Bergarde Galleries presents Internet pioneer JODI at ART ROTTERDAM PROJECTIONS 05.02.2014

Bergarde Galleries presents works by Internet pioneer JODI, the artist collective founded by Joan Heemskerk (NL, 1968) en Dirk Paesmans (BE, 1965) in 1994. The presentation at Art Rotterdam Projections will focus on the early period (1995-2001) of their multifaceted oeuvre.In the sixties and seventies movements like Fluxus and conceptual art already showed that art could manifest itself as a communication process, but with the dawn of the World Wide Web (www) new art forms emerged. In the nineties the function of the Internet shifted from a mainly academic and military medium to a mass medium. This caused new strategies to democratize knowledge, but at the same time market power influenced knowledge distribution increasingly. JODI’s response was radical. Their online work, such as wwwwwwwww.jodi.org made in 1995 (image left), gave the Internet user a feeling of powerlessness. This was caused by the confrontation with the programming language among other and unsuspected effects by design errors in the system (so called ‘glitches’). Instead of utopian thoughts, in which the digital revolution would bring new forms of transparency, JODI showed how the web could lead to uncontrollable chaos, miscommunication and confusion. In 1999 they won a Webby Award for their project jodi.org.For Art Rotterdam Projections JODI produced a new performance based on an instruction manual. During the fair an ‘operator’ will execute these instructions continuously. The result will be projected on a screen and features a compilation of JODI’s early works, including wwwwwwwww.jodi.org (1995), 404 (1996), OSS/**** (1999), and SOD (1999).