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The Work An exhibition entitled "Beyond Interface" would be remiss in overlooking the contributions of jodi. As a matter of fact they have become almost synonymous with the exploration of the net interface as well as net.art itself. So rather than just give them another award, we've decided to honor them be asking ten people to react to jodi. This group of comments was organized by Remo Campopiano, director of ARTNETWEB.
Robbin Murphy writes: I first encountered jodi through newsgroups and mailing lists like Rhizome, nettime and 7-11, not their Web site, and that is an important point to keep in mind when evaluating their work so far. They have developed an economy of exchange for themselves and rather than being "computer" or "multimedia" artists they remind me very much of the early Gilbert & George when they presented themselves as "Living Sculptures." There isn't an agreed upon term to define what they do. When Joan [Heemskerk] and Dirk [Paesmans, who constitute jodi] were first getting started ('94) they were in San Jose trying to convince Yahoo! to include their site in its art listings. Yahoo! said they should try again later when they had more work to show. I checked out the site, thought it was great and sent an email in support. It was the first one I'd seen that used the browser as a medium rather than just a means for presentation. Over the past few years I've visited the site every once in a while, usually when they sent a message saying there was something new. I also have a work on my own site where I used the Mac Talker plugin to make an obscure text message they'd sent to someone else as an audio piece. They liked it very much and linked to it and I think that attitude reflects what is the basic misunderstanding of their work. It is as much about collaborating and sending messages to people for response as it is about people visiting the Web site. They are first and foremost net.artists (and helped coin the term) who work on and with the network and the people who are a part of it. They are making art with email as much as HTML. Museums should be the first to recognize and accommodate this kind of work that has been made possible through new technology.
Robbin Murphy
Eve Andree Laramee writes: On The Origins of jodi.org Konrad Zuse, the inventor of the "world's first fully functional programmable digital computer" states in an interview with Brad Schultz, Senior Editor of *Computerworld* and Elmar Elmauer, Senior Editor of *Computerwoche* (The History of Computing: A Biographical Portrait of the Visionaries who Shaped the Destiny of the Computer Industry, By Marguerite Zientara):
"The mathematicians make the world seem much too theoretical. For instance, in 1945, when I was in a small village after the end of the war in the Alps, I had nothing to do - surely the only thing to do was to survive. (It was then) that I had time to make my theoretical developments. By that I mean the first programming language for computers." (Pg. 39)Having been introduced to Yves Fissiault years before in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire by Emmy Hennings, and knowing Fissiault had recently immigrated to the United States to work in the aerospace industry at Rockedyne Corporation, Zuse began a correspondence with Fissiault regarding strategies for developing a programming language. Fissiault and Zuse called that language "jodi", which was an acronym for "juncture of discursive indeterminacies". Zuse goes on to explain: "This was especially organized for practice. And 10 years later, we had a big series of languages - very complicated. Even today, they are very complicated." (pg. 39) It was during those following 10 years that that Fissiault and Thomas Pynchon developed their programming language which they referred to as dot-com or .com as part of the ARPAnet project (which Pynchon referred to in his novels as W.A.S.T.E.). The "dot" in .com was a code-word for a "micro" dosage of LSD-25 an oppositional alternative to Oswell and Lilly's macro-dosages (an inside joke between the two colleagues) and "com" simply stands for computer language. Later these two programming languages were merged into a self-replicating pseudo-intelligence or UVESC (Ultra-low voltage electro-synaptic code) entity known as jodi.com. Over time, a morphogenesis began to take place, and hence a recodification. Spontaneously, over a period of years, the jodi.com UVESC began to differentiate into a polymorphic organism with thousands of millions of electro-synaptic "cells", that developed into "organs" each with a different function. Jodi.com had evolved into a multi-cellular "organism", with each of its "cell" groupings acquiring more and more specific determinations, opening up pathways of flows and breakages of information and multiple intelligences. The resulting complex "Being" (simplistically referred to in late 20th C. English as a cyborg) is a "Juncture-Of-Discursive- Indeterminacy Organism" , or a jodi.org.
Reported by Eve Andree Laramee
Eduardo Kac writes: 40JO4DI - It couldn't be any other way: I just surfed jodi's site for a few minutes and it crashed my computer. It's hard to tell who's to blame: jodi or my computer. At that moment there was no difference anyway. Because of the playful nature of the site, I'm not upset, as I might have been if I was using the Web for work and lost important data. First time visitors are probably startled with (and fearful of) the apparent randomness of the site. However, as a viewer already familiar with the strategy of surprise employed by Joan and Dirk, I surf the site already expecting something bizarre to happen. This is a curious reversal--perhaps unique to the ultra-accelerated development cycles of the Web--because what was transgressive yesterday quickly becomes a new style. What is interesting about their work is that it points to the overwhelming saturation of information we live with. In daily life, as in their work, this information surplus can lead to great frustration to many people. They make it a point to capture the irrational side of the clean, productive, and functional network. The criticism implied in this gesture is not removed from the provocative anti-technology reaction of Dada or the humorous self-conscious metamachine parodies of Tinguely. In a world in which digital technology is virtually omnipresent, who doesn't enjoy being reminded of the absurdness of it all?
Eduardo Kac
Cary Peppermint writes: "Jodi.org" removes the shimmering facade of the world wide web. There is no longer a seductive guise of glamorous sound bytes and Photoshop(r) splendor. With regard to 'jodi.org' we find the 'organism' exposed. Raw, writhing, pixelated code, unruly windows, and routines sometimes crashing the browser. This is our baptism in information technologies. Courtesy of the Internet, the journey is rendered meaningless. Now amidst the deconstruction of interface, "Jodi.org" suggests our arrival is an impossibility. Of course all of this could be my own subversive fantasy. "Jodi.org" is interesting for many reasons including it being the forerunner of the first recognizable 'style' of internet art to emerge. However, I remain wary of art being so easily categorized. Is not 'jodi.org' simply a self-referential and otherwise modernist approach to Internet art? "Jodi.org" is isolating not only in its decentralizing and subsequent removal of the individual through abstraction of the interface but, also in that it is part of a dialogue exclusively for those with a privileged familiarity and a wide knowledge base of evolving internet "culture"... Then again all of this might just be the point.
Cary Peppermint
Benjamin Weil writes: For the past three years, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans (working under the name of JoDi) have produced numerous projects, hosted first on their web site (http://www.jodi.org), and then expanding their territory to a number of other web sites, thus creating a de facto comment on the notion of network: their body of work is as amorphous as the realm they reflect upon. Their investigation questions the notion of local and distant, as the PC desktop increasingly merges with the remote information as ported by the browser and other access software. It also reflects upon the notion of access to information, and the notion of the web as virtual territory. Last year, with Day 66, they extended their observation to the notion of transmission and the potential danger of viruses, while continuing to search for metaphors that would best define the nature of the web as a nascent and intricate medium. As artists who have chosen the web as their primary medium, they contribute one of the most achieved and sophisticated body of work to be found at this point. While at first their work can be perceived as formal, it is also undeniable that its conceptual grounding is only partly concealed by a sharp sense of humor. Revealing the potential dysfunctionality of the machine, and thus commenting on the relationship we maintain with them, they offer the viewer an opportunity to think about how the advent of micro-mechanics has profoundly transformed the nature of this relationship. Indeed, one tends to increasingly assign emotional qualities to the computer, as one's approach to the machine is increasingly mediated by instruction manuals and read_me texts, which replace a thorough understanding of the mechanics, which in turn leaves one disempowered as for the ability to understand the way those machines work.
Benjamin Weil
Carmin Karasic writes: www.jodi.org? I just don't get it. Exploration is the way of the web, but I want to be rewarded for my exploration. I want more than scrolling code or blinking ASCII characters. Code is beautiful when elegantly implemented. Sometimes jodi gives me a pleasant reward. But usually the click isn't worth the wait. I often feel like I'm looking at a screen from a bad day at work; a work day when there are too many crashes. I'm not happy to wait for that sort of visual to load.
Mostly the jodi pages bore me, but not always. Jodi's web pages that
display user specific information are more interesting to me than the
pages that invite me to click ambiguous spaces that link me to other
ambiguous spaces. I also like the pages that repaint the screen as I
drag the mouse. So sometimes I like to look at jodi's html to see how an
effect is achieved. I don't like the pages that invite me to play with
forms. But then I've never liked forms. I also don't like the pages
that display code without context. Perhaps the UI serves as context for
some people. But I've seen far too much code and too many core dumps to
find "framed" computer code interesting.
Carmin Karasic
Mark Tribe writes: I first learned about jodi at the next 5 minutes conference in amsterdam in 1995. geert invited them to give a presentation. one of them, the guy (i think their names are something joan and dirk, thus jo and di), did the talking. he was a total euro-bad-boy, and i think he spoke in flemish or dutch. at any rate, i hung out with them a bit later on, and it turns out that they had some kind of grant or residency in san jose, which i think is how the www.jodi.org site got started. it kind of makes sense: take two really talented european designers/artist, transplant them to silicon alley for a few months, and they come back with an aesthetic deconstruction of the web as an interface. at first i thought their project was just that: an aesthetic deconstruction or play with very little substance. but they've persisted, the site keeps changing and evolving, and in this persistence they've taken it further--one might even call it an ongoing critical practice that takes the visual language of the web as a field of operation. i still stop by every few weeks to see what they're up to.
Mark Tribe
G.H. Hovagimyan writes: If one were to compare the works of Peter Halley and Jodi.org one would gain a better understanding, of the current crisis in the art world. Both Jodi and Halley come out of late modernist painting practice. Halley of course has effectively utilized the Gallery/Museum structure for distributing art. Jodi uses the web. On a basic ideational level the art works are very similar. However the brilliance in Jodi lies in the use of the information world to distribute art ideas. Halley of course is considered a success in the art world. I consider his work to be vacuous repetitive and boring. Why is he successful? Because he produces objects that can be bought sold and traded within the existing mechanisms of the art world. Why is Jodi so troubling to the art world? Because there is no easy way to fit Jodi's work into the existing structure. Jodi.org as well as most net.artists (myself included) are successful in a much larger arena than the art world as it exists today. By successful I mean the art ideas reach a much larger interested audience in a much faster interval of time. Even more to the point net.art that is essentially conceptual has found it's perfect home within the information logos of the Internet. This is a case where the artists actually practice what they preach. Jodi.org and most of the artists presenting works on the Internet don't need a rigorously intellectual tome published along with each presentation, to justify their work. The works are already super-enervated dense packed information kernels penetrating and informing the information media sphere.
G.H. Hovagimyan
Christiane Paul writes: There are interfaces so commonplace that we hardly notice them anymore. The computer presents itself as a desktop, with a little trash can bottom right, pull-down menus, scroll bars, system icons. With its "interface in your face" approach, the website of jodi.org might be an antidote to our obliviousness to interface standardization: unformatted ASCII on a tasteless RGB-green background gives the impression of a crumbling Web facade; pages of seemingly "broken" HTML with integrated scroll bars and icons bring the desktop to the foreground of the Web page, turning the interface inside out. Jodi's site is a decidedly low-tech graphics battle that reminds us both of the standardization of the interface and the inherent beauty of its form elements and "sign language." The seemingly opaque matrix of code functions as a transparency, a "View Source" option that the browser's pull-down menu doesn't offer. The major achievement of jodi's pages might be that they achieve a fluent transition from the prosaic to the sublime.
Christiane Paul
Ebon Fisher writes: Jodi x 2 I had a peculiar romp in the Web as I searched out Jodi.org. For a full ten minutes I explored the wrong website and assumed that the internet business website which I had arrived at was the true "Jodi" experience. All the details were perfect. Jodi seemed to be presenting "Compass Net" as the true face of the internet. Information about prices, hooking up your website, FAQs, 56K Flex Modems -the whole connection experience. The internet as pure marketing technology. There was a clumsy innocence about the site which I rather liked. I assumed the entire thing was a fake, but managed to see the exploding business culture on the web in a new light. But something bothered me. I knew I had been to the "art" Jodi site once before and felt that something was off. I changed the .com to .org and, voila, I was thrust immediately into the official "Jodi" site. Strangely, the frenzy of numbers and changing colored panels, as elegant as they were, seemed to pull me back into art school, back into a very specialized art world. Yes, the real Jodi presents a smart, apoplectic depiction of internet deep structure run amok. Yes, Jodi seems to offer an immersion into a virulent systems failure deep in the assembly language of the digital realm. But when I compare it to the simple, commercial, nuts-and-bolts website of Jodi.com I can't help thinking that my first mistaken encounter was more indicative of the rampant pragmatism inherent in the entire infrastructure of computers. Although the tidy little "Compass Net" website was the glossy *surface* of a more complex digital realm, inherent to its very direct marketing ploys were some of the very mechanisms of techno-capitalism. The "art" Jodi seemed to draw me into an array of superficial art values and techniques, better known as collage -which seemed to contradict its immediate ruse of hashing out an entanglement with the deeper mechanisms of assembly language. It was ultimately an illustration of the internet's reality rather than a living embodiment of it. And that's OK. It's just not as moving or edifying as the real thing. Try http://jodi.com In all fairness to the creators of Jodi, I think that all digital artists, this one included, struggle with the sense of awkwardness which ensues once "art" values are applied to this outrageously alive and popular medium. "Art" almost pollutes it. Perhaps we need to explore a language, not of "deconstruction," which is so apparent in the Jodi site, but of deep "construction" or even "nurturing" of vital, alternative entities. Ebon Fisher
Semiotics' analysis of the site Jodi Luisa Paraguai Donati Multimedia Department, Arts Institute, University of Campinas--Unicamp Member of the group wAwRwT http://wawrwt.iar.unicamp.br lupado@obelix.unicamp.br
Abstract |
Net Art and Theater of the Senses: A HyperTour of jodi and Grammatron Randall Packer
While theater begins with the notion
of the suspension of disbelief, interactive art picks up where theater (and
film) leaves off with branching, user-driven non-linear narrative. The letting
go of authorial control has been the big dilemma in the development of interactive
works as an art and/or entertainment medium, games being the exception. Both
Jodi and Grammatron energetically ignore the warning signs and head unabashedly
into the danger zone of audience interaction / participation. Both works gain
enormously from a kind of breathless urgency, abstract use of language, and
surreal sensory distortion that might have been inspired by the performance
art of Artaud, the poetry of Rimbaud, or even the transformative work of such
contemporary digital artists as Laurie Anderson, Char Davies or Perry Hoberman.
I feel
that abstract expressionist concepts ask new media for one last dance,
and as they waltz across an dance floor, they collide with the janitor:
It's closing time. The same is true for dadaist typographies: there
really should be a law against cultural necrophilia.
Turn off your computers! Look out your window not into your screen! Smell the flowers, feel the sun. Jodi - this is a remarkably nostalgic project. Then again I don't know any other media where a project can reach in and turn itself off. Do you work for Apple, because my Mac constantly does this even when I'm not viewing your homework assignment? |