WEB | TERRITORY

Since I have a tendency of falling outside the main categories of statistics, censes and classifications, I developed a sympathy for the less common meanings of words and things. The remote provinces of gist, so to speak. So you'll understand that my preferred way of reading 'territory' is the seventh meaning the dictionary gives: "A sphere of action or interest".

The sites collected here share that idea of territory. Action prone zones of public interference like Adbusters or IDIE.net deliniate their stakes in terms of critique on the rest of the world, while others, like Young-hae Chang or Michel van der Drift translate what's out there - the absurd chaos of surreal messages and incitements we call the 'information society' - into exhilarating commentaries that have at least one advantage over real life: they're consistent.
All these people have created their own habitats, not to be sheltered from the storm that rages outside, but to hold their own in the turmoil. Their windows are wide open.

Edited by Max Bruinsma | AMS/NL | GMT 2300.

Vancouver based culture jammers Adbusters pledge to "help you turn your computer into the most versatile activist tool ever reckoned with."

Net.artists of One38 jump the bandwagon of Absolut vodka's celebrity ad campaigns. They could have done so with more panache.

Critical Idie artist Jouke Kleerebezem got mad at gratuitous lounge do-gooders and ignited his own "home for launch-and-learn activism."

Ironic, and absurdly sexy, South-Korean web-artist Young-hae Chang seduces us with the bare essentials of words, movement and music.

In his private playing ground, Staroftheeast webdesigner Robin Garms charms us with "the kind of obscurity that the site wants to remedy in its simplicity."

Internet art exhibition intrigues and irritates by mapping a forest of associations while wraping its trees in a cutting-edge quandary.

A classic of Net.art, Vuk Cosic's 'History of Art for Airports' in Rhizome is a caustic and funny critique on attempts to bring art to the masses.

An amazing, funny hypertext of a nobody, musing over the big questions of life while being existentially depressed by its mundane realities.