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JODI
1995
In 1993, artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans began an eighteen-month artist residency at San Jose State University, in close proximity to the manicured lawns of Silicon Valley.
“In San Jose JODI found themselves in an artificially green city surrounded by an often drought-parched landscape, where rain was something controlled ‘automatically’ most if not all the time, as if they were in an enormous greenhouse.”
Read Josephine Bosma's article on Automatic Rain.
Trained in photography and video, JODI came to San Jose to learn about digital media, and and were introduced to the nascent public web. In 1995, they set up a website at the now-famous address jodi.org, and published their first works for the web browser.
The jodi.org server can be considered as a single, overarching work, but discrete works also can be singled out within it. One of these, Automatic Rain, begins with a red logo bearing the title of the work. These were drawn from small branded flags that announced the presence of timed sprinklers on the lawns around SJSU.
Clicking on this brings the user to a black screen. In 1995, on a dial-up connection, blue text would fill the screen slowly; thanks to the , the text flashed on and off. The slowness of the apparatus gave the rain a decidedly uneven, cinematic effect.
From here, the user clicks through to an image of raindrops on a window. “This last picture is, in JODI’s words, Holland,” Bosma writes.
JODI’s work explored the particular affordances of the web of its day, and it quickly ceased to function. The blink tag, available in Netscape 1, wasn’t adopted by Internet Explorer, and no longer functions in modern browsers. And as network speed increased, the work’s tone changed drastically.
Joan Heemskerk, Olia Lialina, Rasa Smite at the Last Real Net Art Museum house party in Moscow, May 2000. Photo: Frederic Madre.