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Club Internet sidebar for K.I.S.S., 2008
The Club Internet sidebar as archived on 3 September 2008, showing the credits for K.I.S.S. — the show's premise in one line, then the artist list, then a link to the Wikipedia article on the KISS principle. Recovered from the Internet Archive.

Club Internet (2008–2010)

Club Internet started as a domain speculation. Club Internet was a major telecom provider in France, so van den Dorpel bought the .org expecting to sell it on. He explained the drift from there to Ceci Moss at Rhizome in October 2008:

But then I started playing with it and put a script online that enabled people to upload images. I got intrigued by the idea of forming a group of people like in a surfing club, with an exclusive and mysterious character found in societies like the Freemasons. Following that model, Club Internet is a society with membership, as well as being an online gallery.

Three things in sequence, then: a domain, an upload script, a society. The gallery came last, and it is what the fifteen recorded shows document. The first, First Selection, opened on 8 May 2008; the last record was created on 28 March 2010. Van den Dorpel's own CV (→ 932, 935) gives the run as 2008–2009 and describes the space as "non-archived", which was true until the database was recovered.

What made it different from a surf club

Club Internet came out of the surf-club milieu — see the surf clubs page for that context — but it is not a surf club, and the difference is structural.

A surf club is a flat group blog. Every member posts, posts stack vertically in one endless scroll, and there is no curator, no run date, and no closing. Club Internet took the same population of artists and put a gallery apparatus around it: each show has a showid, a title, a curator, a from-date and a till-date, a header and footer for the press text, and a set of works attached to it. The interface showed one work at a time, framed inside a fake browser chrome with an address bar and a wand-shaped refresh button, and advanced with a next button rather than a scroll. A collapsible sidebar carried the show credits.

That sidebar is the whole editorial apparatus: a premise, a list, a reference link, a mailing-list signup, and "All works © by the artists" — a copyright line that the surf clubs, by Chris Coy's account in the Spike conversation, would not have written.

The selection criterion was medium-specific. Asked what Free Fall was about, van den Dorpel answered first about where work belongs:

Works for Club Internet are chosen because they are best viewed online, rather than making a transformation from the screen to a video projector in a gallery. Television programs are best viewed at home, and not in a cinema, I believe the same often applies to Internet art.

He also described a deliberate lowering of the entry requirement for that show. Earlier shows "dealt with the subculture of internet artists or were referring to some (technical) knowledge usually available only to the more Internet aware visitors"; Free Fall was meant to need none of that. The result, he said, was that the works "were suddenly floating in the air. There was no clear framework such as the browser or HTML to comment on."

The exhibition history

Fifteen shows survive in the shows table. Shows 1 through 6 carry real opening and closing dates; from show 7 on the date fields were left empty, so those are ordered by the timestamp on which the record was created. Show 4 was deleted from the table at some point — twenty-four of its works survive in the work table, almost all van den Dorpel's own material on aura, cybernetics and simulacrum, which suggests a show that was assembled and never opened.

Counts below are works and distinct exhibiting names as recorded. Collaborative entries (Daniel Eatock & Timothy Evans, Jeremy Hughes & Ken Seeno, Garrett Davis & Kieran Gillen, John Michael Boling & Guthrie Lonergan) are counted once, as the database stores them.

2008

1 — First Selection. 8 May – 14 June 2008. Curated by Harm van den Dorpel. 42 works, 24 artists.

AIDS-3D, Charles Broskoski, Laura Brothers, Petra Cortright, Aleksandra Domanović, Harm van den Dorpel, Constant Dullaart, Daniel Eatock & Timothy Evans, Michael Guidetti, Travis Hallenbeck, JODI, Oliver Laric, Jan Robert Leegte, Guthrie Lonergan, Miltos Manetas, Ilia Ovechkin, Rafael Rozendaal, Will Simpson, Paul Slocum, Thomas Traum, Isaac Bigsby Trogdon, Anne de Vries, James Whipple, Damon Zucconi.

The opening show is the surf-club roster almost exactly: Nasty Nets and Supercentral members alongside the European contingent van den Dorpel knew from del.icio.us. Works included Rozendaal's colorflip.com, Laric's 787 Cliparts, Manetas' Jackson Pollock (2003) and van den Dorpel's bison.gif.

2 — ORACLE. 16 June – 12 July 2008. Curated by Harm van den Dorpel. 22 works, 18 artists.

AIDS-3D, Kari Altmann, Charles Broskoski, Carl Burgess, Jeff Carey, Chris Collins, Aleksandra Domanović, Harm van den Dorpel, Constant Dullaart, Joel Holmberg, INFObeard, Oliver Laric, Guthrie Lonergan, Ilia Ovechkin, Rafael Rozendaal, Travess Smalley, tntet, Damon Zucconi.

ORACLE is where van den Dorpel first showed Ethereal Self .com, and where two Spirit Surfers handles — INFObeard and tntet — appear in the membership. The Spirit Surfers used pseudonymous INFO- names rather than personal ones, and Club Internet's member table records them as given.

3 — Contact (1997). 24 July – 20 August 2008. Curated by Damon Zucconi. 15 works, 14 artists.

Christopher Byler, Aleksandra Domanović, Harm van den Dorpel, Marcel Duchamp, Garrett Davis & Kieran Gillen, Nathan Hauenstein, Martijn Hendriks, KUO I-Chen, Hugh Pocock, Jordan Rhoat, Jeremy Hughes & Ken Seeno, Ken Seeno, Alexandr Skarlinski, James Whipple.

The first guest-curated show, named after the Zemeckis film and hung against it, with Duchamp's 3 Standard Stoppages included as a reenactment. Van den Dorpel showed Codec Breeze here, dated 2008 in the database — a year earlier than the 2009 date the work usually carries.

5 — K.I.S.S. 29 August – 29 September 2008. Curated by Constant Dullaart. 28 works, 21 artists.

John Michael Boling, Victor Boulet, Mark Callahan, Ben Coonley, Petra Cortright, Chris Coy, Harm van den Dorpel, Constant Dullaart, Daniel Eatock, Yariv Alter Fin, Justin Kemp, Dennis Knopf, Stan L, Oliver Laric, Jan Robert Leegte, John Michael Boling & Guthrie Lonergan, David L. Mitchell, Jonathan Puckey, Rafael Rozendaal, Pascual Sisto, Ola Vasiljeva.

Keep It Simple, Stupid — the engineering maxim used as a curatorial filter. Dullaart's own The internet says "no" was in it, as was his internet aesthetics copied to real life (nasty nets tribute), Laric's Touch My Body (Green Screen Version), and David L. Mitchell's a:hover { text-decoration: blink; } (2002), a work that is a CSS rule.

6 — Free Fall. 15 October – 15 November 2008. Curated by Harm van den Dorpel. 21 works, 18 artists.

Alain A-Dale, Kevin Bewersdorf, John Michael Boling, Jesper Carlsen, Harm van den Dorpel, Constant Dullaart, Azin Feizabadi, Michael Guidetti, Travis Hallenbeck, Martijn Hendriks, INFOpruner, Marcus Kaiser, Guthrie Lonergan, Barry Pearson, Rafael Rozendaal, Ken Seeno, Pascual Sisto, Damon Zucconi.

The show with the opening party at Mediamatic in Amsterdam, and the first with a physical event attached. Van den Dorpel gave the title three readings at once: works with no browser or HTML left to comment on and so falling through open air; "a Cheap Autumn" against the banking collapse then under way; and AIR, the Adobe runtime for browserless web applications.

7 — Tag Team. Record created 14 November 2008. Organised by Guthrie Lonergan. 19 works, 14 artists.

John Michael Boling, Tyler Campbell, Petra Cortright, fixoid, Michael Guidetti, Travis Hallenbeck, Joel Holmberg, Lindsay Lawson, Olia Lialina, lowcast, Ilia Ovechkin, V/A, Jon Williams, Robert Wodzinski.

The most surf-club show in the programme, and a chain letter in structure. Lonergan's footer describes the mechanism: "Non-art" links from Club Internet members and others to sites by non-artists — Active SETI, Cougar Interactive, the Krannert Computing Center webcam at Purdue, pretty-secrets.net, Ulillillia City Software, WFTV 9 Orlando. Each entry credits an artist with the find, not the making. The four works filed under V/A are the ones with no author to credit at all.

8 — Dissociation. Record created 22 November 2008. Curated by Harm van den Dorpel. 44 works, 24 artists.

Samuel Beckett, Charles Broskoski, Harm van den Dorpel, Constant Dullaart, Ida Ekblad, Thomas Galloway, JODI, Marc Kremers, Claire Legendre, Tobias Madison, Ilia Ovechkin, Christopher Pappas, Bradley Pitts, Poster Company, Seth Price, Jonathan Puckey, Rafael Rozendaal, Hayley A. Silverman, Pascual Sisto, Spectacular Society Corporation, Thomas Traum, V/A, Ola Vasiljeva, Damon Zucconi.

The largest show, and the one that names what came next: dissociations.com launched in 2010 as van den Dorpel's own generative studio and archive, and is the substrate this wiki sits on. Beckett's Quad (1981) and Seth Price's Dispersion (2008) sit in the same list as Broskoski's .png paintings and van den Dorpel's video stills. It is also the show whose page survives most completely in the Internet Archive, which is how the works were first recovered before the database was found.

2009–2010

9 — Reverse Engineering: The Uncurated Reunion. Record created 7 March 2009. Curated by Harm van den Dorpel. 31 works, 29 artists.

Kari Altmann, Kevin Bewersdorf, Charles Broskoski, Laura Brothers, Mark Callahan, Chris Collins, Aleksandra Domanović, Constant Dullaart, Nathan Hauenstein, Martijn Hendriks, Joel Holmberg, Justin Kemp, Dennis Knopf, Marc Kremers, Oliver Laric, Jan Robert Leegte, Guthrie Lonergan, Miltos Manetas, Vadik Marmeladov, Tom Moody, Philipp Otto, Jon Rafman, Pascual Sisto, Alexandr Skarlinski, Travess Smalley, Thomas Traum, Ola Vasiljeva, Robert Wodzinski, Damon Zucconi.

Twenty-nine artists and thirty-one works — nearly one each, and almost all made in 2009 and titled Untitled. The subtitle is the method: submissions rather than selections, tied to LMIRL (Let's Meet In Real Life), the New York show it ran alongside. Rafman's contribution was Portrait of a netartist as a young man .com.

10 — Z-Index. Record created 13 April 2009. Curated by Harm van den Dorpel. 7 works, 7 artists.

Charles Broskoski, JODI, Tobias Madison, Hayley A. Silverman, Sounder2, Spectacular Society Corporation, Robert Wodzinski.

Named for the CSS property that decides which element sits in front. Seven works, including JODI's GEO GOO and Sounder2's mpg meditation #3: Kazimir Malevich.

11 — New Wave. Record created 15 May 2009. Curated by Harm van den Dorpel. 9 works, 9 artists.

Petra Cortright, Harm van den Dorpel, Sinem Erkas, Elna Frederick, Martijn Hendriks, Parker Ito, Oliver Laric, Guthrie Lonergan, Pascual Sisto.

Shown at the Internet Pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 (→ 935), which puts a Club Internet show inside a biennial. Laric's Versions is in it, as is Parker Ito's Self Portrait in 3D.

12 — stolen. Record created 6 July 2009. Curated by Martijn Hendriks. No works recorded.

The show exists as a row with a curator and a slug and nothing attached. Either it was never filled or its works were removed — appropriately, given the title.

13 — Once Upon a Time in the West. Record created 24 November 2009. Curated by Domenico Quaranta. 15 works, 15 artists.

AIDS-3D, Michael Bell-Smith, Brida, Wayne Clements, Chris Coy, Florian Cramer, Harm van den Dorpel, James Houston, Les Liens Invisibles, Oliver Laric, Olia Lialina, Eilis McDonald, Rosa Menkman, Rafael Rozendaal, Math Wrath.

The one show curated by a critic and historian rather than a practitioner, and the roster changes accordingly: European net art and glitch — Menkman, Cramer, Les Liens Invisibles, Brida — beside the American surf-club names. The database spells the curator "Domenico Quarante"; the show header links to domenicoquaranta.com, so the name is corrected here.

14 — AFK sculpture park. Record created 1 January 2010; the physical show ran 18–26 September 2009 at Atelierhof Kreuzberg, Berlin. 8 works, 7 artists: Aleksandra Domanović, Harm van den Dorpel, Constant Dullaart, Joel Holmberg, Oliver Laric, Billy Rennekamp, Rafael Rozendaal. This is the inversion of everything above — an online gallery hosting an offline sculpture show, under a title that abbreviates Away From Keyboard. The Club Internet database records van den Dorpel as the show's curator; the archived AFK page credits AIDS-3D with curating the physical exhibition, and van den Dorpel's CV lists it as a group show he was in (→ 932, 935).

The documentation is the part that matters. The eight works were not photographed. Each was 3D-scanned and published as a coloured point cloud floating on black — no ground, no garden, no daylight, the object dissolved into the sample points that describe it. What the online gallery showed was never an image of the sculpture park; it was a measurement of it. For a wiki whose organising claim is The Work = The Work + Its Documentation (→ 992, Mediation and the Archive), this is the sharpest case in the archive: a show that exists offline for eight days and online as a set of coordinates.

Dullaart's two titles name their own procurement method. A sun bed and a pharaoh, both identified by the auction site they came from, make the acquisition the work — the same flattening of research and artifact that Broskoski describes in the Spike conversation, moved outdoors and then scanned back in.

Texture Mapping is van den Dorpel's own entry, and its title is exact about what the scan does. Texture mapping is the 3D-graphics operation of wrapping an image onto geometry; a colour point cloud is that operation run backwards, the surface's colour stripped off a real object and kept as loose samples with the geometry only implied. The longing he described to Rhizome a year earlier — that running Club Internet "awoke my longing for creating physical objects" — surfaces here, though the object reaches the gallery only as data. The sculptural line continues, in actual matter, through the Assemblages (→ the sculpture page).

15 — progressive recesses. Record created 30 January 2010. Curated by Harm van den Dorpel. 3 works, 3 artists: Charles Broskoski, Chris Collins, Harm van den Dorpel.

16 — progressive recesses. Record created 28 March 2010. Curated by Charles Broskoski. 10 works, 9 artists: Charles Broskoski, Tony Cokes, Harm van den Dorpel, David Hockney, Joel Holmberg, Oliver Laric, Timur Si-Qin, V/A, Ola Vasiljeva.

The last two records share a title and were set up two months apart, the second handed to Broskoski. Its slug is the literal placeholder title_url and its description is a bare <img> tag, so the record was probably left mid-edit. Hockney's iPhone Painting (2009) in the list is a small, exact marker of the end of the period: the phone that Dullaart names as the close of the surf-club window, showing up inside the last Club Internet show as a painting tool.

The roster

The member table holds 124 entries. Of those, 106 exhibited at least once. Eighteen were registered but never shown: Peter Baldes, J. G. Ballard, Manuel Bürger, Jon Burchmore, Hevanet, Shane Hope, INFOsembler, Robert Morris, Marisa Olson, Planet Dan, Angelo Plessas, Domenico Quaranta (registered as a curator), Johnny Rogers, Emanuel Rossetti, Ramsay Stirling, SuperCPU, Dirk Vis, Jordan Wolfson.

The list is not only living artists. Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett and Robert Morris have member rows, as do a Flickr slideshow, a pseudonymous Spirit Surfer, and a placeholder called V/A used for found material with no author. Membership was a slot in a database, and van den Dorpel used it for whatever needed attributing.

Names recurring across the most shows: Harm van den Dorpel, Oliver Laric, Rafael Rozendaal, Damon Zucconi, Constant Dullaart, Charles Broskoski, Guthrie Lonergan, Aleksandra Domanović, Ola Vasiljeva, Pascual Sisto, Martijn Hendriks, Joel Holmberg, Petra Cortright.

What happened to it

The domain lapsed. clubinternet.org now serves a WordPress site about casino bonuses, and the shows are gone from the live web. What survives is in two places: Internet Archive snapshots of a handful of show pages, and the MySQL tables from the DreamHost server — member, shows and work, exported in August 2026 and held at media/member.sql, media/shows.sql and media/work.sql. This page is built from those three tables, cross-checked against the archived pages.

Two things are worth flagging about the reconstruction. The work table stores its text as latin1 holding UTF-8, so a number of captions in the raw dump are mojibake and have been decoded here. And the works themselves are mostly not recoverable: they were links to work hosted on the artists' own servers, and half those servers are gone. Broskoski's remark about Domanović's flattened HTML page — "especially now that half the links are broken" — describes Club Internet's archive exactly.

Connections