The Wrong is a sprawling, multi-month-long online exhibition of digital works. It’s so packed with material that it’s often easy to miss the most interesting pieces before the show ends and the work disperses back into the ether. The show maintains no archive, a truly ephemeral exhibition format.
Above is a screen capture from a piece by Dutch artist Jan Robert Leegte, best known for his Scrollbar Compositions, Table Border Mural, and other sculptural works that engage with the Web or bring a sculptural sensibility to Web-based practice.
This work, Portrait of a Web Server, is an Apache HTTP Server serving its own source code to the screen. Apache helped build the Web. Dating back to 1995, when it served as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it is still the most widely used web server today. It has remained surprisingly lean after hundreds of releases; an under-celebrated but highly functional piece of open-source code. In Leegte’s piece, it serves its own source as a long scroll, beginning with a dramatic fade-in, but with no other flourishes; the code is served to us using the performance of itself as its delivery mechanism.
Leegte’s piece is part of the “Scripting The Other” pavilion of The Wrong, which “explores the notions of the Other and Otherness in online, performative scripting and writing,” which could very well describe esoteric.codes itself. We’ll be spending more time with work from this pavilion and others from the Wrong over the next few months.
