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browsers bite back Browser art has become something of a sub-genre within net art. The latest entrants to this field, .nl, .com and .co.kr from art group Jodi, automatically connects to the net and then proceeds to mangle the web pages by reading their code in the 'wrong' way. Net art writer Tilman Baumgärtel braved the ensuing digital storm. Do you think that your computer is a rational machine? A number-crunching automaton that does only what you order it to? Jodi are on a mission to prove you wrong. The computer art that this Dutch-Belgian artist duo has produced since 1995 turns your PC into an unpredictable, terrifying machine that seems to have a life of its own. If you access their website, or download one of the software pieces that they have made over the last couple of years, Jodi's art starts to wreak havoc over the formerly disciplined, passive calculating slave. You'll see pieces of text flying by, fragments of your computer interface swirling around as if it has been put through a mincer, windows flickering over the screen playing hide-and-seek. Is your trusty machine about to blow up? No, don't worry; it's just some lines of code running amok. And now Joan Hermskerk and Dirk Paesmans - whose internet nom de guerre comes from the first syllables of their Christian names - are up to no good again. Jodi's latest work is a series of browsers that are part art project, part functional pieces of software. Idiosyncratically named .nl, .com and .co.kr, the three different programs take over your monitor as soon as they are started. Don't bother trying to use them; they can do that themselves, thank you very much. Each piece connects automatically to random internet addresses in the domain space that their title indicates. You wouldn't know, though, since the programs show the data that they download from these sites as a jumbled mix of digital pulp. You can punch in another URL, but before long the automated net carousel starts to turn again without your interference. 'Our work is about the fact that everything you see on the screen of the computer is dressed code', says Dirk Paesmans. Their new browser pieces take off that dress, and then put the HTML code - in which web pages are written - in much more bizarre, and at times terrifying dresses. If you didn't hear your modem connect to the net, you probably wouldn't even know that the data you are looking at was formerly known as web pages. 'That is because you are conditioned by the "real" browser', says Paesmans. After working on the web for a couple of years, it made sense for Jodi to take on the 'frame' that surrounded their early net pieces: the browser itself. They are not the first artists to turn their attention from the content of the web to the tools that turn computer code, such as <BODY TEXT="#00FF00" BGCOLOR="#000000">, into visual material. The first 'art browser' was called WebStalker and was released by the British collective I/O/D in late 1997. The piece, which the London-based artists called 'speculative software', didn't show the surface of the websites, but their raw material: the code, the structure of the site, and the links between the different documents on the server. In the years following, art browsers have become something of a sub-genre within net art. The American artist-programmer Maciej Wisniewski started to develop Netomat in 1998: a browser that turned the supposedly interactive experience of surfing the net into a passive activity, staring at floating images and texts. Reconnoitre, by London-based artists Tom Corby and Gavin Baily, reduced image-rich web pages into stark, white text pieces that hover over a black background like stars on a dark and wintry night sky. The artists say that the piece 'seeks to reinstate the pleasure of browsing as technologically experienced dérive (drift) in its own right - an ambient grazing of text, fragmentary, incomplete and happily purposeless'. Jodi are much more in-your-face than these cyber-flaneurs. Once started, their three browsers mercilessly rip apart HTML data and turn them into a digital collage in the colorful shades of old 8-bit computers. These pieces, as well as the other art browsers mentioned above, examine the internet with an X-ray vision that goes deep beneath the surface of the web page. As Dirk Paesmans puts it, 'It looks chaotic, it is not really readable, it is simply not practical. Of course, these are exactly the things we like'.
tilman baumgärtel, eyestorm, 8 march 2001 | |
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