For us, it's not an error jodi interviewed by Florian Cramer, Dordrecht/NL, Oct. 11, 2007 fc: With your early work "404" , you might have been the first artists to make a network error an artwork... jo: For us, 404 is not an error. 404 is an error in http, a basic error on a server. We had first made that error ourselves and saw that our server provider... di: ...had a specific 404 page in the middle of our web site. He used a sound file from Kubrick's "2001 - A Space Odyssee", all kinds of graphics around it and advertising for renting web space. So we thought, he uses error space, commercializing and capitalizing on it. It was a bit like wastelands. But that 404 space was really valuable because many people end up there by mistyping. So _we_ should go and use it, and make something there. fc: At your presentation tonight, you mentioned that it was important for you to admit an error when it occurs. Why then didn't you keep the provider error message as it was? jo: We try to get control over errors, maybe. A lot of times in our work, there are errors we make ourselves, or errors people make using our web site, and we think: hey... di: ...it's an interesting thing. In the case of "Location" , the truth is that the green code, and the surface versus the source code, had been an error, a mistake I made. We wanted the regular ASCII you can see in the HTML source code, but I had forgotten a bracket. So suddenly this destroyed ASCII showed up, and at that time, I was really afraid, just like other people later were maybe thinking, that I was destroying the whole computer at this moment. jo: ...and I said: Hey, this looks cool, this is better than what we originally wanted. di: So we thought, yes, we have to reproduce and keep it, not clean it up and do it "the right way", but keep the emotion which I had looking at it first. After an hour, we settled and said: yeah, this is not breaking our computer, this has just broken our understanding of what a regular image, a computer image is. And if we put it into the web site, is this a valuable thing to do? Would the police come up to our door [laughs] or would there be twenty angry people hitting at our windows to try, well, to clean it up because we didn't clean up an error. And that were also the first comments we got about this page. They were like... jo: ..."learn to use HTML!"... di: They really saw it as an error, not as the image of an error which we projected. jo: In the first days of the Internet, a lot of errors were committed. di: Everyone made errors because you copied things you didn't understand. We were trying all kinds of things with wrong HTML, commands contradicting and on top of each other, background that repeated and so on. But gradually, the browser erased these possibilities. While some of these commands produced effects in one browser, in the second version, they did not. We know that Jamie Zawinski, then one of the coders of Netscape, regularly browsed jodi.org, at the point where we thought that we are just like beta testers of their product. And then I thought: "I don't wanna be the weird guy, and then they come up, having the power anyway, and clean the weirdness out of it". fc: But the saga continues, since you have the same experience with your current blog project ... jo: No, it's totally different. We decided to do something in blogspot.com [a popular blogging platform owned by Google]. We decided to make blogs, and decided to make the question: What is your freedom of speech in a blog? If you put in a piece of ASCII, it repeats itself... di: ...because there are lot of repeating characters in an ASCII... jo: ...and the robot controlling the blog space recognizes the repetition of an ASCII character and says "you are spam" and... di: ...automatically freezes your own blog. jo: So we got an E-Mail: "This is suspicious blogging"... di: ..."maybe you are a spammer, maybe not, but from this point on, your blog is frozen. And wait until a human will review your site". You can get this message within two minutes. jo: So our test was not about errors, but about the freedom of speech in blog software. People are using blog software as their tool to make web pages, and it's not free at all. There is always a bot looking over you. fc: Is finding the error, and finding the limits of free speech, a romantic project? jo: It's not romantic, it's punk. di: But punk is romantic. jo: Nowadays, punk is romantic. But I'm from the eighties. di: Romanticism is typically the one man, one person with the impossible belief in fighting against something. This is maybe a bit abstract, but it is a kind of feeling we have when we work. It's bit like, yeah, kind of against things... jo: No, no, we basically... di: ...it's really a guerilla type of attitude. You also know that you cannot win from a total system. You are reduced to a beta tester, or you are reduced to a good-looking graphic, or you are reduced to a style or whatever. And you know that from the beginning, already when you're doing it. We're not stupid. But still it's important to do. Someone has to do it, us or someone else, it didn't matter. jo: Silly enough, we are just parasites of the system. If the system of the Internet wouldn't evolve, the system of games and programs wouldn't evolve... We're parasites of them, and we don't want to follow their way. That's not romanticism. di: Movies like Tron or Blade Runner, hacker movies, The Matrix, are trying to find romantic images for systems that are just technical machinery. So we use some that imagery in the early web site, yes, we combine clichés of how computers look inside. We work a lot with the surface, it's not clean conceptual. jo: Well, it's funny... di: And an error is one of these big mythical things. News articles say that for people who work on computers all day, three quarters of every Monday is spent on fixing their computer, in the offices, trying to clean it up, the viruses, things that don't work anymore. The error is a big part of a big waste of time. It has an economical connection with everything, and it's part of the computer. jo: No - the error is a predefined thing. An error is not per definition an error. Someone in society decides: this is an error, and this is not an error. And it's very suspicious to be an error. An error is to not follow the rules. If you make an error in the programming, there could be errors in the goal you achieve. But it's only the goal you have in mind to achieve, and not the side effects - because the side effects which are the error... di: ...are more interesting than the goal you have. And as an artist, you are free to give up the one goal you had and then decide that the sideways are more interesting. jo: Not only as an artist, but also as a scientist, you should explore the errors, not the things we know. fc: So does working with the error manifest artistic autonomy? jo: No. fc: No? jo: No, I only say that the error, in a way, is predefined, or even defined retrospectively. Sometimes, in computers, it becomes an error afterwards. Beforehand, the territory is open. But suddenly it's: "oh, this is okay, or this is not okay"; suddenly, there is an error. If you tear the code apart, it's not an error. And even if you tear HTML, it's not definitely an error. It's sometimes the boundary which most of the people say it is. It might not be in there. For me, it's not an error because we knew in the moment of this green ASCII page, despite all the people who said you have to learn HTML, we did know that the mistake was this bracket around the preformatted text.