The Wizards of OSS - by Martin Conrads

If they were musicians, they obviously were signed up with touch or sonig. But because they are net.artists, jodi (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans), since the mid 90s, have been on the forefront of publishing disturbing digital dialectics on their website. "Jodi-like" has become a term widely used for this kind of technowhimsy which mixes only seemingly faulty functions like system errors, never-seen-commands, pseudocrashes and weird sound with the whole field of visuality in collage, abstract and minimal art. Having won (and rejected) this year's "Webby Awards", jodi, after years of brilliant net.work, have now released their first CD-ROM "OSS" (both Mac and PC). OSS turns your desktop into strobe limbo, fools around with your ctr's gui, samples your folder structure and seems to bug your harddisk. While jodi's first non-webspecific artwork surely adopts its structures from their perspective on html and ascii, the binding link of both their web and CD-ROM work is their awareness of the computer screen, its format, flatness and illusory reliability. There are five sections to be discovered on OSS: "#Reset", "%20", "****", "**** ***" and "000,0", and you can tell by the names that enjoying this work is more about pattern recognition and structure than about content and linearity. Being a masterpiece of visual paranoia, OSS functions as a virtual virus detechtor that keeps on repeating the one basic rule of the computer age: "**** ***".

OSS

OSS mailorder

jodi mirror








last update: 12.9.1999

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