18 OCT - 09 NOV 2008

IMAL, Center for Digital Cultures and Technology
30 Quai des Charbonnages/Koolmijnenkaai, 1080 Brussels

JODI, the Belgian-Dutch duo pioneers of Net Art, explore the relations between the world we build through the Internet and the one based on our past mental and physical maps. Services such as GoogleMaps have changed radically our worldview by making the Globe accessible as a commercial multi-user surface. Mapping these online geometrical constructs to reality and vice versa, overlaying their figures as jogging paths, The 'Parc Royal' of Brussels (Warande Park) becomes an INFO Park revealing symbols and mysteries of the capitale of Belgium and Europe, amplifying or deconstructing them through an intricate web of data and associations.

For centuries, geometry has been overloaded with symbols, starting from pure mathematical objects to esoteric and mystic signs, hiding in complex figures meanings to be revealed to the gurus, the persons in the know or the psychedelic explorers. Geometrical shapes and lines were drawn on the territories, the cities, the architectures and the monuments or the crop fields. The Royal Parc of Brussels is a well known example with its triangle + circle = Masonic compass. JODI is connecting this long tradition of tracing geometry on the ground with the new geometries one can draw on the surface of the Earth as proposed by online tools such as Google Maps and Google Earth. Of course, the duo of artists draws in a pure JODI style: hectic and free traces resulting from extreme coding and hacking. As they always did since their first web pages in 1995, JODI uses the codes of Internet (e.g. html) and the codes inside the computers (binary) as their artistic material. They paved the way for Net Art and renewed Computer Arts as much as Nam June Paik opened new fields for video art. But the work of JODI plays also with the processes of coding/decoding, of deciphering cryptic data in a chaotic surface. Messages are hidden, only visible to the ones who will dare to dig into the code (see http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/). In the exhibition GEOGOO (Info Park), many things can be constructed into meanings, it just depends on you and your capacity to disconnect and reconnect: the radial glimpses of the sunshines in the video, the 3 DJ turntables laid on a perfect triangle at the visitor's disposal (backmasking!), the jogging walks through Brussels roundabouts. And if you can not reconfigure, just contemplate, it is beautifully rewarding.

Websites

http://www.imal.org/GEOGOO/
http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/
http://www.jodi.org
http://geogoo.net