Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, collectively known as
JODI, are rightfully venerated for their countless contributions to art and
technology, working as an artistic duo since the mid-90’s. Generally referred
to as pioneers of “net.art,” that oft-misunderstood “movement” combining the
efforts artists using the internet as a medium circa 1994, JODI is revered not
only for their artistic meditations on the increasing presence of new technology
in our daily lives, but also for their fuck-if-I-care attitude toward both the
establishments of the technology and art worlds. JODI’s famous five-word
“acceptance” speech—if you could call it that—for their 1999 Webby Award in
art, simply read, “Ugly commercial sons of bitches.”
Unlike an overwhelming majority of artists, and especially
those in art and tech, JODI has managed to sustain a successful career for over
15 years, mounting exhibitions internationally. February 2011 saw the duo
literally blow its audience in the face with bomb-like cans of oxygen at Foxy
Production, accounting for one of the best performances of the year.
Yet, their recently launched exhibition at the Museum of the Moving
Image (MoMI) finds a flashy, overly simplistic exhibition that
fails to represent the deeply important perspective that JODI has come to
represent over the last two decades. Comprising work made from 1999 to the
present, “Street Digital” extends JODI’s focus from the desktop computer to
hardware’s broader, more public landscape including cellular phones, LED signs,
and iPods. A projection split into four channels, YTCT (Folksomy) (2008/2010),
combines Youtube videos of “people doing weird things with hardware,” or more
specifically, the video features mostly-teenage boys destroying old iPods,
cameras, laptops, etc., by throwing, bashing, or hammering them. Periodically,
a legitimately strange occurrence replaces the usual simple, hormonally charged
violent acting-out of an enfants terrible. (An extra special moment occurs when
a young man puts an iPod in his mouth for a while.) In a 2009 interview with
Motherboard, Heemskerk says that she prefers these truly uncanny and bizarre
moments, to which Paesmans added, “I feel really sorry for [technology], that
it needs to display information. It can do so much more.” Paesmans has
seemingly stumbled into a manifesto for glitch art.
The further one traverses into “Street Digital,” the more it
becomes plain that its target audience is probably a young, tech-friendly
male—one who particularly enjoys playing video games. Burnout (History of Car Games) (2004–2012), a set of nine wall-mounted
screens, takes screen recordings of various video games in which cars are made
to perform virtual “doughnuts,” their tires screeching around in circles. SK8MONKEYS ON TWITTER (2009) provides a
more participatory experience, consisting of a desktop keyboard fitted to a
skateboard. Its viewer is asked to stand atop the skateboard, effectively
mashing the buttons on the keyboard, which sends a series of nonsensical
characters to a nearby computer. These characters are meant to be sent as
Tweets, shown on the computer’s monitor, though at the time of my visit the
Tweet function was not working. Bad juju for a technology museum.
Similarly nonfunctional was ZYX (mobile app), 2012, a mobile device application (first debuted
this past February as part of Rhizome’s New Silent Series) acting as equal
parts game and choreographer. Prompting its user to enact various postures
endemic to using a cellular phone, such as looking for reception with an
outstretched arm, the app is installed on two iPod touches, one of which was
broken, the other’s battery dead.
While the app nodded to contemporary performance (or from
what I could tell), LED Puzzled (2012) provides the most
gallery-specific installation within “Street Digital.” Appearing akin to a
post-apocalyptic Jenny Holzer, LED
Puzzled strews jumbled, illuminated LED panels on the gallery floor.
Usually formed into a large grid of smaller constituent parts, the schizophrenically
pulsating panels bathe the gallery walls in a brilliant blue. Elsewhere in the
gallery finds Untitled Game
("Arena," "A-X," "Ctrl-Space," "Spawn")
(1996/2001), a compendium of modified game code installed on a circle of
monitors, as well as an “internet reading room” of JODI’s past websites.
GEO GOO (2008),
video documentation of the duo’s Web-based work installed on wall-mounted
monitors, is sort of an animation using Google Maps as its subject. This piece
encapsulates many of the problematic aspects of “Street Digital.” The wall text
reads, “’GEO GOO’ has no meaningful
relationship to spatial reality. Instead, it transforms an encounter with
Google Maps into an aesthetic experience, calling to attention to the fact that
the tool we increasingly use to navigate the world is itself an abstraction.” [Emphasis mine.] Does anyone forget that a digital map is not a 1:1
depiction of ontology reality? Is this a systemic problem that we actually need to parse out through
artistic means? I think not. Rather, the charge here is much more simplistic
and perhaps intuitive than that: to aestheticize and abstract widely used
digital technologies in order to glean something from their dismantling. A
problem arises when it is assumed that the pure aestheticization of digital
technologies necessitates its politicization, or some sort of grand reflection
on its widespread usage. The way in which GEO
GOO has been aestheticized, for example, expounds not on how we use such
technology, but merely creates a pretty picture with it.
While curator Michael Connor may contextualize “Street
Digital” as being “gleefully disruptive,” it may be better termed “gleefully
simplistic.” This isn’t to cast
JODI’s entire oeuvre in a negative light, but rather to assert that when the
vein of contemporary art or performance is elided in the work’s
contextualization, the resulting experience is one that lauds sensationalism
and spurns criticality.
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