This is an article about oss.jodi.org, written by Tilman Baumgärtel
https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Boeswilliger-Code-3441597.html.
(Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)))
Anyone who has looked at the website of the Dutch-Belgian net art duo Jodi (www.jodi.org) in the last few days might have been disappointed: instead of the usual colorful Jodi chaos, there is only a short email on a gray background on the site. The rest of the "work" of the prominent net artists, who among other things participated in documenta X, has completely disappeared for a few days. The reason: the American provider of the website has fired the two artists.
The Internet company "ValueWeb", which "hosts" their entire website (i.e. keeps it available for retrieval on its Internet servers), had written an email to Joan Hemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, the artists behind the notorious site, two weeks ago. It said:
"As you know, one of their WWW pages contains malicious javascript that crashes the browser.... Please remove this page or we will be forced to delete your account with us."
Since then, Jodi have been net artists without a net: they have had to take all their artistic work from the past four years off the Internet.
The bone of contention is the work "OSS." Anyone who enters the WWW address oss.jodi.org into their browser will still experience their blue Internet miracle. "OSS" is the only Jodi work still online, and it does strange things to the browser: The surfing software suddenly seems to take on a life of its own and keeps opening new windows of its own accord, which dance around wildly on the monitor and can hardly be closed again. As "ValueWeb" had correctly recognized, a line of code in the programming language "Javascript" triggers the computer chaos. It doesn't crash the browser, of course, only the surprising duplication. The subdomain oss.jodi.org, however, is not located on the server of "ValueWeb" at all, but on a computer of the Amsterdam net art provider desk.nl.
Although the two artists live in Barcelona, they have set up a large part of their website with the American provider "ValueWeb," because it is cheaper to have an Internet presence there than with the European competition. The fact that the Florida company is now refusing to serve Jodi for technical reasons is a completely new phenomenon. Previously, websites had been shut down because they contained pornography or politically offensive messages - and not because they contained "malicious" Javascript.
In the guestbook that Jodi created on her website, Internet users from all over the world now show solidarity with the artists. "The whole site never crashed my browser. It merely made me laugh," writes one outraged netizen. An Internet company from Israel has even already offered the artist couple to host their entire site for free - out of enthusiasm for Jodi's work. But they only want to bring their site back online piece by piece with a new Internet company. And they wonder why museums and media art institutions are happy to put on a net art exhibition, but don't want to invest in the infrastructure.
https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Boeswilliger-Code-3441597.html.
(Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)))
Anyone who has looked at the website of the Dutch-Belgian net art duo Jodi (www.jodi.org) in the last few days might have been disappointed: instead of the usual colorful Jodi chaos, there is only a short email on a gray background on the site. The rest of the "work" of the prominent net artists, who among other things participated in documenta X, has completely disappeared for a few days. The reason: the American provider of the website has fired the two artists.
The Internet company "ValueWeb", which "hosts" their entire website (i.e. keeps it available for retrieval on its Internet servers), had written an email to Joan Hemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, the artists behind the notorious site, two weeks ago. It said:
"As you know, one of their WWW pages contains malicious javascript that crashes the browser.... Please remove this page or we will be forced to delete your account with us."
Since then, Jodi have been net artists without a net: they have had to take all their artistic work from the past four years off the Internet.
The bone of contention is the work "OSS." Anyone who enters the WWW address oss.jodi.org into their browser will still experience their blue Internet miracle. "OSS" is the only Jodi work still online, and it does strange things to the browser: The surfing software suddenly seems to take on a life of its own and keeps opening new windows of its own accord, which dance around wildly on the monitor and can hardly be closed again. As "ValueWeb" had correctly recognized, a line of code in the programming language "Javascript" triggers the computer chaos. It doesn't crash the browser, of course, only the surprising duplication. The subdomain oss.jodi.org, however, is not located on the server of "ValueWeb" at all, but on a computer of the Amsterdam net art provider desk.nl.
Although the two artists live in Barcelona, they have set up a large part of their website with the American provider "ValueWeb," because it is cheaper to have an Internet presence there than with the European competition. The fact that the Florida company is now refusing to serve Jodi for technical reasons is a completely new phenomenon. Previously, websites had been shut down because they contained pornography or politically offensive messages - and not because they contained "malicious" Javascript.
In the guestbook that Jodi created on her website, Internet users from all over the world now show solidarity with the artists. "The whole site never crashed my browser. It merely made me laugh," writes one outraged netizen. An Internet company from Israel has even already offered the artist couple to host their entire site for free - out of enthusiasm for Jodi's work. But they only want to bring their site back online piece by piece with a new Internet company. And they wonder why museums and media art institutions are happy to put on a net art exhibition, but don't want to invest in the infrastructure.
