Christoph Wachter und Mathias Jud: “New Nations”

Shedhalle / Exhibitions / Connect / Artists

Christoph Wachter und Mathias Jud: New Nations

New Nations
Web-community-project, installation, variable

The Internet seems to be an open, limitless space for communication beyond all borders. This visible openness is confirmed and substantiated by means of participation and platforms like Blogs, Wikipedia, or YouTube. The less visible facet intervenes in all areas of this communicative space – by censorship, control, and exclusion. The artists Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud use the possibilities of the accessible, open net to make those mechanisms of control and exclusion visible.
ICANN, an organisation under private law that is closely connected with the US Department of Commerce, controls the allocation of Internet addresses. The Country-code Top-Level Domains (ccTLD) like .ch or .de – denote the nation states maintaining and regulating their respective representation in the Internet. Cultures or cultural
communities not recognized as nation states don’t have ccTLDs. This applies e.g. to the Tibetans, the Kurds, the Uyghurs, and the Tamils. Wachter & Jud render these cultures symbolically represented in the Internet by creating new ccTLDs: .ti for the Tibetans, .ku for the Kurds, .uu for the the Uyghurs, and .te for the Tamils – thus circumventing the existing restrictions with regard to the territorial, national and cultural manifestations ruling the Internet.
In New Nations, like in previous projects, the artists rely on participation. Innumerable homepages and new addresses have been created since they started their project two years ago, thus yielding a model of self-empowerment and identification for cultures that are, again and again, viewed as terrorists or enemies of state. The art project New Nations wants to counteract the medial and cultural hegemonies and political rules governing our communication structures and – by revealing the control mechanisms – open up new alternatives in the supranational fabric of the Internet. 

/ www.new-nations.net
/ www.wachter-jud.net