http://www.jodi.org/Jodi is a collective of artists founded in the late 1980s by a group of European new media artists. Their early work often used this tactic of mimicking computer glitches and viruses as an aesthetic or humorous device. Today it is run on the Internet by Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans and, whilst still conceptual, encompasses imagery and moving image to generate artwork.
Jodi's blogs
http://blogspot.jodi.org/Jodi's art blog may seem like a load of random gibberish but this is in fact a reflection, or even an extension, of their ASCII artwork. It's actually quite fun to navigate around because you never know what will happen when you click a link - you may get a
404 error message which links directly to a page of random keyboard mashing or something like
this, which looks as though it has been corrupted or something with all the elements moving around on screen in an unnatural fashion.
Texthttp://text.jodi.org/
Meanwhile, the text pages of jodi.org are reminiscent of corrupted teletext pages with a poor reception. I've always admired the random quality of these scrambled pages, auto generative artworks in their own right. An idea for a future project may be to create a random gibberish generator in the style of these teletext pages. Click various part of the page to navigate through the various pages (over 100) of keyboard mashing and text fragments from broken files.
Environmentshttp://sod.jodi.org/Here one can download a copy of the deconstructed version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I wonder if I could produce something like this in Flash? If so, a 3D interactive environment might be good and challenging to create. The black and white environment can often be hard to navigate but from an aesthetic point of view looks good in a corrupted, bizarre way.
Wrong Browser.comhttp://www.wrongbrowser.com/This simulates a broken browser. Seemingly created in Flash, one can interact by moving around various draggable windows of different colours. Moving them to different areas or typing in text of the screen triggers weird occurrences such as the background changing colour or a flood of text that descends onto the screen. There are also different versions which typify different regions' web sites, such as .co.jp, which has vertical text that reads as though it has been turned 90 degrees.
I like the aesthetic of these pieces and there's something about them that appeals to me. Perhaps it's the knowledge that my computer is not actually experiencing problems and one can revel in the strangely appealing visual representations offered by computer glitches. If I could transpose some of these to an environment and project them onto a video screen I feel I could really immerse the visitor.
Viewdata is a Teletext style information retrieval implementation. Its development pre-dates Teletext's and runs on a phone line, much like the Internet, as opposed to Teletext which actually runs via televisions.
