JODI begins by startling the viewer with a page of apparent nonsense, long lines of underscore symbols and punctuation marks interspersed with the occasional number, all in glowing neon green against a black background like the screen of an early '80s monochrome monitor. There isn't a "hub" page with navigation provided to other parts of the site, or even a Flash-y splash page with a little button for the impatient marked SKIP. There is only a sea of incomprehensible symbols -- which coalesce into diagrams of a mask, a ship, and data structures if you view the page source. As it turns out, the whole mass of characters is also a link to the main page of the site, a series of mysterious titles in red and little iconic links against some sort of schematic map of part of the northeastern US. Many of the links on this page are redundant, taking the visitor to the same parts of the site as some of the other links.
Clicking on "BINHEX" or "message.hqx" takes you to a page resembling a badly glitching monitor attempting to display two bar graphs with illegible text labels. "Static" or "artifacting" of many bright colors streaks the orange background in a disturbingly accurate imitation of a screen gone wrong. The most seemingly ordered part of the page is a link, taking you to a page of blue vertical bars and fragments of machine code superimposed upon one another. Some words in mirror image ("Agenda" and various others in German) can be discerned. The artifacted screens and snippets of code and words continue in bright colors for several more pages, with partial images appearing as well: topographic contours in grid form, ASCII art, a curiously altered graphic of a woman's bowed head inside the upper right corner of a Mac OS 9 (or earlier) window. Some references to pornography appear, along with strings of unfamiliar words. A more abstract screen finally takes you back to the main page.
Clicking on "BETALAB" takes you to the index page of another branch of the site, where the familiar 3-D topographic grids appear along with blocks of machine code and titles of more pieces. "Rain" is a cascade of four-digit numbers in blue, all of which are links to further pages of the same; the maze of links continues until you find one that takes you back to the Betalab index page. "Untitled" is a photograph of a bird, riddled with holes, where a JavaScript text box shows the current time according to your computer's clock. Surprisingly, the image is not a link, but the black space beneath it is; a certain section of it returns you to the Betalab index. "REM" features a diagram of a strange machine next to a 3-D computer realization of it. Clicking the diagram takes you to a static black-and-white photo of another machine; clicking the 3-D image takes you to the same image rotating over and over. The work continues with a series of complex and mysterious machines in diagram, photo, and 3-D form; they are comically bizarre, and far from anything recognizable. 3-D representations, when clicked on, take you back to the diagram of that machine; photos, when clicked on, take you to the next machine in the series.
"Goodtimes" (named for an infamous computer virus) is a particularly interesting subsection of Betalab. The frame at the center of the page is filled with small iconic images such as moneybags, houses, horses, cars, TV sets, old-style floppy disks, dollar signs, and human figures, reminiscent of the icons that occasionally appear on Jenny Holzer's LCD signs. Images of briefcases and stock charts appear next to the icons, and below is a block of code, with some underlined words serving as links. Three buttons labeled "EXE" "SEMI" and "TDOOG" are placed at the center. The link "s1" pops up a window larger than the screen without menu bars; the pages to which the new page leads are full of artifacted graphics, broken image symbols, flashing blocks, fragments of HTML, and reproductions of images from the index page, all in monochrome-monitor green. "Item" leads to a 3-D grid representation of an armchair.
"(TM)GOODIES" leads to a mock-serious string of warnings, disclaimers, and agreements in convoluted legalese, many clearly taken from software license agreements, Web site terms of service, and similar documents. The user is given no choice; there is only a button labeled "ACCEPT." There is no way to back out without using the browser interface rather than the page. The warnings create an uncomfortable feeling in the visitor; they speak of surveillance, restriction, punishment. Occasionally a sarcastic voice breaks in: "If you do anything described in this document and get yourself arrested (ha, ha!), I refuse to carry any responsibility for it." A long series of words of likely interest to hackers searching the Internet is labeled "Worm food" and "Text for bots only." Eventually the warnings become a description of a mission to combat "terrorist and gang activity"; agreeing to it takes you back to the main Goodtimes page. "(TM)GOODIES", in its juxtaposition of stern warnings giving the impression of an all-powerful and severe authority watching you and hacker references, appears to be a comment on the motives of some hackers: to rebel against what they see as an authoritarian system controlling the Internet and computer software.
Other areas of "Goodtimes" take the visitor to pages of assembly code, screen captures from Telnet sessions with remote servers, an ATM instruction screen, and a briefcase labeled "Goodies(TM)."
"Goodtimes" puts the visitor in the position of "being" a hacker: watching what are apparently private files on a server scroll by us; being herded one-way through a hacked license agreement of, perhaps, a piece of warez (unfortunately there appears to be no singular form of that example of hacker slang, so I'm stuck with the plural. . .); viewing the source code of a program of unknown and possibly nefarious purposes. The imagery is of ownership, money, corporate power, disrupted by illicit, and dangerously thrilling, activity that challenges that power and ownership. Yet even hacking does not break us away from the linear series of warnings without choice in "(TM)GOODIES"; it is part of the predetermined path, part of the structure of control. We never have any choice but to "ACCEPT". What appears to be resistance or cheating the system is all part of the plan.
Natalie Bookchin's "Homework" page links to a page of (mostly outdated) links to net art pieces submitted for this "homework" assignment and Prof. Bookchin's grades and terse evaluations; presumably Prof. Bookchin intended artists in general rather than only her students in particular to send her links, considering that the artists listed are not UCSD students (British and Japanese artists, as well as JODI, show up). On this page she also includes a link to an "evaluation" of her own "homework": an odd e-mail presented as being from one of her students. The e-mail juxtaposes a polite note of thanks, praising her teaching of a course, with an admission of "staring at your hot body" and an exclamation of "damn you have a gorgeous figure" -- jarring things to read when written from a student to a professor. The likely fictional but possibly actual revelation of a private and shocking e-mail out of context is reminiscent of another of Bookchin's projects, her entry in "Desktop Is. . ." in which a screen capture shows windows full of cryptically named art projects, icons for everyday utility programs, and a highly personal, passionately emotional e-mail all sharing the same virtual and visual space.
Kristin Lucas's "Between a Rock and a Hard Drive" offers the visitor a choice of areas of an airport/hotel complex to explore, with names such as "VIP Lounge," "Concourse," "Daycare Center," and "Terrace." The interface consists of photographs of rooms, framed by computer keys. The objects in the photographs talk to each other in cryptic snippets of chat-room conversation; many of these same snippets are among the sounds that play when the visitor's mouse rolls over the keys. Other sounds sometimes have to do with the photograph -- for example, a shot of a filling station is accompanied by keys that produce sounds of revving engines -- but sometimes are general telephone and computer sounds, clicks, buzzers, bells, and thuds. The conversations are almost always banal, sometimes merely many repetitions of "Hi!" and "Hello!" and "Bye!" Only two photographs show people: the silhouetted figure reflected in the washing machine and two indistinct figures by a door in another shot. If the photographs have foregrounds, they are always objects such as sinks, shopping carts, elevator doors, gas pumps, and television sets.
The near-total absence of human figures and the talking objects create an impression of disconnection and distance, yet at the same time the interactive interface involves us actively and draws us in. We feel more connection to the computer-key interface, with its keys that change color and reward us with sounds, than to anything else. As in any space, virtual (chat room) or physical (airport) where many strangers pass through all the time, individual personalities are perceivable only as brief glimpses. The conversations rarely have any coherence -- replies often have little or nothing to do with the comments that went before. Even the FAQ, accessible from the button at the top right of every screen, makes little sense; it is a long list of odd questions whose replies often resemble search engine results in that they relate to a single word or phrase in the question but not the question as a whole, or misunderstand an idiom, or mix up different meanings of the same word. The whole experience feels like a mostly-anonymous chat room, in which the other participants in the conversation, perceivable to the visitor only as their words on the visitor's own screen, seem not entirely real, as if they are figments of the computer's imagination.
Such a "dehumanized" setting might seem creepy, but Lucas's piece shows a whimsical sense of humor throughout.
Mark Napier's "Shredder" program takes any Web page entered into the "Location" bar at the top and turns it into chaos, revealing the source code, fragmenting the graphics, superimposing links on one another, placing text at random across the frame. It prints out information on the server hosting the page in tiny font, and displays the URLs to which all of the links on the page lead. If you click on one of these links, the Shredder shreds and displays that page as well.
Napier includes a variety of links on the "Favorites" page: net.art pages, pages of browser companies, and Barbie.com (explained as "This one's personal"), among others. Even such a simple, minimal page as 404.jodi.org is turned into a jammed-together, largely unreadable mass of text.
The Shredder is essentially an "alternative browser." As Napier explains, it interprets HTML code in a way very different from the way coders expect. Rather than concealing the HTTP header information and HTML code, it displays them. Rather than embedding the links in text and images, it lists them, stacked on top of one another in a blob of text. This sometimes makes navigation easier, while it usually makes comprehension nearly impossible. What little in a shredded Web page that can be seen is mainly "nuts and bolts." To the Shredder's eye, the operating system of the server and the URLs of the links are what the user wants to see, not sequential text or images laid out neatly in a table.
This one's just for fun. It's a vast archive of Web cartoons by the Chapman brothers (or "Brothers Chaps"). Mike Chapman got together in 1996 with their friend F. Craig Zobel to write a children's book about a sweet but dim-witted athlete named Homestar Runner. At the time, the brothers were art and film students. The book went nowhere, but the brothers started to make Mario Paint animations featuring the characters from the book, and later moved on to Flash cartoons. (Some of their early work is on the web at their "Museum"). Their site has been up since 2000, and they have since been able to quit their day jobs and live on the revenue from selling T-shirts and the like on their site. However, the whole thing started out as a hobby and only later developed into a way to make money.
The site redirects the user to a random menu page with interactive rollover buttons that play little movie clips (such as one of the characters crashing into a tree on a sled with a cry of "This sucks!" or a bowling ball knocking over pins) having to do with the theme of that page (a winter landscape or a bowling alley, in those cases). The "Toons" section contains the bulk of the site's material, with numerous "toons" ranging from under a minute to six minutes or longer. The cartoons are episodic, rather than following an ongoing plot; they have a set of central characters in common, and often refer to previously posted cartoons, but there is no plot arc connecting them. The most popular, and many of the funniest, are in the "Strong Bad Emails" section. Strong Bad, a gravelly-voiced little figure in a wrestling mask, boxing gloves, and red boots, is the comic villain who has upstaged the title character of the site; in the "Strong Bad Emails" he riffs on the pieces of fan mail sent to the site, answering viewers' questions and making fun of their grammar, spelling, punctuation, names, places of origin, and any other information they give. The e-mails range from the clever ("Dear Strong Bad, if you had three wishes, what would the second one be?") to the illiterate ("i she be your girlfriend"); the responses often depict the situation posited by the writer, show Strong Bad's wish-fulfillment scenarios, or give the writer what he or she asked to see (such as Strong Bad's children's book, or drawing of a dragon) -- taking it a step further, of course. The cartoons work extensively in parody, spoofing all sorts of products and forms of cultural production; for example, one cartoon features Strong Bad designing a line of ludicrously muscular action figures based on himself and the other characters, another redraws Strong Bad as a Japanese anime character, and others show mock language-teaching records, CD covers, underground comics, and even Strong Bad's "personal Web page" (a series of "photos" of his pet "little yellow thing," the Cheat, surrounded by busy and unrelated animated GIFs, pointless frames with scrollbars that lead nowhere, and "Under Construction" notices). The references and parodies tend to concentrate around pop culture since the 1980s, although 1940s-50s graphic design is occasionally referenced and there is a fairly extensive set of "Old Timey" scenes starring early-movie versions of the characters, mimicking early 20th-century popular music, and referring to "hobos," "drinking bootleg hooch and listening to the jazz," and the like). Sometimes the parodies are self-parodies, but intentional ones; the creators of the site laugh at themselves while they laugh at everyone else, producing clumsy, poorly tweened Flash animations with monotone voices, or explaining how to "answer emails like a true Strong Bad."
Strong Bad, the true star of the site despite its name, is an eternal adolescent perpetually in search of "makeouts," get-rich-quick schemes, and pranks to play on the other characters, particularly the witless, tangential, and cheerfully trusting Homestar and his own unpopular, glum brother Strong Sad, the "little gray fat kid with elephant feet." He seems permanently stuck in the 1980s: he peppers his speech with enthusiastic exclamations of "totally awesome," and uses an old 386 computer running DOS and simple, thickly pixelated computer games such as one might remember from the early days of the personal computer. In the earlier e-mails he even used a computer with a monochrome monitor where the text glowed green against its black background and diagonal lines scrolled up across the screen. He enjoys 1980s heavy metal, monster trucks, action figures with "severe knife fight damage" that "ooze radioactive goo"; his crude pen and pencil drawings usually involve something getting "burninated" or "ARROWED!" or otherwise destroyed. The other characters are "Moron", "Loser", "Dumpface"; anything he doesn't like is "total crap."
Yet for all his bullying and posturing, Strong Bad usually loses. He'll try to cheat at contests, be discovered, and mutter dejectedly, "Holy crap"; for all that he claims to be a "babe magnet" he never has a date; despite his claims to be the most "totally awesome" and popular character, he spends Labor Day weekend sitting alone on a cooler talking to a dead tree while everyone else has a party; in one e-mail, asked if he's ever done stand-up comedy, he hastily and defensively denies that he has, but Strong Sad shows a videotape of his childhood talent-show performance in which he gets only forced laughs at his lame jokes until his pants fall down and he waddles offstage exclaiming "Oh, no!" Furthermore, some of his interests run rather contrary to his macho image; he likes to sing and to cook fancy dishes requiring that he borrow a fondue pot. Several of the cartoons question his masculinity and heterosexuality. In one, a male fan writes that he finds Strong Bad attractive, and Strong Bad's reaction is momentary interest followed by an outraged cry of "What? Brian?" In another, Strong Sad confides that the patch on the family couch covers Strong Bad's scrawled message about one Carl Jenkins, whom the much younger Strong Bad thought was a woman and was "HOTT!!" And in two of the Halloween cartoons, Strong Bad dresses in drag. These moments make him at once funnier and more sympathetic; rather than seeing merely a bully, even a humorous one, we see someone whose tough, egotistical, and utterly self-assured image is as much a mask as the one he wears on his face.
The Fulifier (as its creator explains, from the Swedish word ful, meaning ugly) turns any Web page into a garish, ugly mess. It retains the original text, but adds a busy (and often downright appalling) background that makes it near unreadable, changes the font (generally to Times New Roman, sometimes to Comic Sans MS, Arial, or Courier), and changes the formatting. The text often becomes center-justified; the color may change, often to one that clashes horribly or is completely unreadable against the background; the text might sprout underlining, slant into italics, or turn to all-caps shouting or miXeD cAsE liKe tHiS. It's randomized so that hitting Refresh will create a new hideous version of the same page; it also acts almost like a browser in itself, in the manner of the Shredder, so that clicking a link will take you to a "Fulified" version of the page to which the link points.
Occasionally the Fulifier will produce an interesting color scheme or aesthetically pleasing set of elements, but that's a rarity. A lot of the fun of looking at it is the shock of recognition you get -- "Oh yes, I've seen LOTS of Web pages that look just like this!" One particularly interesting thing to do with the Fulifier is to feed it a corporate site such as Microsoft (here's the Fulified version: Fulified Microsoft) or Yahoo (Fulified Yahoo) or CNN (Fulified CNN) and see it stripped to its basic components and refinished as if by a colorblind and spectacularly tasteless script kiddie. An entirely new "corporate aesthetic". . . Some sites seem more badly mangled than others; Yahoo becomes unintelligible, while CNN is generally still possible to navigate. I plugged Smith's site into the Fulifier (as if it weren't ugly enough to begin with) and it changes little beyond chopping up the table and replacing the already ugly background with an even uglier one.