“You have to get people very quickly,” says JODI, an award winning duo of video game mod artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, specializing in video game mod and web browser crashing art. “You need to give them a karate punch in the neck as soon as possible. And then — of course — they don’t get to the details, and the site will just sit there for the next five years or ten years, or maybe 100 years. And maybe their children will have the time to explore the details… [(laughs)].”184 JODI’s work, like forced waking, and silence musics, spurts in manipulation of the error in a creation. Their piece My Desktop OS X 10.4.7 (2007)185 is simply a zoomed-in view of a user negotiating a Macintosh OS X desktop screen at rapid pace, scrolling and clicking and blipping back and forth through various folders, programs, access points; copying and pasting glyphs of command text; causing the system’s error sounds and movement usage tones while a synth-dictation voice spells out each move in collaged glitch. The result, while at first startlingly commonplace in appearance for the ubiquity of the computer screen as realm of art (and after all, we are probably viewing this video on our own desktop, a screen inside a screen), becomes quickly claustrophobic and manic in its process, made more so particularly because of its very banality and any day, everyday, but supermagnified terror sound.
The very fact of much of JODI’s work being indistinguishable but from certain stretched moments of daily integrated electronic experience is what makes it, as an entity, so effective — like the strange light of certain scenes in Inland Empire, there and not there, like ours but slightly off. JODI’s modded scenes of popular games like Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem II catch the user’s avatars in glitch boxes made of colored space that interrupts the body and the air — sheets of architecture folding into limbs and breathing space around the user’s only tool inside the codeworld — while the errored sound of the game inside the game goes on. Another project, simply titled OSS, comes on a CD-ROM, which when inserted in the user’s computer immediately overwrites the desktop with a pyramid of 317 files. The effect, unlike the string of viruses and spam popular throughout the ’90s, is not to cause dysfunction, but to “manipulate the surface of your system. An interface is a translation of code and your understanding is what you believe and that’s all there is to a computer, it’s a language.”186
The effect is not destruction, but reordering, renegotiation of the content and interaction with our other household, the electronic rooms where we store not only our digital identity information (credit cards, numeric values, browser cookies, even background wallpaper and design), but also the more abstract or self-negotiated tokens (Word files, pictures, image of self). The computer, in some way, has become the most direct avatar of the user — show me your desktop and I can likely glean a dozen things about you, from sense of order to priority to interests and ideas. A computer is, in some sick but honest way, a child — an amputated mirror of the self we interact with via buttons, cameras, microphones, and light. This is not the case for all bodies, surely, as some can hide out, but it is more the case than at any point before, and perhaps more so than we’d like to imagine. Even JODI talking about the overlay interface of OSS seems like some handbook to a waking: “There is no About or Read.me file, just this grid of folders. It is a stress situation, some people try to deal with it, others want to get the CD out as fast as possible but then realize there is no CD icon and it gets even worse.”187
Brian Eno explores this sort of self-mesmerizing concept even more demonstrably in his sound and video project 77 Million Paintings, which combines an enormous database of randomly combined generations of color, light, and tone to create an aural chamber. The work is composed actually of only 296 works that in collage and juxtaposition, along with the layers of sound, develop a field that seems to the viewer (and the creator) to be ever-shifting, but is actually mathematically rather smalclass="underline" a mistakenly finite infinitude. According to Eno, one would have to watch the program for 450 years to see a repeat. This confined but massive rubric, he says, drums power from a reversal of “the supposition that you can always hear something again. We’re so used to recordings. The last 120 years of human history have been this tiny little blip… where suddenly we could have identical experiences again and again.”188 In this way 77 Million Paintings models an insomnia enslaved, the endless spooling busy brain of a sleepless meat at night, parsing and reparsing the same terrain into new glyphs. As though in the head the parsing ramifications and wrinkles rooms seem to go on and on in all ways therein forever, ultimately the branching and unbranching all leads back to the same center, the brain space occupying a negligible 2 percent of any human’s weight.
Though it has always been this way — translucent rhizomes and complex histories set on any air, and the brain endlessly wanting and not succeeding in defining itself within — the package of the junk from which we might select our elements grows only larger, and more readily awaiting, and more there. The internet itself becomes another realm of endless hive meat over the always waking 24/7/365 bright-lit gorge. Not only are we now dealing with the hours of our experience and seeing, the residues of every person’s person hung like unseen curtains over every inch where we inhale, there is also now a second, electronic looming, rooms buried and married to all rooms, a silence seeping of some nothing, renaming names inside our sleep, or at least gone. Toggling between the Google SafeSearch feature’s levels of access — two modes adaptable by any user, with a third offering “moderate” coverage between the two — quickly reveals the onslaught of fuck and feces connectable to most any search. Google mother and in the first page of image results (at the time of this writing) you get a picture of a nude dude ramming his cock into a young girl’s face while another, older woman lies back on the bed to watch. This next to a picture of somebody’s grandmother with a thank-god-someone-still-loves-me face, holding flowers and wearing pearls. Though we no longer need to remember all the information we once had to store inside our heads in order to make it useful, the definitions we might gather in the same name are all gyrating.
From enough distance overhead everything appears the same. The way on Google Maps the cursor’s tiny outstretched hand clenches the earth before you drag — the leaning diamond-shaped eye hidden over each and every one of our houses, capturing that air in database-made air. The weird looming patches of gray blank space over new area as the browser waits to load. Google-mapping “hell” actually tenders a result: “We don’t have imagery at this zoom level for this region.” A search for “heaven” returns 2,894 locations. Photographs of photographs, to be zoomed in on or out from, made into directions, toured, printed out.