The internet has its origins in the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) communications system developed by the United States Department of Defense in the 1960s. Today, it has become a pervasive global network in which any number of users can connect to computer networks that are themselves interconnected.¹ Its penetration rate is said to have reached 59.6%: 4.65 billion of the world’s 7.6 billion people.² In 1996, when the internet was just starting its journey towards the mainstream, the penetration rate in Japan was 3.3%; now the vast majority of people use the internet, with 89.8% of individuals in Japan having access in 2019, with many shifting from use on personal computers to smartphones.³ The global spread of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic has only given new energy and importance to internet-mediated communication.

Despite the propagation of the internet, however, the term “internet art” may still be unfamiliar to many. Over recent years, developments in computing technology have naturally promoted diversification in art and culture. It would be no exaggeration to state that the internet has permeated our society so much, and the commercialization of art has proceeded so far, that it is now difficult to draw a line between art and entertainment or games. Experiences based on digital technology, such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and online gaming, have worked their way into our daily lives as consumer products, and there have been more opportunities at museums and galleries to show high-resolution video works or media art that makes use of the latest technology.
In Japan, there has been an increased awareness of media art since the Basic Act on Culture and the Arts defined and situated media art within its cultural policy in 2001,⁴ leading to many more artists showing work that employs cutting-edge technology. Internet art, on the other hand, emerged in the ’90s as more of an art movement than a genre, and was characterized by its critical exposure of technological and societal structures through examination of the internet medium.
This present exhibition introduces the work of exonemo, an artist duo whose career goes back to 1996 – a time when the internet was beginning to spread in Japan following the release of Windows 95, with more and more people owning personal computers. From then until today, exonemo has produced a multitude of works and projects that have taken diverse forms. The exhibition, which spans the duo’s 24-year career to date, underwent significant changes in the course of its preparations, after the artists proposed that it should serve as a fresh reconsideration of the possibilities of internet art. The biggest factor behind this decision was the global pandemic, which had the effect of reestablishing the value of internet art in the artists’ eyes. Given that exonemo’s distinctive and far-reaching practice is itself inextricably linked to the birth of the internet and the zeitgeist surrounding it, this seemed a fitting approach for trying to understand the appeal of exonemo’s art.

When the camcorder first became available, it had an impact on the independent DIY culture as an alternative medium that could counter the mass culture of TV, resulting in the rise of video art. The emergence of the internet in the ’90s, however, had an even greater impact. This was a medium full of promise, which allowed individuals to connect over physical distances, forming new networks as independent beings – an ideal espoused by the open-source software movement and the free software movement.
But looking at today’s society, in which social media plays a key role in shaping public opinion, the internet appears to have changed from a network for individuals to one that prioritizes media for the literal masses, which echoes the will of institutions such as corporations and states.
This exhibition’s title phrase, “UN-DEAD-LINK,” expresses the idea of reconnecting with exonemo’s works that have become “dead links” online, in an attempt to reconsider the duo’s early internet art in a new light. This idea partly has its roots in experiences surrounding the pandemic, which reminded the duo of the open atmosphere of early internet art, making them reaffirm its importance. The exhibition’s setup, furthermore, which synergistically connects a physical venue at the museum with an online venue, is an undertaking that explores new possibilities for museum exhibitions in the digital age.
At this point, let us return to the question of what internet art really was. In 1999, the artist duo Jodi published http://map.jodi.org/, a “map of the internet” that showed the interrelations between internet artists of the time. Diagrammatically representing the web’s information network through visual symbols, the work maps the names of artists – exonemo among them – and internet activists close to Jodi, together with numbers that appear to be IP addresses (whether or not they are real addresses is unclear). Worth noting here is that the internet artists composing this network went not by their actual names but by their pseudonyms, which granted them a certain anonymity. In this sense, the map also serves as telling symbolic evidence of the state of internet art at the time. Indeed, it was also around then that the term “net.art” was first used by the Russian artist Alexei Shulgin, and, with the spread of the internet itself, the activities of the artists we know as the first generation of net.art would begin to attract attention as an integrated movement.
Jodi and Ubermorgen, two of the leading names in early net.art, described net.art as the last avant-garde movement of the 20th century.⁵ Certainly, the movement demonstrated a similar international reach to that of avant-garde movements such as the early 20th century’s Dadaism and Constructivism, or Fluxus that would later follow, and spread energetically in the West while maintaining a distance from existing forms of art. Many of its proponents aspired not so much to art but to alternative cultures such as punk or techno.⁶ Just as Jodi’s work, created under the mottos of “no content” and “no story” through a methodology rooted in hacker culture, was aesthetically and practically characterized by the element of error, these artists’ web-based expressions constituted critical and radical activities. The heyday of net.art, however, would only last in real terms from 1994 to 1999; by around 2000 it was even said that “Net-dot-art is dead,” and the movement rapidly petered out soon after.⁷
As for exonemo, the duo – Sembo Kensuke and Akaiwa Yae – formed and started their activities when the internet was still just beginning to permeate people’s lives. The pair first experienced the internet as students when they found part-time jobs at an internet tech company after meeting someone affiliated with it on their travels. Unlike the net.artists described above, who in their various ways were skeptical about and defiant of Western modernism, the Japanese duo seems to have been swept up into the internet art movement as if by spontaneous mutation.
The alias “exonemo” is itself a symbol of this unpredictability, as it was a wholly new and random word that happened to come to Akaiwa’s lips. But given that this very unpredictable spontaneity was what made the internet art of the time so free and innovative, it seems almost inevitable that it should have led to the creation of exonemo.
Looking back on their beginnings, exonemo says: “To us, this was just something new that could be done with the internet. We didn’t know what it was that we were making, we didn’t even consider them ‘works’ as such – we were just building little playgrounds, if you will.”⁸ What has remained consistent throughout their career can be summarized in their stance to “create spaces and platforms rather than artworks.” From these beginnings, exonemo would go on to explore the possibilities for open networks between individuals – an idea embraced by the net.art of the day – through their own creative activities.
Their first interactive work created on the internet, KAO （1996）, involved users selecting facial parts to design a face – like an online version of fukuwarai (a children’s game like “Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” in which blindfolded participants try to place cutouts of facial features onto a drawing of a face) – which would then combine with another face on the server to generate a child that inherits features from the two parent faces. During their art college days, Sembo and Akaiwa became disillusioned with the idea of artists trying to create work ex nihilo through conscious intent.⁹ KAO, as a work that is at once a collaborative act of creation and an act of destruction, offers a glimpse of the duo’s consistently critical and multidisciplinary awareness, which questions the traditional preoccupation with the role of the creator-artist.
Meanwhile, their iconic Danmatsu Mouse （2007） records the on-screen movements of mouse cursors as physical computer mice are destroyed, and reproduces these movements on the viewer’s desktop. It might be described as a mouse-and-cursor documentary that translates digital phenomena into the language of real space. The use of motifs now familiar to everyone – mice and cursors – recalls the methods of pop art in its use of mundane images from mass culture, although the objects they target differ slightly. By translating these invisible phenomena that are specific to the medium, the work dynamically spanned the divide between the internet and the real world.

Since the duo first conceived the meaningless word “exonemo,” their medium of expression has shifted from the internet to large-scale installations; but their work continues to evoke feelings of both familiarity and surprise, drawing humorous and critical connections between language, media, and material objects.
The 20 works featured in this exhibition are arranged chronologically, but they are also tied to one another by five keywords chosen by exonemo – Internet, Platform, Interface, Random, and Boundary – forming an interconnected web reminiscent of Jodi’s map of the internet.
The online venue, meanwhile, features a timeline that chronicles exonemo’s career and beyond, while also tying the artworks together with yet broader keywords. In other words, the act of putting together the exhibition (at the museum and online) is itself treated as a creative act of a similar order and meaning to the creation of artwork. As this demonstrates, exonemo’s activities do not limit themselves to producing artworks. Perhaps, then, their practice ultimately represents an active, independent continuation of the legacy of early internet art – what its proponents described as the last avant-garde movement of the 20th century. It is our hope that introducing the activities of such boundary-crossing artists as exonemo will also offer us a chance to reconsider new possibilities for museums, both in terms of how artwork can be experienced, and how best to preserve “living archives” of art.

Tasaka Hiroko [Curator, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum]

Notes:

1. Andrew S. Tanenbaum and David J. Wetherall, Computer Networks, 5th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2011).
2. https://news.yahoo.co.jp/byline/fuwaraizo/20200704-00185443/ [Japanese only]
3. https://www.meti.go.jp/press/2020/07/20200722003/20200722003-1.pdf [Japanese only]
4. https://www.bunka.go.jp/english/policy/foundations/basic_act.html
   Article 9 of the Basic Act on Culture and the Arts states that “In order to promote art that uses video, manga, animation, and electronic equipment including but not limited to computers (hereinafter referred to as “media art”), the state shall provide support, and establish necessary policy for, the creation and display of media art.”
5. https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/netart
6. Ibid.
7. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/a-net-art-pioneer-evolves-with-the-digital-age-rhizome-turns-20-6884/
8. See interview p.6.
9. See interview p.7.