sites as a confusing digital mush. You can enter a URL yourself, but soon the automated network carousel takes control again itself.
"Our work revolves around the fact that everything you see on your computer monitor is just verbatim code", says Dirk Paesmans from Jodi. Their new browser work strips away that surface and makes the HTML code in which websites are written reappear in much more bizarre and sometimes quite degenerate ways. Unless you hoard your own modem as it connects to the Internet, you may not have known that the data on your screen was something that used to be a website.
After working on the web for a number of years, it is only logical that Jodi now turns to the "Frame" itself, in which their art appeared so far, ame. Jodi are not the first artists to turn their attention from the "Content" of the Internet, and instead to support the programs that create computer code such as BODY TEXT="#00FF00" BGCOLOR="#000000 to visual material, themselves under the microscope. The first "Art Bowser" was the "WebStalker", which was published at the end of 1997 by the British collective I/O/D. The work of the London artists showed not the surface of the websites that the browser scanned, but their raw material: the code, the structure of the site, the links between the various files on the server.
In the following years, art browsers have become almost a kind of subgenre of net art. In 1998, the American Kunstler programmer Maciej Wisniewski developed Netomat, a browser that would recreate the supposedly interactive experience of the "Websurfing" to stare at pictures and internet texts flying by. Reconnoitre, by Tom Corby and Gavin Baily of London, reduces image-rich websites to wispy strings of text that float against a black background like stars in a dark winter sky.
As always, Jodi’s approach is much more brutal than such cyberflaneurs. Their programs shred the HTML code and assemble it into digital collages that glow in the bright colors of old 8-bit computers. In the following interview Dirk Paesmans explains what is actually going on in our monitor.
Your latest work consists of three different browsers. Why did you take up this topic after working inside the browser for so long??
Dirk Paesmans: When you play around with the HTML code, you reach your limits. The browser becomes more interesting. We call our three browsers "Closed Domain Browser", because all three of them automatically connect to randomly selected web servers within a domain category, for example, to servers whose domain names consist of three letters that are in the .nl domain space. Mostly they find a web server, because there are almost all names sold out. Even if there is no website of a person, company or organization, most of these URLs belong to a domain bank. This is especially true for the .com domain space, where all domain names with three letters are sold. If these programs are based on browsers that we are familiar with – such as Netscape?
Dirk Paesmans: No, they are all written in Director 8. This software has a function that automatically opens the modem, establishes a net connection and shows HTML script. The code is not complicated at all. Maybe we even publish the 50, 60 lines of Lingo on our website as an open source program. These browsers look very abstract, it’s almost impossible to tell that they are browsers at all and what they do. The ".com"-Browser looks almost like a constructivist painting.
Dirk Paesmans: We wanted to create different interfaces for the same browser code, which would look "Correct" browsers look exciting. Our work is about the fact that everything you see on the computer monitor is just hidden code. The deeper you go, the more naked it is. Why was the browser so interesting for you in this context?
Dirk Paesmans: As far as I know, the browser was the first software to have this "View source"-feature where you can easily look under the surface and make all those layers that normally hide the code a bit more transparent. You just click and you can see how everything is done. All three browsers look completely different from the browsers you normally work with. You almost don’t understand anymore that the images on the monitor are HTML data. It no longer looks like "Internet experience from…
Dirk Paesmans: That’s because people are so conditioned by the "right" Browsers is. You’re used to having these comets that fall over the Netscape logo, or you can see in the bottom left of the browser window what percentage of a web page you’ve already downloaded. Funnily enough, these images look much more like the Internet when viewed in a browser window. With Director you can make these little Shockwave movies that you can watch with Netscape. We did this with our browsers. Inside the browser frame it looks much more convincing. You have this online feeling, and it looks much more like you’re online. (Tilman Baumgartel)