Heath Bunting (co-founder) — irational.org — tactical-media collective infrastructure

1996

Artists: Heath Bunting (co-founder), Kayle Brandon, Minerva Cuevas, Rachel Baker · Year: 1996 · Medium: Collective web infrastructure — server hosting, distribution platform, collaborative authorship for net-art, bio-art, and tactical-media projects · Substrate: Shared web server hosting multiple artist projects; collaborative-publication infrastructure; project-by-project attribution often deliberately unclear · Place: London, UK / distributed · Institution: irational.org (web infrastructure and distribution collective) Heath Bunting co-founded irational.org in 1996 alongside the artist Daniel García Andújar, the writer Kayle Brandon, and others as an independent domain-hosted server that sat explicitly outside institutional affiliations — not a gallery site, not a university site, not a commercial platform, but a loose artist-run Unix host that distributed what its members wanted distributed. Over the following decade, irational.org became one of the most productive and least-documented nodes in the European net.art network. The projects irational.org hosted were characteristically anti-institutional. Bunting's own readme.html (1998, elsewhere in this archive) turned every word of the artist's own biography into a hyperlink that made "Heath Bunting" a generic term dissociated from any specific person. Kayle Brandon's Natural Reality Superweapon (1999) distributed instructions for building DIY ham-radio and low-power-FM broadcast infrastructure. García Andújar's Technologies to the People project (1998–2001) staged a series of faux-corporate interventions aimed at exposing how technology-access rhetoric obscured actual technology-access inequality. What irational.org argued, as an institution, was that the web's promise of disintermediated distribution was real but fragile — that if artists did not run their own servers, own their own domains, and negotiate their own relationships with the physical infrastructure of the internet, the distribution channels would eventually be captured by commercial platforms and art-institutional gatekeepers. The prediction was correct. The collective continued to operate the server long after most of the early-net.art community had moved onto platforms. Bunting is in this archive also through readme.html specifically, but irational.org is his infrastructural contribution, and arguably more consequential long-term. He continues to work in Bristol, teaches occasionally at UWE Bristol, and has been one of the most consistent figures in the English net-art scene for thirty years. Lore Bunting had begun his career as a graffiti artist in Bristol in the late 1980s — his King's Cross intervention (1994) that used the railway station as a communication relay is one of his best-documented pre-web works — and moved into net.art around 1994 when he got his first Unix account. The domain irational.org was registered in 1996; its co-founders paid the first few years of registration fees collectively out of pocket. Bunting has been explicit for decades that the project's value lies in its durability rather than its visibility; the server has run essentially continuously for almost thirty years now, and the archive of work hosted there is preserved in ways that most contemporaneous net.art of the period is not. He has recently moved parts of the archive to distributed-hosting systems on IPFS to reduce the infrastructural fragility further. Sources • Bunting, Heath — irational.org (primary archive). • Greene, Rachel — Internet Art (Thames & Hudson, 2004). • Rhizome ArtBase — Heath Bunting and irational.org archives.