Heath Bunting — _readme.html (Own, Be Owned, or Remain Invisible)

1998

Artists: Heath Bunting · Year: 1998 · Medium: HTML text where every word is a hyperlink · Substrate: A complete English-language newspaper article in which Bunting hyperlinked every single word to the matching '.com' domain · Place: Bristol, UK · Institution: irational.org Every word in readme.html is a hyperlink. The page content is an article from The Telegraph (London) profiling Heath Bunting. Bunting took the article and replaced each word with a hyperlink to the matching dot-com domain. The word "is" links to is.com. The word "the" links to the.com. The word "I" links to i.com. Every word is linked to somewhere. A few of the links go to parked pages. A few go to ad-riddled domain-squatter landing sites. A few are dead. Almost none go anywhere useful. The work makes visible, at a glance, a historical process that was happening too slowly to see. In 1998 the commercial enclosure of the web was underway — dot-com speculation was in full escalation, domain squatting was a business, and the words of the English language were being systematically acquired as trademarks and trade names. The common words were the most valuable domains. The common words were also the words you could not own in any other sense. readme.html takes the collision of those two facts and renders it as hypertext: every word in the language is now a property, and linking to it is now a financial transaction. Bunting's practice is broader than one web page. He co-founded irational.org — one of the most important net-art nodes of the 1990s. He walked across European borders without documents as durational performance, mapping the border infrastructure of Schengen by slipping through it. He was eventually banned from the United States, for reasons that remain partly obscure but are certainly related to the border work. He is, among the net artists of his generation, the most consistently political — always about property, about borders, about enclosure, about the private theft of commons. _readme.html is the one-page compression of that politics. The subtitle of the work is Own, Be Owned, or Remain Invisible, which names the three choices the commercial web offers. The piece is still live at irational.org. Some of the links have become even more dead than they were in 1998. The work still works. Bunting is still active. He lives in the UK. Lore The piece is a text — an article about Bunting from The Telegraph — in which every word has been turned into a hyperlink to the corresponding dot-com domain. 'is' → is.com, 'the' → the.com, 'I' → i.com. It is a map of the commercial enclosure of language in a single page. Bunting's broader practice pushes the same bone: he has walked across European borders without documents as durational performance, mapped vending-machine surveillance networks, and been banned from the United States after his work on border-crossings drew government attention. irational.org — the collective he co-founded — is one of the most important node-points in the history of net.art. Sources • Rhizome — Net Art Anthology • irational.org (live) • Tate — Heath Bunting