MF Programme

JODI — media performance and workshop

Trendy net artists JODI are responsible for Media Forum parties, and if you know something about net.art, explanation of who they are just isn't necessary. This time around, they are arranging a live performance and a workshop. 

Jodi, a duo from Netherlands, are Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, perhaps the most famous net-artists in the world. Their Moscow tour is made possible with the support of the the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Moscow. In the early nineties, when HTML protocol has just emerged and the planet was on the eve of world wide web, Jodi were among the first who used the unfolding Internet space as a media to create art, trying to feel out and learn this new, unknown environment by means of fine art.

    Dirk and Joan have their own signature style; by artistic methods they reproduce and observe technical failures and malfunctions. Anything that disturbs the normal operation of computer systems arouses their ardent interest and becomes their subject. Standard errors resulting from virus software activities, glitches and bugs are transformed into decorative elements from which the artists compose the image: designer, toy-trick, substitution of the real with fake. This fake code has acquired additional meaning compared to the original, and this meaning can be deduced. Finally there emerges a form of interactive and moving abstract art, and it is indeed often described as a "technological abstraction" influenced by Dada and performance. Dada art can be interpreted as a response to the insanity of the First World War. Than Jodi art is an interpretation of the infinite and senseless reproduction of information, of the panic caused by its excess and oversaturation –it gives an image of a network’s madness.  

    Links to the error logs in the system signify that Jodi are not excited by the technological progress, mostly because the networking technologies were initially developed for military purposes, and now remain a powerful tool of political or economic influence. For these artists creativity is something of a guerrilla war: "We are at war with computers on the graphic stage. When the spectator observes our works, we are inside his computer. <...> I think that computer is a device created to infiltrate peoples’ heads. We substitute this mythological concept of a virtual society in the network by our art. We plant our own individuality”.

    Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans will talk more about this during their workshop at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture. Besides, the audience of Media Forum will discover that net art is not limited to the window of their favorite browser only, it sometimes goes off-line, for example, to a nightclub where the performance aspect is quite obvious. That’s why Jodi are planning to present a live performance The Folksomy at Solyanka Club. The materials they use are amateur videos from YouTube.com. Millions of users affectionately make, edit and upload their videos to the network; these files are mostly of meaningless quality, with rare splashes of really good work. Jodi state that when mixing them in a live multimedia performance they explore love and hate relationships between users and new technologies and, at the same time, they find out the means by which the system works. Moreover, any antonym to the word "operation" would be appropriate. One can also assume that in this case it is not so much access into the user's head that Jodi seek but an attempt to show their own mind inside out .

19 June, Saturday