The subdomain is an interesting entity in Internet publication. To put up a website at an address that is not a straight top level (mynameorsomeinterest.something) is one thing, to conceptually fathom its deep reading quite another. When I changed my provider’s hosting plan I was granted unlimited subdomains. Also 25 TLD’s hosted, if I’d wish to maintain those. Such is primarily of interest for small resellers. I use some as a service to friends and colleagues, or my family. For my own work the subdomains matter most.

Being a publishing and graphic artist, I mostly consider a domain name to be like a work’s title. Also before the expanded literary possibilities of naming online publishing domains, I much appreciated the referential possibilities of an art work’s title. Unlike for instance Rémy Zaugg, who in Die List der Unschuld (1982) pleaded to even abolish ‘Untitled’ as adding too much information to a visual work of art. Text and image are mutually evocative, whenever and in whatever constellation, hierarchy or dependency that they occur together. Meanwhile contextual literacy has become more critical aware of institutional, informational, political and other complicity, in the experience of the art work, which is hardly an island of pure sensory sensation. In my own work I exhibited at one occasion, invited by Paul Perry curating a presentation called ‘Wild Talent’, a long list of all titles that I had in mind for at some moment in time to be realised artworks. Obviously only a small fraction of those titles made it into a work.

I will not use my unlimited subdomain possibility to construct an endless list of empty domain names under the joukekleerebezem.com top level though. In order to choose between folders and subdomains, to address a distinct activity, event or piece or publication in my body of work, I will apply certain rules. As a general rule a folder within jkc contains the sections over which my work has divided its attention. Some of those will be works, like e.g. the /nqpaofu/ section, which spans 7 years in time and holds the core of the work that I was devoted to over that period. A subdomain could have any special interest as its subject matter. Subdomains and folders allow, because of their placement respectively before and after joukekleerebezem.com, specific linguistic possibilities, like ‘themakingof.joukekleerebezem.com’ exemplifies.

From ‘Internet-for-One’ to social media bonanza

Another part of my motivation to work on domain name expressive management comes from the fact that I grew literate with the ‘Internet for One’ philosophy (think: every household its own publishing server; Symmetrical Digital Server Lines, with equal bandwidth going up and down) – long before social, mobile media, even before big access providers came about. Yet even at the present time, with an Internet way beyond 1990s imagination, to me the domain name question is valid, as it immediately connects to my naming artistic production and its presentation, distribution, documentation, preservation. Also, from a preservation politics point of view, I don’t want to have to rely on commercial editorial policies of Facebook and the likes. Who would I be to preserve (a large part of) my life’s work for?, is a question that I posed myself too. The short and honest answer would be to do this for my sons and possible generations coming after them. My work is as much a sign of my times as my grandfather Jan Kleerebezem’s, early 20c radio building and hand crafted morse key that I keep in a box. A longer and just as honest answer would include its possible importance for a wider audience, of artists and art lovers and then some. At that point inevitably cultural institutions – museums, libraries to name just two, and already the choice between the two is an interesting one – come into the picture. As long as I don’t know of any repository that has for its mission to preserve digital cultural production since the 1990s, I want to be able to hand down all of that on a hard disc. And another one, as a back-up. And, excuse me, there will be enough material stuff also, to weigh on the decision whether to keep or to dispose of.

At least as fas as subdomains go, ‘unlimited’ is not much of a burden.

After having started using the Internet in 1993, ever since 1995 I have entertained some web presence or other, to serve as a reference to my work as an artist, for long periods of time even being the only work that I made. Like from 1998 to 2005, when the web publication Notes, Quotes, Provocations and Other Fair Use was the only conduit and display for my visual and textual production — ‘NQPaOFU’ actually remaining my only ‘piece’ from those years. Whatever spin-off has resulted from it, it all was native to that one work, to which only small changes and additions have been performed since.

On hold

The end of the NQPaOFU work in progress was inevitable from the start but has happened largely unnoticed. No vernissage was organized to make it shine and it does not fit the common definition of a ‘finished’ work, nor can it be considered ‘unfinished’. It has never been documented, does not appear in any catalogues, though it has been written about while it was in full progress. I like to think of it as ‘on hold’. Meanwhile it has technically moved from being an independently served domain to being a folder in the joukekleerebezem.com hierarchy, leaving no mistake about its status. Here it sits with other web publications ‘on hold’, being material for future posts here.

When I recently changed my plan at the hosting provider I obtained the possibility of unlimited subdomains. Previously, with only limited possibilities for subdomains, for a new publication I decided mostly for a new folder in the joukekleerebezem.com architecture, now I can conceptualize the differences between folders and subdomains. I will dedicate separate posts to distinct features of the handling of the domain and the publications that it allows. I need to find out how the Internet and web serve my work best, with all the different possibilities of display and publicity that have developed since two decades.

Operation

The subject of this weblog is the detailed operation of reconceptualising what the Internet-domain-bearing-part-of-my-first-and-full-family-name (which’s postponed registration posed no problem at all, for obvious reasons…) can provide, both to myself and to my audiences, and how it will be built. What will be its architecture, its interface, its editorial grain of voice, how will it relate to other media that I apply in my work. How will I operate it and how will it operate me?

We have quickly familiarized with the recent form of representation, which is the medium of the personal website. The artist’s name, either nom de plume or natural, with the dotcom TLD is no exception for an address. Whether ambitious in true to the person-by-the-same-name honesty or straightforward in brand brutality, our names are easier dropped in the web than in any other medium.