Jodi
Jodi or jodi.org is a collective of two internet artists: Joan Heemskerk (the Netherlands) and Dirk Paesmans (Belgium). Their background is in photography and video art; since the mid-1990s they started to create original artworks for the World Wide Web. A few years later, they also turned to software art and artistic computer game modification.
Jodi's works seem inaccessible and impenetrable, appearing to make the user's computer run amok. Jodi's art consists of - among others - meaningless texts and blinking graphics, visual elements in primary colors that refer to old GUIs or computer crashes, dead links and references to computer viruses. With this, they question the rules of the Internet and defy the surface of well-designed interfaces and demonstrate the potential ugly side of technology. In more recent works, they modified old video games such as Wolfenstein 3D and Quake, turning these games into confusing and disorienting flat black-and-white environments.
Their work was included in many international exhibitions and festivals, including documenta X in 1997. They received a Webby Award in the Arts category in 1999; as an extremely short acceptance speech, they exclaimed "Ugly commercial sons of bitches!".
Works
- http://www.jodi.org/
- http://map.jodi.org/ - Jodi's personal map of the Web
- http://404.jodi.org/ - playing with the "404 - File not Found" premise
- http://oss.jodi.org/ - a deconstruction of the Windows and Mac OS 9 desktop interface, also released on a CD-ROM
- http://sod.jodi.org/ - a modification of Wolfenstein 3D
- http://asdfg.jodi.org/
- http://text.jodi.org/
- http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/
- http://www.wrongbrowser.com/ - absurd artistic interpretation of a browser
- http://www.untitled-game.org/ - also on CD-ROM, twelve modifications of Quake
