Some of My Favourite Web Sites Are Art
http://www.alberta.com/unfamiliarart/

Project #8:

JODI
Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans
http://www.jodi.org

Still the oldest and best of the "browser artists," Jodi continues to
crash, bang and boom around the insides of the internet. Jodi is the web
site that makes you wonder if your computer is broken. Jodi loves the
look and feel of raw code, using it often in their work. Jodi.org
projects are dominanted by text, and when images appear, they tend to
disorient (or reorient) the user. Jodi's raw materials are text and
image fragments, their templates the syntaxes of computer code.

Is Jodi just a bunch of hostile nonsense? I should hope so. If you look
closely at the blinking screens, "system error" bombs and wildly
animated images, you will see a keen interest in the browser itself as a
focal point and structuring framework for art making. Jodi reflects
directly on the nature of the web by using the web as art, not just the
vehicle for art. Jodi pages are like machines that run on their own.

Jodi has two presences, web and email. In fact, since the beginning
email intervention has been nearly as central to Jodi's artistic
agitation as their well known web sites. Email bombs on usenet are old
hat for Jodi. Cryptic, distracting, and sometimes chaotic, email from
Jodi usually looks like the error log from a crashed
mainframe–characters all jumbled into a sweetly numbing blob of text.
If you get one, save it.

Jodi's most recent project, 404.jodi.org, seems to be the least
failure-oriented of their current work. Inspired by the web's "404"
error, or dead end link, 404.jodi.org is a collection of pages where
users can post text messages and see what other users have written. But
this happy little bulletin board system becomes confused as the inputted
text is pushed through various distorting filters before being added to
the web page for general viewing. The result is a rather curious type of
scrawled guest book.