Without addresses

Blank & Jeron

Joachim Blank (*1963) and Karl-Heinz Jeron (*1962) have been working together since 1993 on the realisation of Internet projects in the art and culture context. In this year together with Barbara Aselmeier and Armin Haase, they founded Handshake, one of the first communication one of the first communication projects involving the electronic network, the Internet, in Germany. Realised as an interactive spatial installation, it formed an interface between the electronic network and the living world. Handshake saw itself as an ongoing process with the intention of observing the behaviour of people and machines in electronic networks. From 1994 to 1995, Handshake operated the legendary Clubnetz (club network), which consisted of public IRC chat terminals in Berlin clubs. At the turn of the year 1994/95, Handshake merged with the newly founded Internationale Stadt.

Blank and Jeron were two of the eleven people working for the International City (IS) Berlin, which saw the Internet as a "digital meeting place" between 1994 and 1998 - comparable to De Digitale Stad Amsterdam. In September 1997, Blank & Jeron opened their own website under the domain sero.org, which took up the name of the GDR's state waste management company SERO Entsorgung AG (Berlin), which emerged from it after privatisation. At the same time, it also described the artistic principle of the two artists: the reuse and further processing of data input.

Blank & Jeron are among the most important actors in the Berlin net art scene of the 1990s and are pioneers of a net-specific artistic practice. Their works, which were created in the context of Berlin's unique history, point beyond this local reference and thus locate themselves in the international scene of media and especially net artists. They are an indispensable part of digital-born art history and, with their pioneering net art activities, established a tradition to which artists working with the digital medium today refer.