 Art Collective, Joanne and Dirk, better known as Jody and also widely known for their countless contributions to art and technology, holders of many awards, will be talking to us today about understanding the browser as a canvas of art. And Apache is still functioning. Please welcome them with a big round of applause. There are a lot of things going on. There are a lot of screens out there now. Good evening, 91. Performed in the Netherlands. In Nijmegen. Together with BBS from Amsterdam. Called Blue Cloud. Or Isobar Network. Blue Cloud, the Blue ASCII. Transmitted from the BBS in Amsterdam to the local television station in Nijmegen. And then it was layered on top of a live camera in the studio of the local television. This was 1991. It was done with help from DFM. Which I met at the Galactic Hackers Party in Paradiso. Do you see the Blue Cloud? So it was a direct result of my meeting. Without understanding anything basically. You see the Blue Wall. Alternative users of technology. And they were running a BBS in Amsterdam. Which I used to make this work. On top of the sound of the modem which is the life the sound modems make. There is also a phone interview. Someone phoning in the studio. To local random numbers in the city. And asking them do you please turn on your local TV. Where this broadcast is running. And asking them do you see the Blue Cloud. And most of them answered positively. Isobar Network. Attempting contact. So basically this is about Jodi. Jodi.org. Which is Joan and Dirk meeting at art school in the Netherlands. Seeing a basement with computers. Which were meant for the design department. To use to design posters and everything. And yeah we investigated it further. And it brought us to San Jose State University. Which is more or less the capital of Silicon Valley. We entered the class there in 1992. And we saw the beginnings of the web there. So we switched our attention from working on local computers. Work we were doing with CD-ROM and everything. For using the distribution medium of the web. Because that's what it was all about for us. That is more or less leaving the art system aside. And learning from the local television lesson. Which was a lesson taught by video artists 20 years before. That you could work against television. By making alternative formats of television. And broadcasting it on local channels. Cable. Art cable TV. So that's our work on the web. By using the website as an abnormal use. If you want. Or an investigation of what the medium was. Is a direct following of the generations before. Yeah this was 1995. And it was actually blinking around here. And the thing was that we found out that computers had a source. And in this source it's the ASCII scheme. It's like a hydrogen missile. And we submitted this to Yahoo. And they said please learn how to program. Because the result, I mean this page is the result of a mistake. A basic mistake of not closing the bracket on the pre-format tag in HTML. Which is the first lesson or the basics of the basics. Of course we had been working with it in a regular way. But at some point of copying the files. There was a mistake by not copying or having cut off the bracket by accident. So instead of displaying this ASCII bomb nicely green on black. As an old school ASCII drawing. It appeared in this non-formatted way. And it was filling the browser completely. We were surprised because this was such a stupid basic mistake. But at the same time it showed a few things about the browser. What we found already interesting is that the browser is not at all a fixed window. So everyone puts this browser at different sizes. And because this is just streaming into the page. It always fills the browser. However that you make it smaller or bigger. And also it of course focused attention on making the digital material. A website was made of the HTML. The main source or the main content. The drawing was inside the code. Both layers were turned upside down. I have a good time. This was made 20 years ago. And when I look at it today. It seems like it consists of a lot of elements which are still on the web. It's a work which is framed. There's an access file. It's downloading something but not today. Then there were items in it. Different items. Some code. So this was basically part of the bigger website. Because at the beginning making this website. The term itself did not exist. There were a few years of weirdness. And we were exploring what the website was. The website had a lot of navigation inside. So you could go between different main menus. And then arrive for example in this good times part. There was also warm food. And terms you had to accept before you could enter sites. Since good times was like a hoax virus. We decided to have some terminal transcripts running. And at that time I mean there was this hacker Mitnik. And he was caught. And they put these files online. And there were war images. We on purpose left these images broken. Because then something which beside the elasticity. Different sizes of the browser. What interested us was also the elasticity of the images themselves. There is no reason at all for an image to be displayed at its normal size. You can just change the X, I, the width and the height to any format. Or just fill in a wrong name or a wrong format. And then it will show up broken. So we were having fun with things being broken at that part of the site. Something which we continued in other works. But Pejnivelke will tell no matter. I'll do it. It depends what John will show. What I will say. This is based on a website which we made which had automatic downloads in it. So you couldn't really, I mean it was software that automatically was downloaded and was placed on your desktop. After a while if you would click some of these items. You don't want to skip it. It would start scrolling up and down and taking over your desktop. So it was behaving really like a virus should behave in a very visual way. But it was relatively hard to shut down. So there are stories of people who brought their computers to the repair service with this website running. So that was OSS Jodi.org. It brought us also into problems with the service provider because we basically needed to move web hosts because he sent an email that we had agreed that nothing unusual would happen as anyone would agree when you sign a contract with a web host. So that was then the message. And we made it into a bulletin board, a guest book where people reacted to. So there were a lot of people pro and contrast. Some were really saying this is so ridiculously annoying that these people should be punished and at least be removed from this web host. And then there were others which were saying no, but this is art. I think by that time net art existed so we could say that it was art. Thank you, Alexis Schulging. Thank you, Heath Bunting. Thank you, Vuk Chosik. Then years later, I mean we did a poke thumbing action on YouTube which was like poking the camera on YouTube and uploading it directly. And we were performing it in public with groups of people and we were randomly without checking what or why putting these like two, three second videos as comments all over YouTube. And at the end we recollected them to make like a long movie of this bodily mass of thumbs. And you can see randomly where they are connected, where they are made, where they are commented on, but that's totally random. I don't know if it qualifies as porn YouTube, but... So that whole movie is almost one hour I think. That's more for the experimental cinema department. Something which is also really interesting for us, I mean the history of experimental film, it's full of annoying things. Like a white screen forever. Which is a version we made of Quake, I have to say. All you do, I mean it always comes from somewhere and Zen for film, like the erased film like a negative. Without anything is a version we made with Quake. We have a white Quake which is a level of Quake which is totally white and you think there is nothing happening there, but it's actually the first level of Quake rendered bright white. Monsters also rendered bright white. And then the blood being curled away. So you have everything in front of you, but it's bright white rendered. But with some habits and there were a lot of Quake players at the time. We could just play the different levels because the sounds and the monsters were always coming more or less from the same corner. So they could get quite far in the game by blinding people. Just at the... May I have the wrong browser? We started with NET and NET Art at the time when there were only four possible domain extensions. .org.com.net. That was it. Of course it was .80.mil, but that was not for the general public. So at the moment that changed, like that the geography of real life was entering the web that was kind of a shock or disappointment to us. So that the national geography was entering cyberspace that would mean that it would be regulated and could be regulated on a national level. So we decided to make browsers, which we called wrong browsers. This is one running. Wrong browsers for... Well, ideally we wanted to make one for every domain extension. So this is wrongbrowser.org. We made a .com browser. We made a .japan. We made a .nl. We made a .brazil. We made a set of eight, nine browsers with the conceptual intention to make one for every domain extension. This one goes to the States. It's automatic, so it's because also the net was filling up with addresses that it's a random four, five-letter combination. Now it's abc, ablz. Well, three letters. Then Jo knows because she made it. And I'm just talking about it basically. And yeah, that's something I also really want to say that during the years, the coding of all these different projects, well, you know, it's not the moment yet maybe because you haven't seen the app. But the program is done by Joan because Joan is a, I don't know, a coder girl, I think. I really don't know basically anything. That's the truth. And yeah, sometimes we ask for help. Well, at the end it was still a lot of the Joan's work. This is .korea, the .korea browser. Okay, ten minutes. We're going serious business now. Uh-oh. What does that mean? Okay, did that, did that, did that. Yeah, we actually created a show where CCC was in. And that was called WebCrash. That was in 2008. Actually, you only needed a banner. And we made a little walk in town. And this is your banner. Your banner. It was the idea of how to organize a net exhibition. And we thought it would be of no use to display computers. And that we would only display the URLs, of course. But then you have to somehow do something more than a flat text. So we kept more or less the design of these original sites and decided to do a demonstration or a walk in the city. Years ago we did the same actually in China. We got some banners like, yeah, since we're in Germany, we made them motivational banners. And we still don't know if they agree, because we put them like kind of official, on places. Yeah, I skipped that. Did he talk to me? He had a lot of time. 10 minutes or so. This is one of these minimal approaches to... I guess it sums up the life of a net artist somehow. Did he talk to you? Yeah, he talked to me as well. Texted it. About texted it. You have to put it a bit louder. I can't put it louder. No, they do it for you. Please Google this for me. Discutility. Finder. Fortbook. Grab. Screen. Selection. Timed screen. Import image. Mail. And it may sound like a computer voice, but it isn't. It is the sound actor of Duke Nukem, who offers his services to make a text for your answering machine. So we gave him the whole text command menus of text edit. File over. File over. Yeah. And we asked him to put as much emotion in it as he was doing in Duke Nukem. Yeah. This is actually like, yeah. It comes from that wrong browser, actually. The domain names per country were made, and now we can have international characters. So the work is international domain names. And we registered some one letter characters to make websites of. Yeah, there's almost nothing, but it's a letter. No, it's actually, that's where the title of this presentation or the work comes from Apache's functioning normally that we were. And we found out that the languages we choose letters from are mostly like all Chinese are in with. And the apache, it's... So yeah, actually, there's somehow a serious intention somewhere that is that, you know, beginning with HTML and the World Wide Web and the way the World Wide Web is going and being kind of, let's say, neglected in response to, in relation to social media and so on. We thought, yeah, we hadn't done enough to show what was behind, you know, what was the server, what was the server, the way that works. And we tried to make that as a subject of a series of works which we are still busy with trying to attract attention to the backside. Oh, I go to the server. Yeah, I found out that if you put in the server, and it happens we have an apache server, so that's why we... Yeah, probably everything we make is functioning normally, but these are just all empty files, only the extension is changed. These are things where I have to disconnect from Joan, because that's like, what? This is HTML. You have to look in... Well, I'm sure there's someone here who understands what is going on. This is mp3. Okay, now we get a movie. SVG, like, yeah. It's a vector file, a text. Do you want to turn it off or not? I don't know. I think you have to stop if you want to. Hi, hello. What? Yeah, there's a stalker at home, basically. I can't imagine you didn't notice, but... Okay. We want to show the app just to close down, because we made this app a moving performance app, you know, just for people to act. There are instructions, like, 10, 12 instructions you need to follow, and this is a group of people doing that, basically. Put up the sound a bit louder, also, because we're going to stop here, I think. Can I come here in the front? He's the first one, most basically finishing. That's the instruction where you have to ten times blow into the micro, and it needs to reach a certain level, so if you don't reach that level, you can't go on to the next exercise. We're going to need a stalker now. Time? No, we're going to loop. What? We're going to loop. A person in the middle found out that you can cheat, because the instruction says that you have to turn around ten times, so she found out that the sensor... We're going to stop here, because time's up, and... Fortunately, thank you for the impressive talk.