Jodi (art collective)
Jodi, or jodi.org, is a collective of two internet artists: Joan Heemskerk (born 1968 in Kaatsheuvel, the Netherlands) and Dirk Paesmans (born 1965 in Brussels, 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.
In 1999 they began the practice of modifying old video games such as Wolfenstein 3D to create art mods like SOD.[1] Their efforts were celebrated in the 1999 Webby Awards where they took top prize in the category of "net art". Jodi used their 5-word acceptance speech (a Webby Award tradition) to criticize the event with the words "Ugly commercial sons of bitches."[2] Further video game modifications soon followed for Quake, Jet Set Willy, and the latest, Max Payne 2 (2006) to create a new set of art games. Jodi's approach to game modification is comparable in many ways to deconstructivism in architecture, because they would disassemble the game to its basic parts, and reassemble it in ways that do not make intuitive sense. One of their more well-known modifications of Quake places the player inside a closed cube with swirling black-and-white patterns on each side. The pattern is the result of a glitch in the game engine discovered by the artists, presumably, through trial and error; it is generated live as the Quake engine tries, and fails, to visualize the interior of a cube with black-and-white checked wallpaper.
Since 2002, they have been in what has been called their "Screen Grab" period, making video works by recording the computer monitor's output while working, playing video games, or coding. Jodi's "Screen Grab" period began with the four-screen video installation My%Desktop (2002), which premiered at the Plugin Media Lab in Basel. The piece appeared to depict mammoth Mac OS 9 computers running amok: opening windows cascaded across the screen, error messages squawked, and files replicated themselves endlessly. But this was not a computer gone haywire, but a computer user gone haywire. To make this video, Jodi simply pointed-and-clicked and dragged-and-dropped so frantically, it seemed that no human could be in control of such chaos. As graphics exploded across the screen, the viewer gradually realized that what had initially appeared to be a computer glitch was really the work of an irrational, playful, or crazed human.[3]
Selected works
- http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org - the website that caused Jodi's uproar in popularity with contemporary art.
- http://globalmove.us/ - another website using Google Maps, this time creating artistic patterns with the map signs.
- http://geogeo.jodi.org/ - a site using Google Maps to show supposed 'Cityfonts'.
- http://map.jodi.org/ - Jodi's personal map of the Web.
- http://404.jodi.org/ - playing with the "404 - File not Found" premise.
- http://sod.jodi.org/ - an art game modification of Wolfenstein 3D.
- http://asdfg.jodi.org/ - an experimental website, using randomly generated ASCII art and Javascript.
- http://yt-rtyuiop.org/ - an experimental website, very similar to asdfg.jodi.org, YouTube related.
- http://text.jodi.org/ - a website similar to wwwwwwwww.jodi.org, containing jumbled graphics.
- http://jetsetwilly.jodi.org/ - an edit of the game Jet Set Willy.
- http://www.wrongbrowser.com/ - absurd artistic interpretation of a browser (Alt-F4 to exit on Windows, CMD-Q on Mac).
- http://g33con.com/ - a web archive containing many websites, including the redirect experiment "you-talking-to-me-you-talking-to-me-you-talking-to-me.com".
- http://www.untitled-game.org/ - also on CD-ROM, twelve modifications of Quake.
- http://maxpaynecheatsonly.jodi.org/ - cheats on built-in functions of the video game Max Payne 2 - new work released in May 2006.
- http://tatatataa.cn/ - an experimental website with a grey background, along with the voice of Duke Nukem saying the Textedit options.
- http://zyx-app.com/ - an art project, experimenting with iPhones and human movement.
- http://compositeclub.cc/ - a web archive, each containing various clips from PlayStation 2 Eyetoy games like EyeToy: Monkey Mania, and Sega Superstars, being "played" by movies.
- http://audioswap5.com/ - redirects to a YouTube channel showing videos of internet-themed songs recorded onto vinyl.
- http://oss.jodi.org - another Javascript site, famous for containing malicious code.
- http://x20xx.com/ - slightly related to zyx-app.com, contains various visual experiments.
- http://folksomy.net/ - a web archive containing randomly selected clips from YouTube, all by tag.
- http://mboxjodi.org/ - another web archive, this time containing lists of various files, ordered by file extension.
- http://www.net-art.org/jodi - biographical entry on net-art.org digital "encyclopedia"
See also
References
- ↑ Stalker, Phillipa Jane. Gaming In Art: A Case Study Of Two Examples Of The Artistic Appropriation Of Computer Games And The Mapping Of Historical Trajectories Of 'Art Games' Versus Mainstream Computer Games. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. 2005.
- ↑ Archived Winner Speeches - 1999 Winner Speeches. Webby Awards. Retrieved 4 February 2013.
- ↑ Wolf Lieser. Digital Art. Langenscheidt: h.f. ullmann. 2009. pp. 199-201
Sources
- Baumgärtel, Tilman (1999). net.art - Materialien zur Netzkunst (in German) (2nd ed.). Nürnberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg. pp. 106–113. ISBN 3-933096-17-0.
- Baumgärtel, Tilman (2001). net.art 2.0 - New Materials towards Net art. Nürnberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg. pp. 106–181. ISBN 3-933096-66-9.
- Baumgärtel, Tilman (2002). install.exe/Jodi (in German and English). Basel: Christoph Merian Verlag. ISBN 3856161848.
- Bosma, Josephine (2011). Nettitudes: Let's Talk Net Art. Rotterdam: NAi/INC. pp. 71–73. ISBN 978-90-5662-800-0.
- Conner, Michael. (2013). Required Reading: A Closer Look at JODI's 'Untitled Game'. Rhizome Journal. http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/oct/16/required-reading-closer-look-jodis-untitled-game/
- Saltiel, Natalie. (2011). From the Rhizome Artbase: %20 Wrong (2000)-JODI. Rhizome Journal. http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/jul/5/20wrong-jodi-artbase/?ref=search_title.
External links
- jodi.org
- Full archive of Jodi
- Talk with Dirk Peasmans, May 2006
- Artists' Biography and list of video works by JODI at Electronic Arts Intermix eai.org.
- Thomas Dreher: History of Computer Art, chap. VI.3.2 HTML Art with a wider explanation of one of Jodi´s early works.