about noemata.net, & what sometemple owes it
— filed under: lineage —
noemata.net is one of the older surviving net-art projects on the open web. it is, in the most literal sense, a directory. you open the url and an apache server hands back a listing of folders and files. you click into a folder. inside is another listing. inside that, sometimes a page; sometimes only further listings. there is no introduction. there is no menu. there is no marketing copy.
the artist behind it is bjørn magnhildøen, a norwegian writer and net artist who has been working under this domain and various adjacent ones since the early 1990s. across more than three decades he has assembled a body of work that includes mail art, e-poetry, codework, hypertext, performative writing, generative pieces, collaborative web events. some of it is dated and gnomic. some of it is recent and gnomic. all of it sits in the directory.
the aesthetic of the index page is the form. folder names alone can be read as a long, slow poem — deepfakemindfuck, ugfatiglem, brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116, cloudmachinery, scanner-obscura, leapsecond.online, telemata, internet-gallery. they refuse to introduce themselves. they refuse to be findable by search. they are anti-SEO in the deepest sense: they do not want to be found, only stumbled into. and yet they have remained, unmoved, for decades.
noemata is the plural of greek noēma — a thing thought, a perceived. one of those words philosophers use when they want to talk about the contents of consciousness without committing to who is doing the consciousing. it is well-chosen for a directory listing: each folder is a small noematic object, offered without explanation, and the visitor is invited to do the rest of the work.
what does sometemple owe? mostly: the courage to refuse the introduction. sometemple learned from noemata.net that a list is a legitimate form. that obscurity can be hospitable, when it is patient. that the long durational practice — the same domain, the same austerity, the same hand, for thirty-five years — is itself the artwork. that one does not need to ask the reader for anything. the page is enough.
sometemple is not a copy. it is not even an imitation. it is dressed differently — more serif, more dusk, more interior — and it has its own architecture. but its posture is borrowed: it stands the way noemata.net stands. quietly, in lowercase, with its hands at its sides, waiting for someone to walk through it.
the small tribute wing in this part of the labyrinth is fourteen pages: an envelope, a clock, a telegram, a codework, a directory listing of invented works, a generator, a slow scan, a small gallery, a long name, an invented word, a likeness, an essay (this one), and a landing page. they are pointed at noemata.net the way one tips one's hat at someone walking past in the same direction.
visit the original at noemata.net.
return to the tribute ·
to the colophon ·
to our directory ·
to the threshold.