Jodi, or jodi.org, is a collective of two internet artists: Joan Heemskerk (born 1968 in Kaatsheuvel, the Netherlands) and Dirk Paesmans (born 1965 in Brussels, Belgium). Their background is in photography and video art; since the mid-1990s they started to create original artworks for the World Wide Web. A few years later, they also turned to software art and artistic computer game modification. Since 2002, they have been in what has been called their "Screen Grab" period, making video works by recording the computer monitor's output while working, playing video games, or coding.

In more recent^[when?] works, they modified old video games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, Jet Set Willy, and the latest, Max Payne 2 (2006) to create a new set of art games. Jodi's approach to game modification is comparable in many ways to deconstructivism in architecture, because they would disassemble the game to its basic parts, and reassemble it in ways that do not make intuitive sense. One of their more well-known modifications of Quake places the player inside a closed cube with swirling black-and-white patterns on each side. The pattern is the result of a glitch in the game engine discovered by the artists, presumably, through trial and error; it is generated live as the Quake engine tries, and fails, to visualize the interior of a cube with black-and-white checked wallpaper.

Jodi's "Screen Grab" period began with the four-screen video installation My%Desktop (2002), which premiered at the Plugin Media Lab in Basel. The piece appeared to depict mammoth Mac OS 9 computers running amok: opening windows cascaded across the screen, error messages squawked, and files replicated themselves endlessly. But this was not a computer gone haywire, but a computer user gone haywire. To make this video, Jodi simply pointed-and-clicked and dragged-and-dropped so frantically, it seemed that no human could be in control of such chaos. As graphics exploded across the screen, the viewer gradually realized that what had initially appeared to be a computer glitch was really the work of an irrational, playful, or crazed human.^[1]

Selected works[link]

• http://g33con.com/
• http://globalmove.us/
• http://geogeo.jodi.org/
• http://map.jodi.org/ - Jodi's personal map of the Web
• http://404.jodi.org/ - playing with the "404 - File not Found" premise
• http://sod.jodi.org/ - an art game modification of Wolfenstein 3D
• http://asdfg.jodi.org/
• http://text.jodi.org/
• http://jetsetwilly.jodi.org/
• http://www.wrongbrowser.com/ - absurd artistic interpretation of a browser (Alt-F4 to exit on Windows, CMD-Q on Mac)
• http://www.untitled-game.org/ - also on CD-ROM, twelve modifications of Quake
• http://maxpaynecheatsonly.jodi.org/ - cheats on built-in functions of the video game Max Payne 2 - new work released in May 2006
• http://blogspot.jodi.org/ - Jodi's art blogs
• An interview with Jodi by Tilman Baumgaertel on the nettime mailing list archives [1]

An animation made for BananaRAM website for the Mind Control theme edition. http://www.bananaram.org/web04/index.php?id=17

See also[link]

• net.art
• Superbad.com

References[link]

Sources[link]

• Baumgärtel, Tilman (1999) (in German). net.art - Materialien zur Netzkunst (2nd ed.). Nürnberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg. pp. 106–113. ISBN 3-933096-17-0. 
• Baumgärtel, Tilman (2001). net.art 2.0 - New Materials towards Net art. Nürnberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg. pp. 106–181. ISBN 3-933096-66-9. 

External links[link]

• jodi.org
• Talk with Dirk Peasmans, May 2006

* Artists' Biography and list of video works by JODI at Electronic Arts Intermix eai.org.