My Keywords Are

by Jodi (NL/B)

About My Keywords Are

Net Art duo Jodi's peformancebrings an audiovisual networked performance which is evolved from their performance at iMAL for the closing of GEO GOO. (YouTube VJ mixer software designed by JODI, produced by iMAL, developped by Yacine Sebti.)

About Jodi

Jodi's work (www.jodi.org), the pioneer belgian/dutch duo of Net Art (Joan Heemskerke/NL - Dirk Paesmans/BE), has been included in many international exhibitions and festivals: Documenta X in 1997, Rotterdam (DEAF98), ZKM (net_condition, 2000), Tokyo (2001, 2002), Madrid (Arco/De-game, 2001), Berlin (Transmediale: 1997, 2000, 2002, 2006), New York (1997, 2003, Guggenheim/2004, 2005, 2007), Chicago (ISEA97), Plug-In (Basle, 2002), Paris (Centre Pompidou/2003, 2004, 2006), SFMOMA (San Francisco, 2004), Montevideo (Amsterdam, 2006), or more recently at the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) in the 'Deep Screen - Art in Digital Culture Proposal for Municipal Art Acquisitions 2008'.

Jodi, or jodi.org, is a collective of two internet artists: Joan Heemskerk (Bogota-Colombia) and Dirk Paesmans (Caracas-Venezuela). 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. 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.

To those that aren't in on their conceptual jokes, Jodi's works seem inaccessible and impenetrable, appearing to make the user's computer run amok. For example, their 1995[1] work http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/ appears at first glance to consist of meaningless text, until a glance at the HTML source code reveals detailed diagrams of hydrogen and uranium bombs. Their early work often used this tactic of mimicking computer glitches and viruses as an aesthetic or humorous device.
In more recent works, they modified old video games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, Jet Set Willy, and the latest, Max Payne 2 (2006). 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.
Jodi's "Screen Grab" period began with the four-screen video installation "My%Desktop" (2002), which premiered at the Plugin Media Lab [2] in Basel. The piece appeared to depict mammoth Macintosh 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, 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.
Jodi's work has been included in many international exhibitions and festivals, including documenta X in 1997. They received a Webby Award in the Arts category in 1999; as their mandatory five-word acceptance speech, they exclaimed "Ugly corporate sons of bitches!".[2]

Excerpt from JODI's biography by Domenico Quaranta in Holy Fire, art of the digital age, exhibition catalogue, 2008.

In it's transparent coherence, what this mysterious European duo have done in the last 15 years has been unsurpassed in many ways - and for many it remains a revelation. Jodi have taught us to puncture the interface, to go beyond the surface, to contaminate languages, to look for a new way of interacting with the software; and they have done this without ever labelling their work as 'art', without ever creating an online 'gallery', but allowing others to do it for them. Even today, the only real homepage for Jodi is the entry in Wikipedia. This means one can still come across their work 'by chance', without any preconceived ideas: still the best approach. Falling headlong into Jodi's web without a safety net is an experience that leaves its mark.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodi

http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org
http://www.jodi.org/colombia
http://geogeo.jodi.org
http://map.jodi.org
http://404.jodi.org
http://oss.jodi.org
http://sod.jodi.org
http://asdfg.jodi.org
http://text.jodi.org
http://jetsetwilly.jodi.org
http://www.wrongbrowser.com
http://www.untitled-game.org
http://maxpaynecheatsonly.jodi.org
http://blogspot.jodi.org