Q: With your work "404", you might have been the first people to make a network error an artwork... J: For us, 404 is not an error. 404 is an error in HTML. It's a basic error on a server. And at the moment where we made that work, we made that error and saw that our server provider... D: ...had a specific 404 page in the middle of our web site. So he had made an... J: ...intervention. D: When you typed a wrong name in the jodi web site somewhere, you came to the 404 from our provider, but it was like a media spectacle. He had a sound file from Kubrick's "2001 - A Space Odyssee" who said "Hey HAL - the computer - you can't do that!". He had all kinds of graphics around it, and at the same time advertising, to rent web space. So we thought "Woo", he uses space within our space. And he uses error space, capitalizes and commercializes error space. So this is also valuable space. So _we_ should go and use it, and make something there. It was a bit like the "brakke grond", the wastelands: you know it's there, but you don't really see it and value it. But actually, that 404 space was really valuable, because many people end up in 404 space, by mistyping and so on. F: Just one hour ago at your presentation in Dordrecht, you said for you it is important to admit errors, things you cannot control. So why didn't you keep the provider error message of that guy as it was? J: 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... D: ...it's an interesting thing. [Location] It's true that errors like the one of the green code, surface versus code, was an error, a mistake which I made. At that time, we were on the computer, and I forgot the bracket, so we wanted the regular ASCII. So suddenly this thing, this destroyed ASCII showed up, and I was really afraid. Of course I am talking about different times, because it's such an emblematic image in our connection to computers, and I have been asking myself how, what happened at that moment. And I know I was really afraid. Just like other people later were maybe thinking, I was really afraid that I broke the computer. At least the browser had faulted, and I didn't know how the browser affected the whole computer - if something was really wrong in the browser, but I was thinking that maybe I was just destroying the whole computer at this moment. J: ...and I said: Hey, this looks cool, this is better than rest! D: And then I realized, it is not physically damaging anything, this is just surface like regular text or regular display, except that there is one bracket missing, or extra to it. And I was already so afraid and not used to that strange appearance of the surface so that I thought, yes, we have to reproduce it, we have to keep it, not clean it up and do it the right way, but keep the emotion which I and we had looking at it, not understanding it. After an hour, we kind of settled and said: yeah, this is not breaking our computer, this is not breaking anything, this has just broken our understanding of an image, of a computer image. It broke my understanding of what a regular image was. And I thought: Well, we have it now, can we keep it? Can we reproduce it, and can we send it into the Internet and put it into the web site? - Yes, okay, then why should we do it? 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. The first were like... J: ..."learn to use HTML!"... D: "Where did you learn HTML, are you stupid or what? Don't you know you have to close the bracket? I am sorry, I don't want to upset you, but don't you know...", and so on, and "Oh, you are sooo bad amateurs, you cannot be in the Yahoo list". Actually, the first mail of Yahoo - Yahoo was back then the Google of the time, the final index of everything on the Web - they said, - we had applied to them and said "take us into your index" - they said "yeah, no, we're sorry, but"... J: ..."you first have to learn HTML"... D: ..."and before we cannot take this, it's bad for you" [laughs]. There was something strange, they really saw it as an error, not as an image of an error, while it was an image of an error which we projected. It was an error which we had made locally, when you make HTML locally, and then you upload it to the mass medium of the Internet, and anyone because a participant of what you put there, you multiply it. And that happened in a very convincing way, it worked exactly as it was, people perceived it as an error, they thought: "this is a mistake". They were panicking, "I don't understand..." J: In the first days of the Internet, a lot of errors were committed. For example, "BinHex", our first collaborative project.... D: Everyone made errors because you copied things you didn't understand... J: There was this code; if you said, "background 1, 2, 3, 4", it made an animation of 1, 2, 3, 4. In the next browser, in Netscape, they took it out. So now, BinHex looks kind of sad, so-to-say, ... D: ...well, a bit boring, it's part of the web site of jodi which was kind of the most experimental, if you want, we were trying all kinds of things with the wrong HTML, commands on top of each other, contradicting 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], they looked regularly in jodi, at the point where we thought that we are just like beta testers of their product. And then I thought: "This is strange, I don't wanna be the weird guy, and then they come up and they have the power anyway, and then they clean the weirdness out of it". J: He would never admit it. But at that time, we had regular E-Mail contact with him. D: He mailed a few times: "yeah, cool web site", and things like that. And actually I said the same thing to Josephine Bosma about this, and she literally mailed him: "Did you change things in your browser because you were looking at things in the jodi web site", [and he replied:] "No, we did not, but I admit we looked at it regularly." J: So what is the error in beta testing? Q: But the saga continues, since you have the same experience with your current blog project. Or is it different? D: A little. J: No, it's totally different. We decided to do something in Blogspot, which is similar to MySpace. 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... D: There is lot of repeating characters in an ASCII... J: ...and any robot in the blog space recognizes the repetition of an ASCII character and says "you are spam" and... D: ...automatically freezes your own blog. J: So we got an E-Mail: "This is suspicious"... D: ..."this is suspicious blogging, 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. After opening a new blog, you can post five mails to your blog, ASCII-style mail, and within half an hour, you will not be able to post to your own blog anymore. Because there are a lot of blogs made by generic software, but we made this kind of generic link web sites where there are a lot of links in there to gain money with links, and so on. J: My experience is that it just repeats a letter combination and a word, and an ASCII does that a lot. With a letter combination like typing "aaaaaaa" is in the same word all over again, you could a trigger a bot like the bot of their own. And our test was not about errors, our test was 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 a restriction. There is always a bot looking over you. Like saying you can't put... D: ...strange words, strange letter combinations... J: You can't put "fuck" in a blog because it's spammed, of course, but if you put in an ASCII, it's spammed as well. Q: Isn't finding the error, and finding the limits of speech, a romantic project? J: It's not romantic, it's punk. D: But punk is romantic. J: Nowadays, punk is romantic. But I'm from the eighties. D: Romanticism is typically the one man, one person with the impossible belief to fight 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... J: No, no, we basically... D: ...it's really a guerilla type of attitude. We had it at least when the jodi web site was running, for sure, J: We can't move every... [18:05] D: because everyone mailed back to us, with things like: "don't do that...", and we were not part of a real group, except for some of the net.art friends, but then everyone did his own typical thing, and the thing we did, we were the only and the lonely. 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. You know that when you are doing it from the beginning. We're not stupid. But still it's important to... when you have the feeling that you are not repeating or you are doing things for the first time, you want to do them, it's important to do them. Someone has to do them. And it was us or someone else, it didn't matter. But someone needs to open, or close, doors and windows in a system which looks so... J: Silly enough, we are just parasites of the system. We're totally 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. [Romanticism is...] D: But also things of the eighties, Blade Runner or Tron, these are at the moment now with even newer work - and The Matrix even - they're all trying to visualize hackers and hacking culture, and it's important for the digital age, we tried to find, it's like the movie Metropolis: What are we within this new society? I mean, not we, but all of us, all the people work on computers all the time. And what is your attitude towards this, what is the culture of it... It's just the beginning of trying to figure that out. And that's where you get movies like Tron or Blade Runner, hacker movies, Matrix, are trying to find romantic images for systems which are just technical machinery. So we use some that imagery in the early web site, yes, we combine clichés of how computers look inside. There is a surface we work with, we work a lot with the surface, it's not clean conceptual, it has a lot of graphical [stuff] in it... It's hard to explain or to know... But I have a fascination which could be like: What could be new icons for a digital age? J: Well, it's funny... D: And an error is one of these big mythical things. News articles say that people who always work on computers all day - three quarters of the time of [every] Monday is spent on fixing the computer, in the offices. 80% of people are working on trying to clean up their computer, to clean up their 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. J: No, but 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 not to follow the rules, so-to-say. And there are certain errors, if you make an error in the programming; there could be errors in the goal you achieve. But it's only the goal you achieve you have in mind, and not the side effects - because the side effects which are the error... D: ...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. J: Not only as an artist, but also as a scientist, you should explore the errors, not explore the things we know. Q: So does working with the error manifest artistic autonomy? J: No. Q: No? J: No, I only say that the error, in a way, is predefined, or even defined after. Sometimes, in computers, they don't know the error. And afterwards, it becomes an error. Beforehand, the territory is open. But suddenly it's: "oh, this okay, or this is not okay"; suddenly, there is an error. And the 404 is an error which is in a protocol which says "you're mistyping in your website", so we only made the error like: okay, we exploit this space to make non-verbs [26:49], to make... D: It's totally about mistyping. Since a few years, there is a whole valuable mistype space. At that time, I just focused on our mistypings without our site. But if you see now how many web sites are making a living just by having variations of a name of another famous web site, as parasites of the correct spelling - it's a large phenomenon. But 404 is about that, and the three parts of the 404, on how important typing is and that the computer reads your typing. The computer does nothing without that. It's a very language-based thing, even if mathematics is underlying, but the first level to it will be language. And that's something we realized there. J: No, actually, it has in a way nothing to do with errors. It has to do with boundaries. If you have game, you type in a cheat, and you say "oh, it's an error in the game", but it's not an error in the game. Programmers use it. Programmers use these mistakes as well in HTML to see what their boundaries are. And a normal viewer is not allowed to go behind these boundaries. D: It's beyond the make-belief system, if you want. J: There's a big puppetry going on, or a big facade... D: In games, for sure. The whole world and story needs to be coherent, while it's a construction. And that's the cheats which we use for those other games.... J: But it's to tear things apart. It's not definitely 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. D: Well, the bracket is an error. In the correct syntax of HTML, you need to start everything with a bracket and to stop every command with a bracket. It's like the most basic, stupid mistake anyone could do, not opening a bracket to start a code command, so that is a typical error in the sense of "I didn't know this" - a glitch in yourself. Which is then actually repeated in the system, as a glitch, as a glitch of your attention which then has an impact on the system, bypasses the regular appearances, and then, with the Internet, you have the power to massively reproduce that outside. And then it's a decision if you dare to do that, want to do that, yes or no. And that's the whole green ASCII code story. J: But if you see it as an error... To recognize 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, who said you have to learn HTML, we all knew the mistake was this bracket around the preformatted text. D: We had the guts to upload the mistake. J: The error is a lot of time the unwanted. And most of the errors we know, maybe not at the first stage, but later we know the source and the consequences. And we don't avoid it. And it's a pity that every program wants to operate you in limits. And I think that's a thing we are always fighting for, that we don't want a program to operate the way _they_ want, and _they_ tell you what an error is, they tell you what a curse is, but the same thing they built in, the same thing, it's all in there. Their boundaries are not a limit. And we're just stupid parasites of it.