“wwwwwwwww.jodi.org is a web-based artwork by JODI, launched in 1995, in the early days of the World Wide Web. The work is typical for JODI, whose artistic practice is characterized by chaos and non-functional designs that reveal the fundamental characteristics of the net. wwwwwwwww.jodi.org is JODI’s first website and probably their most famous, or infamous. The website consists of a maze of pages, written in HTML code, that are full of dead ends but also seem to be full of secrets. For example, the first page consists of unreadable green text (code) on a black background. Only when you see the source code of the page do the signs appear to form a diagram of a nuclear bomb. It is not strange that the website is regularly seen as the work of hackers. Through the chaos and confusion that JODI arouses with this website, they emphasize the dangers that the web can bring, what can be hidden in code, and how you can be misled.
JODI aims to reveal what is often invisible and expose the back side of the internet; its workings, dangers, and possibilities. Their work highlights the code that is behind everything on the web—treating the internet itself as the medium as well as the subject.The work is also about exploring digital aesthetics, poetics, and the characteristics of the medium. “We decided to put the work immediately on the screen, without our press releases and without our bio. We don’t use our site to present information. We present screens and things that are happening in these screens. We avoid explanations. Look at any exhibition: People are sniffing on the information plates next to the art works, before they look at the work itself. They want to know who did a piece, before they have an opinion about it. As long as we can we try to avoid that.”1 “We made the biggest basic code mistake on the first page of our very first website. We simply forgot to include a forward slash in the first command. If you forget this, you don’t get a nice drawing. Instead of being a properly spaced diagram, the drawing was all over the place on the screen. We first thought something was wrong with our computer, but ultimately decided that the effect was quite interesting. We published the mistake online, and, as it turned out, this meant that it was endlessly reproduced. Everyone saw the exact same mistake in his or her browser, which got us quite a few angry emails. By daring to make that mistake, we made the code the subject of the piece. When you subsequently requested to view the source of that webpage in your browser, the correct version of the drawing was revealed. […] The work included instructions on how to make an atomic bomb.That hidden layer was a very interesting way to draw attention to the code, which is inevitably behind everything.” “Well, if I look at our work retrospectively, the basic idea might be to get a better insight into the ways a computer system functions, or rather, how you can tell stories through all kinds of symbolic tricks. Through manipulation, you can discover how the machine is constructed; how it is trying to have you believe that something cannot be done differently. We show that it can certainly be done differently!””
