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Jamie King
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Name: Jodi.org Design: Jodi http://www.jodi.org http://, since 1995 |
Jodi.org positions itself as a thoroughgoing critique of Internet practice, deploying the familiar glyphs and signs of Internet protocol both as central components of its look and feel, and in order to test the conventions of coding, design and the organisation of 'content' on the Web. The site is assembled around the conceit of the malfunctioning interface, with the index pages taking their cues from crash screens all too familiar to many Net users. The front page, for instance, offers an ersatz 'Transfer Interrupted' message as a hyperlink; upon clicking, the visitor is taken to one of three wilfully obscure index pages, all of which take shape around a degraded, corrupted Cartesian grid, offering arbitrary hyperlinks with impenetrable and unhelpful titles such as 'MAP' or '404' (from the notorious '404 Not Found' error). It's a navigational system which mimics and parodies the often nebulous modes of sorting and accessing information on the Web at large, where visitors are left clicking more or less at random, not really knowing where they're going next. What Jodi's oblique hyperlinks reveal, in fact, is a series of acute dissertations on the aesthetics and aestheticisation of the network's various transmissions. In '400' [http://www.jodi.org/400], the shivering lines of text which fill screen after screen once again play on the outward signs of machine meltdown; this is the other side of the Web, the side filled with error messages and hung systems, miles away from the gloss and polish of java-powered, Shockwave-enabled, Stylesheet-friendly browsing. Clicking (assuming that you can find the hyperlinks) just moves the visitor through page after page of incomprehensible script, which may or may not be real system error messages, java script, C++, or PERL. This use of code, or the semblance of code, plays upon the visitor's ignorance: we know that this is what makes the Internet work, but we don't quite know how. This can make a hunk of esoteric alphanumerics seem at once beguiling and threatening. Is it a sign that things have gone wrong, or that we're somehow seeing through into the workings of the Net? Jodi.org never lets on. This same unparsable, corrupt code is also the central component of '404' [http://404.jodi.org/bcd/], which seems to lampoon the transmission of Web-based bulletin board systems. Here, the visitor is presented with a long page of other visitor's posts, messages which lapse in and out of comprehensibility not unlike, in many cases, the real thing. 'The secret is to write like this:' someone has written, 'v#w$ls ~r$ v#w$ls ~nd ...' some secret. The 'Re.' button poised at the bottom of the page then asks visitors to respond to a code for which there is no key, to add their views to the garbage already up there whereupon a (hidden) script quickly turns the response into gobbledigook. This critique of the threaded bulletin board system, which despite the rhetoric of interactivity that surrounds it is often put to work hosting unbelievably banal interchanges, is all the more amusing for its harsh unforgivingness. In fact, this is true of the whole site: while its scope does not extend to the offline world, Jodi.org is unfailingly acute in documenting and commenting upon the excesses, and the structured absences, of the networked domain. This review is an excerpt from the book Website Graphics Now, an international source book on the best in Global site design. Website Graphics Now was edited by Mediamatic and published in July 1999 by BIS Publishers in co-operation with Thames and Hudson. For more information on Website Graphics Now read the introduction, or see the complete selection.
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