Jodi

Or a name. Jodi, Jody, or Jodie.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 [ [http://www.ntticc.or.jp/Archive/2005/art_meets_media/Mediaonline/netart.html] Information about www.jodi.org, including date of creation] 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 [http://welcome.weallplugin.org/de/kalender/archiv/archiv/detail/article/installexejodi-3/] 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!". [cite news|publisher=Wired|accessdate=2008-01-01|title=Digital Darlings Bask at Webbys|author=Joyce Slaton|date=March 19, 1999|url=http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1999/03/18591]

elected works

* http://www.jodi.org/colombia
* http://geogeo.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://jetsetwilly.jodi.org/
* http://www.wrongbrowser.com/ - absurd artistic interpretation of a browser (Alt-F4 to exit)
* 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://blogspot.jodi.org/ - Jodi's art blogs
*An interview with Jodi by Tilman Baumgaertel on the nettime mailing list archives [http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9708/msg00112.html] An animation made for BananaRAM website for the Mind Control theme edition. http://www.bananaram.org/web04/index.php?id=17

References

Fred Forest "Art et Internet", Editions Cercle D'Art / Imaginaire Mode d'Emploi, pp. 82-83