[Nettime-bold] Discordia Concors: www.jodi.org

[Florian Cramer <cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de>]

[The following piece was written in German and English for the
exhibition catalogue of "install.exe/Jodi" and posted here with kind
permission of the editors. The book is available from Christoph Merian
Verlag Basel, see
<http://www.christoph-merian-verlag.ch/m2_buecher/D04_BuecherDetail.cfm?BUCH_id=185>).
-F]


$Id: jodi_anti_net_art.tex,v 1.8 2002/07/09 00:41:04 paragram Exp $


Discordia Concors: www.jodi.org

Florian Cramer

July 10, 2002

jodi net

If the contemporary art system were not fixated on displays - whether of
opulent visuals or of political correctness - and on material objects to be
sold, jodi might be recognized as the most important artists of our time. Such
a canonization of course seems to go against the very aesthetic subversion of
www.jodi.org, all the more when considering the efforts jodi spend on
contextualizing their work within a larger network, withdrawing it from easy
consumption. On the other hand, jodi's anxiety to provide a defined context for
their own art could be seen as a control strategy in itself, rendering the
opposites of subversion and canonization more complicated.

It is, as the sinologist and computer poet John Cayley writes, ``difficult to
say anything hard and fast in terms of more-or-less conventional criticism
about a site which is hardly ever the same on successive visits.''{1} At the
time of this writing, http://www.jodi.org transferred all its visitors to the
download page of ``Untitled Game''. The rest of the web site could be found via
World Wide Web search engines, pointing to critical writing about jodi.org
which in turn pointed to its sections hidden from the front page - or by using
the pirate mirror of www.jodi.org on http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/
jodi.org. Thus undermining the corporate identity contained in its catchy web
address, jodi.org requires its readers to invest net-work on their own. This
strategy of withdrawal also reminds of Gnosticist writings from the late
antiquity which, for a long time, had only survived through citations in the
writings of Christian theologists who sought to refute them.

Poems which, according to combinatory-algorithmical rules, jumble the words
they contain, are known since the 16th century as ``Proteus verse'', named
after the Greek god who constantly changed his appearance. www.jodi.org shifts
the Proteic principle from the internal data of the artwork to the meta-data of
its addressing scheme and its networking. This strategy does not only cover the
way to, but also the ways through and out of the website. www.jodi.org refuses,
for example, to limit itself to being www.jodi.org by drawing connections
between various net artistic servers (``map'', http://map.jodi.org), providing
link lists (``CC'', http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/100cc/baklava/index.html) and
interspersing hidden internal with hidden external site links.

But at the same time the mapping out and pinning down of this context
contradicts jodi's Proteic slippages away from a fixed identity. Jodi's
identity is reinforced all the more by the thorough impact their work had on
fellow net.artists. Given that jodi were as import tant for the
code-experimental net.art as it manifested itself since 1997 on the E-Mail
forum ``7-11'' http://www.7-11.org{2} as Cézanne was for cubism or as Malevich
was for constructivist painting, canonization is unavoidable.

jodi art

At the time of this writing, a ``Google'' search on the keyword combination
``jodi.org'' and ``noise'' brought up 228 web pages. But how is jodi's noise
different from the noise and randomness in previous avant-garde arts, from
pointillist painting and Dada to John Cage's music and Fluxus?{3} The
difference lies in the media and in the rhetoric. In Dada poetry, Hans Arp's
chance painting and John Cage's random music, randomness occurs structurally
within a work, not in its transmission. Even where www.jodi.org doesn't
randomize its own transmission by unstable addressing schemes, it reads and
behaves as if it contained intact data disturbed only by faulty net
transmission or computer crashes; but in reality, the line noise is mocked up
within the data itself. Unlike Nam June Paik's visual noise manipulations of TV
sets in the 1960s, jodi's disturbance is not done in hardware with only partly
predictable results, but is a clever simulation of unpredictability done in
software.

For the random behavior of the jodi website is but a trompe-l'oeil simulation
given that it consists of linear and deterministic codes: text files written in
the HTML formatting language, simple animated GIF images and terse lines of
Javascript algorithmic programming.{4}. While the chance poetics of Cage and
Fluxus conceived of disturbance and randomness as means of radical freedom,
their implication is much more ambivalent in jodi's work. They inspire and
liberate the viewers' imagination all the while locking it into deception,
mazes and dead-ends. The naive Cagean ontology of chance is replaced with a
tricky rhetoric of simultaneous anarchy and entrapment, a neo-baroque conceit
and discordia concors of surface chaos with inscribed discipline and vice
versa.

jodi net art

Jodi are famous for their art of disruptions and miscodings and for making, far
beyond all techno-naive ``multimedia'' art, computers aesthetically visible as
self-immersed generators of contingent data streams. However, their poetics is
not simply about uncovering an (imaginary) truth hidden beneath deceptive
software interfaces. What appears as code in jodi's works - like the contingent
numerical stack tables of the ``Automatic Rain System'' subdirectory of
``betalab'' http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/betalab/rain/ - is code pointing to code,
but: code which is not what it seems to be. Jodi's codes are typically
simulations of other codes: simulations of algorithms in graphic animations,
simulations of screen graphics via blinking text, etc.. On October 22, 2001,
jodi posted a lenghty text to the international E-Mail list ``Nettime'' which
seemed to be a commentary on current war crises and their discussion in net
cultural forums:

$cd ug/models/soldier3
$origin 0 -6 24
$base base
$skin skin

$frame soldierc
$frame soldierd

/*

*/

void() army_fire;

void()  army_stand1     =[      $soldierc,      army_stand2     ]
{ai_stand();};
void()  army_stand2     =[      $soldierc,      army_stand3     ]
{ai_stand();};
void()  army_stand3     =[      $soldierc,      army_stand4     ]
{ai_stand();};
[...]


The text (which cannot be fully reproduced here, but is available at http://
amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0110/msg00120.html) was, first
of all, an impressive piece of concrete poetry. It made military order
intervene into its linguistic and typographical structure and read like a coded
inventory, a strategic plan in an obsessive code language. Readers fluent not
only in English, but also in programming languages, were able to recognize that
the poem is a functional sourcecode in the programming language C. It is, in
fact, part of the sourcecode of jodi's ``Untitled Game'' which in turn is based
on the sourcecode of the commercial computer game ``Quake''. Not mentioning the
origin and nature of the code in their mailing list posting, jodi disclosed the
aesthetic and political subtexts of seemingly neutral technical instructions.

In 1924, Tristan Tzara formally instructed his readers ``To make a Dadaist
poem'' by cutting out the single words of an arbitrary newspaper article,
mixing them and taking out ``the scraps one after the other in the order in
which they left the bag''.{5} While the resulting poem is random, the
instruction is not. It generates Dadaist language, but its own language is not
Dadaist. An even more constructivist code is the poem ``3 variationen zu `kein
fehler im system''' (``3 variations on ``no error in the system'') by Eugen
Gomringer, the German-Bolivian co-founder of concrete poetry. The text permutes
the sentence ``no error in the system'':

    kein fehler im system
    kein efhler im system
    kein ehfler im system
    kein ehlfer im system
    kein ehlefr im system
    kein ehlerf im system
    kein ehleri fm system
    kein ehleri mf system
    kein ehleri ms fystem
    kein ehleri ms yfstem
    kein ehleri ms ysftem
    kein ehleri ms ystfem
    kein ehleri ms ystefm
    kein nehler ms ystemf
    fkei nehler im system
    kfei nehler im system
    kefi nehler im system
    keif nehler im system
    kein fehler im system

The error, signified by the initial ``f'' of the corresponding German word
``Fehler'', moves right in each line until the initial order has been restored.
However, since the error is induced in a strictly systematic way, there's no
error in the poem.

In comparison to Gomringer's poem, jodi's sourcecode is typographically,
linguistically and semantically richer, and it differs from Tzara's poem code
as well in that it does not separate a poetic collage from a non-collage
algorithm. Treating both sourcecode and its output as artworks in their own
right, it employs the methods of pastiche and ready-made on the sourcecode
itself. Unlike permutational Proteus poetry and generative art from Optatianus
Porfyrius and Lullism to until recently, jodi no longer synthesize instruction
codes, but for the first time use them intertextually, as found material.

net anti net

Other works on www.jodi.org subvert the aesthetic expectation of an opaque
sourcecode and a human-readable output even more obviously than the above poem.
In ``Location'' http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org and ``faq'' http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org
/100cc/faq/index.html, the browser display doesn't seem to be readable except
as letter noise, but renders as readable plain text - with a typogram of the
cartoon character Stimpy (from ``Ren and Stimpy'') - when clicking on ``View
Sourcecode'' in the web browser. Just as the web site plays with its
accessibility and non-accessibility on the meta-data level of its address
schemes, it plays with visible and hidden codes on the data level of its files,
making what's plain opaque and vice versa.{6}.

``Location'' and ``faq'' intertexually refer to computer typograms known as
``ASCII Art''. ASCII text, the ``American Standard Code for Information
Interchange'' the lowest common denominator of all computer character sets,{7}
was used since the 1970s to emulate graphics in non-graphical computer
networks, so that, out of technical restraints, it reinvented the classical
literary genre of pattern poetry known since Simias of Rhodos of the 3rd
century B.C..{8} With the Net.art of jodi and later the community of the
``7-11'' mailing list, ASCII Art was rewritten from naive mimetic figuration
into an experimental and ironical art form that played with error codes,
pretended system crashes and the spam-like mass mailings. ``Location'' and
``faq'' map the transition from figural to self-reflexive ASCII codes: In both
pieces, the old naive ASCII Art literally becomes the sourcecode of its
reflexive Net.art successor.

code anti code

Jodi's particular artfulness to make one type of data look like an other type
of data manifests itself most blatantly in an artform which they seem to have
invented: fake software which in reality is just animated graphics and blinking
browser text. ``Surgery/havoc'' http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/100cc/havoc/ looks
like a jump'n'run computer game with several zoom functions, but is actually a
clever arrangement of animated graphics files. Employing the same means,
``BinHeX'' http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/100cc/hqx/i900.html simulates system
crashes and computer virus infection. Alluding constantly to the popular
cultural semiotics of software interfaces, jodi manage to make software art -
and thus also generative art - even where they don't employ algorithmic
programming, a conceit that challenges the whole conceptual grounds of both art
genres.

The pre-digital net art known as Mail Art promoted open participation by
consequent mediocricy. Jodi.org and the Net.art it made possible prove that
outstanding art can come out of bottom-up networks. What renders jodi's art an
ultimate example of contemporary ``argutezza'' - artful wit and urbanity as it
was defined in 17th century rhetoric - is it simultaneously affirms and negates
its place within a network. After all, it stands out too much in this network,
with the links and disseminations being the preventive weapon against undue
readings and contextualizations like this one.

References

[AE87]
    Jeremy Adler and Ulrich Ernst. Text als Figur. Visuelle Posie von der
    Antike bis zur Moderne. VCH, Weinheim, 3 edition, 1990 (1987).
[Arn01]
    Inke Arns. Texte, die (sich) bewegen: zur Performativität von
    Programmiercodes in der Netzkunst, 2001. http://www.v2.nl/~arns/Lecture/
    performativ-code.html.
[Cay01]
    John Cayley. The Code is Not the Text, 2001. http://www.p0es1s.net/poetics/
    symposion2001/a_cayley.html.
[Tza75]
    Tristan Tzara. Pour fair une poème dadaïste. In Oeuvres complètes.
    Gallimard, Paris, 1975.
[Zim97]
    Dieter E. Zimmer. Schone Gruse aus dem Netz. In Deutsch und anders, pages
    272-292. Rowohlt, Reinbek, 1997.

Footnotes:

{1} [Cay01]

{2} see Frederic Madre's essay in this catalogue

{3} Thomas Skowronek, who currently writes an M.A. thesis at Humboldt
Universität Berlin on noise in Net.art, brought up this question.

{4} The phenomenon of the static ``genotext'' vs. the mobile ``phenotext'' in
the digital arts, with reference to jodi, has been addressed first and more
thoroughly in Inke Arns' paper [Arn01]

{5} [Tza75]

{6} A method adopted and radicalized in Ivan Khimin's project "http://
imageless.net". The website only consists of very small HTML files which only
contain information in the sourcecode. (The site can be accessed via "http://
imageless.net/ASCII32/")

{7} For a history of the ASCII standard, see [Zim97]

{8} [AE87]

-- 
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/
http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html
GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3200C7BA, finger cantsin@mail.zedat.fu-berlin.de

_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold