JODI is a unit of two artists, Joan and Dirk, based in Barcelona, Spain. You can view their works as you access to the internet, but those installation-like radical works seems often to drive the machines into crash.

Those works give us senses and meanings of noise music visually as we are on the net world which usually follows the rule. We can take it as a warning to the uniformed digital society.

Their activity caught a lots of publicity by the contribution to the exhibition in the book ‘CREAM’, as one of few artists on the field of internet. This time we had a direct contact from them at their visits to Japan and had an interview.

Could you introduce yourself?

Dirk: When we started about 4 years ago with our website ‘jodi.org‘, the web was ‘academic #gray’, because the Mosaic browser did not support backgrounds, there was almost no graphical work around. Our first works distorted the classic page-layout by making basic errors in HTML and putting contradictory commands in the code. Many people thought our site was broken and complained.

We felt that the browser-Tags imitated ‘Text on paper’ to much and we resisted that with ‘Cyber-green on black’. At the time we were in CADRE San Jose State University, so there are also military influences.

Before you started internet-base art works, did you work on some other areas?

Joan: I did photography combined with 3D modeling, and Dirk did Zapp-tv, but we never worked together.

Did you know each other at that time?

Joan: Yes, we started our own Domain because we needed the ‘jodi.org’ URL channel for our new works. We shifted to the network as a medium, not making prints or video anymore.

Dirk: With photography, magazine, print, radio, TV… the production machines are available but not the distribution. Their specific links to society are closed. Now new media exhibits are being organized with the title ‘net art’ just as in the 70′-80’s when there was ‘video art’ and the ‘net exhibition and collecting’ is being copied from then. That is a critical mistake with the net medium! Video art is in reality, experimental TV without access to the medium and as an alternative it needs the art channel. But for the net, the distribution channel exists with the world wide web, and is neglected !?’Networks’ exist only in the network context.

People like in the 60’s or 70’s has predicted the development of technology, and today in the beginning of the 21st century we have that kind of development. Communication tools like telephones, TVs, radios, internet and so on were developed and, through those tools, the way of communication, including forms of representing art works using technology has been changed. What do you think about it?

Dirk: ?…last years, a lot of alternative groups, artists, designers, etc, established websites and most of them rent 50MB webspace at commercial US serverfarms or use the academic network.

That works now but when something changes in the providers policies; censor, traffic, pricing… there is no back-up system. Even the New Media centers cater around this fragility.

Curators and designcollections should be aware of this, but they only represent surfaces and collect and don’t give a shit about the future of the alt.web. They exploit the hype of ‘net art’ and within 10 years let it drop dead. But some alt.projects are also web providers and interfere with local media-politics, like Namespace, The Thing, Public netbase, This is Your Server, Ljudmila.org, Desk.org.