Interview with JODI on Rhizome, 2001
19.05.2001
?: You got known because of your experiments on the WorldWideWeb, and
many think of you as “the” net artists. Why did you leap into software
in your newer projects, like “OSS” and “SOD”?
Jodi: We never choose to be net.artists or not. It happened that we
started to make things on the computer, about things inside the
computer. And where is the internet anyway? Is it out there or just here
in front of your cursor? Your browser’s cache is filling up with stuff
that is stored on your harddisk all the time, you can browse in and out
with the same programs.. to disconnect net.art from the %local
computersystem would be simplifying.
?: Could one say that “OSS” is “CD-rom specific”, while your pieces on
the internet were “net specific”?
!: Yes, OSS/**** was conceived for CD-Rom. That medium has specific
possibilities, for example: if you insert our disk in your computer, on
Mac it immediately overwrites with a grid of 317 files what you have on
your desktop. CD-Roms have this capacity to remember and repeat the
exact locations of how files and folders are placed.The user can %delete
and %rearrange this whole file structure while the CD is in, but the
next time, the CD will restart with its full original setup again.
?: “OSS” seems to be directed against the Graphical User Interface
(GUI). What’s wrong with this interface? It seems to work very well for
a lot of peopleO
!: OSS/**** builds on the personal relation you have with your computer,
through the smooth GUI, the disk introduces an uncertain element. Even
the %downloads on the web (oss.jodi.org) got us into trouble; the
webhost threw us out after customer complaints.
?: But would I be right in saying that this piece is a critique of or an
assault against the GUI?
!: What is always surprizing to us is that there are many other ways to
present things visually inside the computer, with a website, on the
desktop, or with a browser, with disrespect to the norm.
?: So the intention is not to make the computer as dysfunctional as
possible?
!: No, OSS/**** manipulates the surface of your system. An interface is
a translation of code and your understanding is what you believe and
that’s all there is to a computer, it’s a language. On the desktop the
lid of the trashcan is open, and you believe there is something inside,
then you have to place your garbage out, so goes the story.
?: There is one section or “programm” within “OSS”, that is called “WIN”
which ironically changes the surface of my Windows-Machine into a
Macintosh interface. There everything is just opposite to what
“normally” happens on a desktop: if you don’t press the mouse, you draw
a line; if you click you hear a sound instead of activating an icon; the
drop-down menues have no text, while the windows are full of text
gibberish. Can you say something about this pieceO
!: Text windows overlap and can be dragged, sometimes speak, your mouse
leaves trails showing the path of what you were doing, the interface is
the subject. We learned from our first web mistakes, that an error can
be most interesting. If you forget a little HTML code tag, for example;
the bracket ” > ” then the text surface mixes with code and becomes
liquid, it flows all over the screen. This type of dynamic, tactile text
is different from hard copy. We can’t accept that print design rules
define also the layout on a computer screen. Most websites still look
like print. The possibilities of code and text exchange are not used,
because its confusing , it is not readable. But these are the medium
specific, digital material, new things.
?: There is no good visual interface for Linux right now, that’s why it
the program is so hard to use. Would it be a challenge for you to make a
GUI for Linux? Or would you rather use existing desktops and mess around
with them?
!:Yes, why not, but we would need a lot of help from other people, and
then we would spend half a year to see what is possible. I have to say
that the few times we were depending on so-called help from an
institution or from a programmer we failed. They didn’t have enough
obsession for the most horrible little details and problems that we must
have. We get always distracted into anything and in any direction.
?: For instance?
!: In our black and white versions of Quake, suddenly appeared %live
Moire, this interference movement of patterns, that is something
uncalculated. It happens because some 1 pixel white, 1 pixel black
graphics were sliding over each other , but which way it starts, and
what kind of patterns it produces is accidental. So we concentrated on
this phenomenon and started to draw the environment modelsizes, in
function of this detail, trying to trigger it as many times possible.
Such deviations keep us busy for months.
?: Back to “OSS”: can you explain to a technical layman how this piece
functions?
!: OSS’ and also the Wrong Browsers are made in Director. There are all
these plug-ins, the so called Xtras, that are developed by other users
and small companies, which add all different functions to the original
program, like making pop-up windows etc,,we used those alot. All the
time these scripts are posted on websites, now this activity has
switched more to Flash.
?: But Flash and Director are, as you said, tools to make information
visually clear and accessible, while OSS does exactly the oppositeO
!: Two weeks ago we were in Amsterdam, someone there told us that some
kids in offices are secretly putting the OSS/disk into other computers
as a prank to watch the confusion
?: But is the idea behind OSS/ to turn the person in front of the
computer into a helpless person?
!: It is a side-effect of the way we structured the interface. Because
it layers itself on top of your desktop, the first reaction of a lot of
people is how to get this thing out, without even looking at what is
further on the disk. It just looks like a serious type of error, and
there are no signs telling you if it is intended or not. There is no
About or Read.me file, just this grid of folders. It is a stress
situation, some people try to deal with it, others want to get the CD
out as fast as possible but then realize there is no CD icon and it gets
even worse. It’s a transgression into your personal space, it does not
work on public computers.
?: But the understanding of the piece is limited to people who deal with
computers at all.
!: No, everyone knows how a crashing computer looks like, and everyone
deals with computers nowadays.You must be strong this century not to
have anything to do with them. But we are not cyber-supremacists, our
work is not about making fun of people who don’t know how to use
computers. It is the opposite, we are clumsy, and we disrupt the slick
surface of the information systems. We get a lot of ideas from making
errors ourselves at our computer, when the system locks, gets frozen,
shaking and flipping while crashing.. that is OSS/blue panic .. we want
to share these rare moments.
?: After “OSS” you started to work with the ego-shooter game
“Wolfenstein” and developed your own version of it. You also did a
number of versions of the game “Quake”. Please tell me how you got to
work on thisO
!: We chose games that create a 3-d space and can be edited. I think we
were tired of desktop flatland- you know, folder-file reliefs, i guess
that was also the reason why the original games were so successful. They
were an eye-opener, a shock when suddenly you start mousing down
corridors and halls, while hitting your keyboard.
?: Games are supposed to be the opposite of work, so is art. Did this
parallel play a role, when you developed your game versions?
!: Well, what is art, if not that pretentious thing that tries to take
the fun out of working with the net, imposing its standards. Forget
about it!
?: That was not what I meant. The point was that games and art share
some characteristics. For example, that they are not work, that there
should be an element of fun to themO
!: Whenever we start a project and have our first results, for us it is
fun, because we see the first time what we can do, as in beta versions.
Then of course we always underestimate the amount of work to finish and
the problems that have to be solved and we end up hating the things we
loved But we always start out of fun and curiosity.
?: There is a whole internet subculture that creates and distributes
so-calles “mods”, short for “modifications”. These are little plug-ins
that change the surface of computer games. You can make a Quake hero
look like Ronald McDonald, and the castle, where the game takes place
into a museum space for instance. How do you think does this popular art
relate to what you are doing?
!: We make abstractions of existing popular code, and we dress/ undress
this code with graphics we believe express the underlying code better. A
formalist exploration of reduction, opening up a view to the underlying
codes to better understand our own user/player behaviour. Graphics are
important but should not become a repetitive style, we’re working now on
more explicit figurative versions anyway.
?: With games patches or with Skins programms you have the possibility
to change the surface of the software you look at
!: Yes, there are a lot of modifications on the net, we played some of
them. but none focussed on the game as a vision machine and how it
creates the illusions of depth, with movement codes etc. We undress this
pre-coded world in different stages by making versions of the same game
over and over.
?: The strange thing is that “SOD” works as a game. It is still fun to
play, despite the absence of images.
!: Yeah, the SOD.1 version of Wolfenstein is very icon-based. The
original elements, the bricks, the guards, the animations are just
replaced by basic geometrics, squares, triangles, and it ends up that
you can still read the game dynamic and even attach meaning to it. But
for longer pleasure it helps if you know the -godmode cheat, it’s in the
FAQ.
?: Why did you pick Wolfenstein to create versions of it?
!: We looked into some other games, but there was the best editing
software for Wolfenstein and the first results were promising.
?: Does it play a role that “Wolfenstein” is antiquated by todays game
standards and is considered to be “abandonware”?
!: Yeah ,the older the software, the more free it gets, usually. and
there is more documentation and examples of other modifications.
There are also a lot of modidification possiblities build-in in the new
games but these are much more standard and stay within the general
framework and the overall visual values of the game. With the older
games, we can get deeper inside and make real contradictory changes or
at least undress the rules, the visuals and the code as bare as we want.
?: It seems that there is no final version of your modifications of
“Quake"O.
!: No, and we don’t make an attempt anymore to make one final version.
Its comparable with an endless set of dub-versions from v0.1 to v99.0 We
keep making versions, and after, we prefer to return to older versions,
from six months before, problematic… But it seems a more digital way
of working, saving versions while in the process and then presenting all
the saved copies equally. Then you see all the steps of the process, not
in a particular order.
?: Some of the Quake versions seemed more figurative, while “SOD” is
emptied of any visual meaning and other things that you recognize if you
know the original Wolfenstein game
!: Except for the soundtrack everything is erased or replaced. Then the
sound gets in an absurd relation, like screaming triangles or barking
rotating squares.
?: Both “Quake” and Wolfenstein are very violent games and there is a
lot of discussion what effect these games have on children. How do you
feel about this?
!: “Wolfenstein” has set the -Forbidden “parental-warning” -stuff in
motion. That first provocation made it an underground success, and then
the follow up games “Doom” and “Quake” became big commercial hits for
the ID company. The ID games relies on a strange contrast between
bloody, gore scenery and advanced coding that pushes mathematical
limits.Now situated on the net as Deathmatch Arenas for hundreds of
players. There are a lot of games like it, but Wolfenstein and Quake set
the standards.
The violence issue is a graphical, commercial drawing style, and that is
exactly the part we changed first. What you see and believe is only how
the code is dressed. We put 2bit black and white pixels on top of the
“dying dog” code, complete black erasure of the gothic castle
environments etc. and after that everything in between becomes possible.
?: You latest work consits of three browsers. Can you explain why you
took on that subject after you worked for so long within the browser?
?: After we were messing with HTML, we found there’s only so many things
that we could do with it and it became repetitive. At one point even
the chrome of Explorer becomes more interesting.Well, anyway.. the three
wrongbrowsers untill now are: (.NL), (.COM) and (CO.KR), They are
shortnamed “closed domain browsers”, because they all connect
automatically only to short letter-combinations inside these domains(for
example to a random http://www.XZ9.COM). Most of the time they display a
site, because the short names are sold out. Many have been bought by
domain name investors who resell the names as virtual real estate. The
browser cycles inside its domain category, and inbetween you can also
redirect it to any addres you want, but when the cycle is full, the
browser will continue with its limited domain presets. It can be like
jumping on a turning carousel, or just Hi-lite text while dragging your
cursor around…
?: Are these programs based on a browser that we know - such as
Netscape?
!: No, programmed in Director, there is a standard script that connects
to the net and displays HTML as text. We should include the 10 lines of
lingo code on the website, or not…
----------------- global gOperation1, set the text of member "getNetText One Field" to "http://www." & char random(36) of "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890" & char random(36) of "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890" & char random(36) of "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890" & ".com" getNetText the text of field "getNetText One Field" if gOperation1 then if netDone(gOperation1) <> "OK" then set the text of member "netTextResultOneField" to string(netTextResult(gOperation1)) end if -----------------
?: They are also very abstract, to the extent that it is hard to tell
that they are browsers and what they do exactly. The “.com”-browser
looks almost like painting, like color dripping down from the monitor.
!: We are trying out different looks of the browser screendisplay and
the syntax of the URL, because we’d like to show that the ‘wrong’
browser is stronger as the ‘real’ browser.
?: Are these different “styles” or “looks” depending on the different
geographical areas - like Korea or the Netherlands?
!: oh well.. do’nt know, but i can tell you that the website
(http://www.wrongbrowser.com) is allready very confusing to people, and one of
the commissioning bodies is highly disappointed by its -warning and that
there is no code mess.
?: Why was the browser so interesting for you in this regard?
!: The browser is the first program that has the “View source”-function,
so you can look under the screen surface and the code layer becomes
readable It comes from the times the web was fighting for popularity and
the first Mosaic. browser spread an “How-to-do-this” button with every
page.html. It is still here and we put it to foreground; for example
with our %location/viewsource.html
?: All these three browsers look so different from browsers as we know
them, that it almost impossible to understand that it is HTML-data that
these images on my monitor are based on. It doesn’t really look like an
“internet experience” anymore
!: That is because you are conditioned by the “real” browser.You are
used to watch
“comets-falling-over-the-small-upper-right-corporate-Logo”, and looking
at “the-lower-left-side-of-you- frame”, to read and believe how you are
%Connected and %Downloading.When trying the wrong browsers out, we
tested them inside a real browser, with a shockwave plug-in. First it
felt OK, more on-line as you said, but then we realized it was a
gigantic capitulation to the standard conventions and we realized we
must keep fighting that..