The brilliantly crazy — or is it crazily brilliant? — people behind Jodi have no respect for the Internet. Wait, that’s not quite right. They have no respect for the stale, rigid collar corporate mouthpiece that the Internet has become. By aggressively deconstructing and scrambling the computer world, the Internet artists at Jodi have turned our world of bits and bites into an absurdist amalgamation of digital mindspray that resembles a binary MC Escher work.Take, for example, their own site, Jodi.org. You’ll never actually get to Jodi.org itself, and will instead be redirected randomly to any number of bonkers subdomains that make your computer act like its been mainlining DOS and LSD for the last two decades. It’s the Internet squeezed through a Play-Doh Fun Factory and mixed with retro psychedelics, and it’s lovely.In 2009, Motherboard met Jodi at the Eyebeam gallery in New York. It’s hard to say who we expected to meet, but we were ready for a couple of freaked-out hackers that looked like Dr. Bunsen and Beaker in the Matrix. To our happy suprise, Jodi turned out to be the brainchild of a pair of soft-spoken artists named Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans ("jo" + "di"), from Belgium and Holland respectively.A number of selected works are available via their Wikipedia page, and all of them are gems. Those include SOD is a jab at the abusive-looking operating environments of MS-DOS, and Global Move, which is a spastic take on browsing through Google Maps. The best suggestion I can make it to click through as many of their projects as they can (after watching our video interview, of course), and then take a minute to think about the fact that, while the Web is no longer the Wild West it once was, there are still people ripping it apart for the sheer sake of watching what happens.Follow Motherboard on Facebook and Twitter.
Advertisement