Code Hacking Navigation Browser User Resistance Content Container HTML Serendipity URL Remix

The advent of the new technologies led to a considerable improvement in the field of communications. Their contribution, among other things, was and is that of assuring the transmission of messages with least expenditure possible, their better and wider diffusion, and the lowest level of error in their reception. This last concept can be considered in some cases as a challenge for artistic thought. The symbolic productions which art generates, rather than seeking the message’s clarity, actually favor its opacity. In the communications system, art functions like noise. As Deleuze would say, “art doesn´t communicate, it resists.”
Artistic production generates a space of reflection which does not seek truths, but rather, quite to the contrary, sabotages language, its structure and its signs. The different works which make up this selection adopt a viral behavior which will be reflected in very different ways, while highlighting the clash between art and communication. The less the clear the message is, the richer the works are in their meanings, and the greater is the effort necessary by viewers to recodify them.

Alexei Shulgin
ABC
Online project. 1997

ABC is presented as a minimalist mélange of an encyclopedia full of risky content and a portal designed with air-tight meticulousness.
In this piece, one of his first for the Internet, Shulgin draws our attention to one of the clichés of web art, the domain name, the URL. The user, once he manages to wrestle control of the pages, which seem to have a mind of their own, accesses a series of links which might at first glance be mistaken for an exercise in concrete poetry: “aaa”, “vvv”, “zzz”, triads that launch us to their counterparts www.aaa.com, www.vvv.com or www.zzz.com, and so on with each of the letters.
From the website for the American Automobile Association we go to the Better Business Bureau, Central Christian Church, Dynamic Digital Depth, before arriving, much later, at the predictable content of more famous triads such as WWW or XXX. In this way, the experience proposed by Shulgin will resemble that of a stroller whose itinerary, controlled by external rules as arbitrary as following a street map in alphabetical order, is transformed into a surprising diversion and, at the same time, into a metaphor for normal Internet browsing habits.

Vuk Cosic
Metablink
Online project. 1998

EThis work is defined within the experiments with the medium and with the formal and functional aspect of HTML, browsers and navigation. Metablink makes use of a couple of prominent features in the “new” versions of browsers at the time and which were overused by users-designers back then. We are referring to frames and to blinking. With an obvious dearth of resources, Vuk Cosic built a website without text and with practically no images, only 1 pixel, which blinks hypnotically from black to white, submerging us in a pure digital experience in which we are connected far beyond the intercession of the image or word.
In addition to this call to observe the forms that go beyond content, Metablink offers a satiric commentary on interactivity, a theme that was also central, though little debated, in those formative years. Interactivity limited to moving a scroll bar if only to give a feeling of control.

Brian Mackern
No content
Website. 2001

The No-content.org website plays with one of the forms that may disappear before too long, that of pre-loaders. These flash animations that were displayed to entertain the user while the main content was loading should be small enough to be seen right away by those with slow connections, and yet also entertaining so as to keep them from browsing away.
In the case of Mackern’s project, the wait is infinite as each pre-loader is replaced by another. We interact with the animation until it is substituted by another, and so on, until we finally realize that there is no content or, better yet, that what we are seeing and enjoying is the content.
The piece makes us reflect on waiting, contemplation and utility. What would happen if we put our critical nature aside and forgot for a moment that flowers are designed to attract insects, and gave in to gazing at its useless beauty?

Joan Leandre
Retro You R/C
Hacked video game. 2001

The closed, canned and apparently unyielding codes double as challenging targets in acts of sabotage. Like the one carried out by Joan Leandre in his work RetroYou R/C, in which he hacks a remote control racing videogame by modifying, among other parameters, the force of gravity. Despite these variations, in Leandre’s first hacked versions of the game, it remains recognizable, though the user’s interaction is dramatically limited. The virtual “reality” experience is transformed into one that is merely digital. It goes without saying that in the digital world there is no force of gravity, there is no up or down, and if it has provided anything to the “real” world, it is to call into question these hierarchical differences. Like the car in the videogame in a weightless environment, it throws the “simulation” of reality up in the air, as well as the inviolability of the closed source code.
In later versions of RetroYou R/C, not only are the physical emulation parameters modified, but also the visuals and sounds. Little by little, the game went from being a simulation of a remote-controlled toy car to a narcotic digital experience in an audio-visual kaleidoscope.

Giselle Beiguelman
Recycled
Online project. 2001

As Giselle Beiguelman herself explains in the presentation of her work, the site is recycled, meaning none of its pages are original. Nor are the objects included in them. All were found, some bought, but all were created for other purposes. They are all second hand goods, as Beiguelman wanted to emphasize by leaving each author’s signature in the scripts and applets used.
And that raises a question for which there is no definitive answer: How to know if something in the digital domain is recycled? How to know whether it is a second-, first- or third-hand good? And then again, does recycling objects imply recycling the message? Does the original message exist or is each message the product of a recombination of messages?
In any case, for the user the experience resembles a collection of ready-made digitals, or becomes a déjà vu of past browsing sessions.

Giselle Beiguelman
//**Code_UP
Online project. Installation .2004

An odd juxtaposition is what Antonioni proposes in his movie Blow Up. A random encounter in a park, a supposed crime and a single piece of evidence, lost in the fuzzy grains of a photograph. Black and white dots that make up the preamble of what will be a binary image. In his project Code Up, Giselle Beiguelman reminds us that digital images are the product of language. A strictly programmed language. With Antonioni’s movie as a base, the artist experiments with the different parameters that “describe” the digital image, the pixel, the decomposition of color between red, green and blue, and with the system for refreshing the screen, changing them radically.
Beyond the radical differences between the photographic and digital realms, beyond the differences between information and data, Beiguelman sets a trap similar to Antonioni’s. Like the photographer in Blow Up, we finally realize that the documentary evidence does not seem to lead to any reality.