Install.exe/JODI

Install.exe/JODI. — Edited by Tilman Baumgärtel. — Basel : [Plug In] kunst und neue medien ; Berlin : BuröFriedrich, 2002. — 112 p. — ISBN 3856161848.

Catalogue published for the exhibition Install.exe/JODI, [Plug In] kunst und neue medien, Basel, Switzerland, September 18-October 27, 2002 [itinerary: BuröFriedrich, Berlin, Germany, January 31-March 16, 2003]. - Curator: Tilman Baumgärtel.

Composed of members Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesman, JODI is an artist collective whose Web projects remodel the conventions regarding the graphic presentation of information on the Internet.

In their first gallery exhibition, which brought together work produced by the collective since 1995, JODI presented a series of works based on BASIC language, a simplified programming language developed in the 1960s for students and the general public, and widely used by programmers until the mid-1980s. With a view to deciphering and reutilizing this language, which is now impracticable on recent computers, Heemskerk and Paesman employed an emulator, an application that simulates the characteristics of an outmoded platform.

Created by JODI and Swiss designer Rafael Koch, the catalogue is a visual essay in which the artists recast the graphic results of research stemming from BASIC language. The pages are folded, their recto sides displaying screen images, their verso sides presenting texts by the curator and participating writers (Waling Boers, Josephine Bosma, Florian Cramer, Frédéric Madre, Annette Schindler and Pit Schulz). In addition to discussing the issues raised by the collective's critical strategies, the texts provide an account of the public's reaction to the projects of JODI, the collective's seminal role as Internet pioneers in the mid-nineties, as well as their affiliations with various 20th-century artistic movements (concrete poetry, chaos aesthetic).