Jodi, is a

collective A collective is a group of entities that share or are motivated by at least one common issue or interest or work together to achieve a common objective. Collectives can differ from cooperatives in that they are not necessarily focused upon an e ...

of two internet artists, Joan Heemskerk (born 1968 in

Kaatsheuvel Kaatsheuvel () is a town in the province of North Brabant, Netherlands situated along highways N261 and N628. With a population of roughly 16,600, it is the largest town in and the capital of the municipality of Loon op Zand, which also consists ...

, the

Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...

) and Dirk Paesmans (born 1965 in

Brussels Brussels, officially the Brussels-Capital Region, (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) is a Communities, regions and language areas of Belgium#Regions, region of Belgium comprising #Municipalit ...

Belgium Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeas ...

), created in 1994. They were some of the first artists to create

Web art file:Simple Net Art Diagram.svg, upright=1.3, "Simple Net Art Diagram", a 1997 work by Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden Internet art (also known as net art or web art) is a form of new media art distributed via the Internet. This form of art circumv ...

and later started to create

software art Software art is a work of art where the creation of software, or concepts from software, play an important role; for example software applications which were created by artists and which were intended as artworks. As an artistic discipline software ...

and artistic computer game modification. Their most well-known art piece is their website wwwwwwwww.jodi.org, which is a landscape of intricate designs made in basic HTML. JODI is represented by Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam.

The artists

Joan Heemskerk was born in 1968 in

, the

, and Dirk Paesmans was born in 1965 in

. They both have a background in

photography Photography is the visual arts, art, application, and practice of creating images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is empl ...

and

video art Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting. V ...

and studied at the

CADRE Laboratory for New Media The CADRE (Computer in Art, Design, Research, and Education) Laboratory for New Media is an American academic entity at San José State University focused on digital media arts research and creation. It is the second oldest education and art me ...

San Jose State University San José State University (San Jose State or SJSU) is a Public university, public research university in San Jose, California. Established in 1857, SJSU is the List of oldest schools in California, oldest public university on the West Coast of ...

in California. Paesmans also studied at

Kunstakademie Düsseldorf The Kunstakademie Düsseldorf is the academy of fine arts of the state of North Rhine Westphalia at the city of Düsseldorf, Germany. Notable artists who studied or taught at the academy include Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Blinky Palermo, Ma ...

with the founder of video art

Nam June Paik Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a South Korean artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" ...

. Both Heemskerk and Paesmans live and work out of the

Artworks

In 1999 they began the practice of modifying old video games such as ''

Wolfenstein 3D ''Wolfenstein 3D'' is a 1992 first-person shooter game developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software and FormGen for DOS. It was inspired by the 1981 Muse Software video game '' Castle Wolfenstein'', and is the third installment ...

'' to create

art mod Video game modding (short for "modifying") is the process of alteration by players or fans of one or more aspects of a video game, such as how it looks or behaves, and is a sub-discipline of general ''modding''. A set of modifications, commonly c ...

s like ''SOD''. Their efforts were celebrated in the 1999 Webby Awards, where they took top prize in the category of "

net art upright=1.3, "Simple Net Art Diagram", a 1997 work by Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden Internet art (also known as net art or web art) is a form of new media art distributed via the Internet. This form of art circumvents the traditional dominance o ...

." Jodi used their 5-word acceptance speech (a Webby Award tradition) to criticize the event with the words "Ugly commercial sons of bitches." Further video game modifications soon followed for '' Quake'', ''

Jet Set Willy ''Jet Set Willy'' is a platform video game written by Matthew Smith for the ZX Spectrum home computer. It was published in 1984 by Software Projects and ported to most home computers of the time. The game is a sequel to '' Manic Miner'' pub ...

'', and the latest, ''

Max Payne 2 ''Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne'' is a 2003 third-person shooter, third-person shooter game developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by Rockstar Games. It is the sequel to 2001's ''Max Payne (video game), Max Payne'' and the second ...

'' (2006), to create a new set of

art game An art game (or arthouse game) is a work of Interactive art, interactive new media art, new media digital art, digital software art as well as a member of the "art game" subgenre of the serious game, serious video game. The term "art game" was ...

s. Jodi's approach to game modification is comparable in many ways to

deconstructivism Deconstructivism is a postmodern architecture, postmodern architectural movement which appeared in the 1980s. It gives the impression of the fragmentation of the constructed building, commonly characterised by an absence of obvious harmony, ...

in architecture because they would disassemble the game to its basic parts, and reassemble it in ways that do not make intuitive sense. In one of their more well-known modifications of ''Quake'' places, the player inside a closed cube with swirling black-and-white patterns on each side. The pattern is the result of a glitch in the

game engine A game engine is a software framework primarily designed for the development of video games which generally includes relevant libraries and support programs such as a level editor. The "engine" terminology is akin to the term " software engine" u ...

discovered by the artists, presumably, through trial and error; it is generated live as the

Quake engine The ''Quake'' engine (part of id Tech 2) is the game engine developed by id Software to power their 1996 video game '' Quake''. It featured true 3D real-time rendering. Since 1999, it has been licensed under the terms of GNU General Publi ...

tries, and fails, to visualize the interior of a cube with black-and-white checkered wallpaper.

"Screen Grab" Period (2002- )

Since 2002, Jodi have been in what has been called their "Screen Grab" period, making video works by recording a computer monitor's output while working, playing video games, or coding. The "Screen Grab" period began with the four-screen video installation ''My%Desktop'' (2002), which premiered at the Plugin Media Lab in Basel. The piece appeared to depict large, malfunctioning

Mac OS 9 Mac OS 9 is the ninth and final major release of the classic Mac OS operating system for Macintosh computers, made by Apple Computer. Introduced on October 23, 1999, it was promoted by Apple as "The Best Internet Operating System Ever", highlight ...

monitors that displayed cascading windows, error messages, and files endlessly replicating themselves. To make this video, Jodi pointed-and-clicked and dragged-and-dropped frantically to give an appearance of uncontrolled chaos. Their exhibition ''Jodi: goodmorning goodnight'' was on display at the

Whitney Museum The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...

from 2013 to 2015. Another project, ''OXO'' (2018), premiered at the Lightbox Gallery at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

and, later that year, would also form Jodi's contribution to the group exhibition ''Difference Engine'' at the

Lisson Gallery Lisson Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with locations in London and New York, founded by Nicholas Logsdail in 1967. The gallery represents over 50 artists such as Art & Language, Ryan Gander, Carmen Herrera, Richard Long, John Latham, S ...

New York City, New York New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on New York Harbor, one of the world's largest natural harb ...

. The piece is an interactive multichannel installation based on old computer games and

tic-tac-toe Tic-tac-toe (American English), noughts and crosses (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English), or Xs and Os (Canadian English, Canadian or Hiberno-English, Irish English) is a paper-and-pencil game for two players who ta ...

. Alongside ''Difference Engine,'' Jodi also held their first solo exhibition in the Los Angeles area— a self-titled exhibition at the And/Or Gallery in

Pasadena, California Pasadena ( ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is the most populous city and the primary cultural center of the San Gabriel Valley. Old Pasadena is the city's original commerci ...

which involved, in part, recreating the gallery's coffered ceiling on the floor to be navigated by visitors. A 2012 ''Vice'' magazine article said JODI's work "underlines the innate anarchy of the online medium, an arena that we've come to recognize as public but one that the duo constantly undermines and tweaks to their own purposes." As of October 2019, ''My%Desktop'' is part of the permanent collection presentation of the new

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

(Museum of Modern Art) in New York. The work is presented as a monumental installation of four adjacent projections, showing screen grabs of JODI's desktop-performance.

Collections

The work of JODI is represented in the permanent collection of the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe The ZKM , Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (until March 2016: ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology), a cultural institution, was founded in 1989 and, since 1997, is located in a former munitions factory in Karlsruhe, Germany. The ZKM (Germa ...

, among other venues.

References

Sources

* * * * * Conner, Michael. (2013). Required Reading: A Closer Look at JODI's 'Untitled Game'. Rhizome Journal. http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/oct/16/required-reading-closer-look-jodis-untitled-game/ * Galloway, Alexander. (2016) Jodi's Infrastructure. E-flux Journal #74. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/74/59810/jodi-s-infrastructure/ * Saltiel, Natalie. (2011). From the Rhizome Artbase: %20 Wrong (2000)-JODI. Rhizome Journal. http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/jul/5/20wrong-jodi-artbase/?ref=search_title.

External links

jodi.org

Full archive of Jodi

Talk with Dirk Peasmans, May 2006

by JODI at

Electronic Arts Intermix Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is a nonprofit organization, nonprofit arts organization that is a resource for video and media art. An advocate of media art and artists since 1971, EAI's core program is the distribution and preservation of a colle ...

br>eai.org

with a wider explanation of one of Jodi's early works.
map.jodi.org

sod.jodi.orgFrom the Rhizome Artbase: %20wrong (2000)- JODI
{{DEFAULTSORT:Jodi (Art Collective) Net.artists Belgian contemporary artists Webby Award winners San Jose State University alumni