Without addresses

Short Discription

The start page of without addresses activated two applications. The first application opened a text input field with the simple call "Tell me who you are.". The text entered was used as a search pattern for an automated online search in the Alta Vista search engine. A customised HTML page was dynamically generated from the results of the online search. This allowed visitors to leave a trace on the website. The query result was manipulated creatively using various layout templates. Images were resized and converted to grey tones, texts on the page were displayed in generated handwritten characters.

The second application created a map from the generated HTML pages, which were represented by dots. The visitors' HTML pages were arranged on the map in a chronological order. Visitors selected dots to view pages that had already been generated. Paths were created from the connections between these points. The structure of the website was only created through the visits. Each selection, each visit expanded the website in real time and visualised the personally selected path. The two-dimensional map, consisting of nodes and connections, was the only means of orientation in the virtual space of without addresses - the self-writing website had no addresses, no index.

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.

Historical context

Having previously realised projects on the Internet that required the active and conscious participation of the recipient, Blank and Jeron have realised the project without addresses for documenta X.