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\begin{tiny}\begin{verbatim}
$Id: jodi_anti_net_art.tex,v 1.8 2002/07/09 00:41:04 paragram Exp $
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\title{Discordia Concors: www.jodi.org}

\author{Florian Cramer}

\date{July 10, 2002}



\maketitle


\section{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.''\footnote{\cite{cayley:codenottext}} At the time of
this writing, \url{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
\url{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'', \url{http://map.jodi.org}),
providing link lists (``CC'',
\url{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'' \url{http://www.7-11.org}\footnote{see Frederic
Madre's essay in this catalogue} as Cézanne was for cubism or as
Malevich was for constructivist painting, canonization is unavoidable.

\section{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?\footnote{Thomas Skowronek, who currently writes an
M.A. thesis at Humboldt Universität Berlin on noise in Net.art, brought
up this question.} 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.\footnote{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
\cite{arns:performativitaet}}. 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. 

\section{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''
\url{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:

\begin{verbatim}
$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();};
[...]
\end{verbatim}


The text (which cannot be fully reproduced here, but is available at
\url{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''.\footnote{\cite{tzara:poeme-dadaiste}} 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'':

\begin{verse}
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\\
\end{verse}

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.

\section{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'' \url{http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org} and
``faq'' \url{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.\footnote{A method adopted and radicalized in Ivan Khimin's
project \url{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 \url{http://imageless.net/ASCII32/})}.

``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,\footnote{For a history of the ASCII standard, see
\cite{zimmer:gruse}} 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..\footnote{\cite{adler-ernst:text}} 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.

\section{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''
\url{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'' \url{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.



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