A “discoder” is a device which destroys HTML informatic code and its codes of behavior, a contradiction provider for the web. In this project the user “messes” with the web’s HTML internet metastructure. The tags in HTML slip, and the integrity of HTML source code is compromised, as if eaten by bugs. The user is liberated not only from the reassuring mathematical illusions of the HTML interface (in the dismantling of the code) itself, but also from the subtle suggestions of normative behavior presented to the individual by the computer.

The Discoder has two modes, a “Private Mode” and an “Open Mode”. In the former, the user inputs the URL of the page that he or she wishes to destroy (all pages on the WWW are discodeable) and proceeds to wreak havoc to their little heart’s content. In the latter, the user can decimate a page socially, with friends. With either, the keyboard, this mundane part of our text-based lives, becomes an instrument of destruction, while typing on the keys produces sounds like a typewriter. HTML code suddenly becomes a breeding ground for inserting bugs (ASCII text, which eats HTML source code like a bug, creating a great many changes in the structure of web pages) who change the face of the virtual terrain.

The user is not limited to random attacks on websites, he can shoot at targets too. Because the bug’s influence on the site can be monitored numerically in real time, the user can devise strategies for his assaults. The numbers, alphabet, symbols, backspace (delete) and other keys each carry a new function in Discoder, and their categories and point of introduction into the HTML bear relation with previously planted bugs so that the bug’s “grow”(into capital letters) and then into HTML tags in their own right, reconstructing the broken pages.

There are any number of unpredicatable effects produced by the Discoder, especially when, in the “Open Mode”, an unspecified number of users participate, and bugs engage the sedimentary layers produced by bugs that have gone before them. Then the Discoder produces some of its most surprising results.

Discoder, through the invasion of unreasonable elements (=bugs), and a process of destruction, becomes a mechanism for new writing. exonemo’s sites aren’t set on HTML. Discoder’s cross-hairs are fixed on the vectors of mundane standardisation, and increased codification in our lives.


Links: http://www.exonemo.com/discorder/e/

SEMBO and YAE (JP) started exonemo, the (Net) art unit whose activity is based on the web-site http://www.exonemo.com. They created many experimental projects which one can go through on the web since 1996. They also present some spatial installations, live performances and organize some events such as dorkbot-tokyo. They live and work in Tokyo and exonemo.com.