Jim Punk: exq=.s.te =n.c&de/s

Jim Punk: exq=.s.te =n.c&de/s:

Jim Punk is prolific and anonymous.

His website is encased largely in a cryptic
vernacular predominately of his own design: A laptop is rendered in ‘Oldskool’
ASCII style illustration graphics with the ‘keyboard’ displaying letters and
symbols (such as “&” or “n”) arranged in no particular order—as if Punk had
button smashed his keyboard and left the results to exist as is. There
are no direct title links, or any kind of straightforward archive list of
projects, instead it’s these arranged letters and symbols that when
painstakingly, individually clicked on, lead the viewer down into a further
maze of Punk’s own glitchy, early net art based work.

&é'(-è_çà)#+

azertyuiop^$¨£

qsdfghjklmù%*µ!§

<>wxcvbn,?;.:/~"{@

It’s this jumbled arrangement of symbols and
navigation confusion that has come to define Punk’s work over the
years. Responding to blog comments, tweets and even emails with this
seemingly incomprehensible employment of language, Punk avoids a certain
communicative regularity; rejecting the comprehensibility and clarity that
often lends itself to distinct individual recognition. Instead, Punk’s
non-linear, schizophrenic performance draws attention to the form language and
communication take, all the while disrupting standardized information flow and
producing an irregularity in the way we expect to approach and access content.

Punk's latest user generated project, exq=.s.te
=n.c&de/s, is a glitched out Twitter feed that anyone can
post to. Utilizing a customized keyboard, comprised solely of unicode symbols, users can easily create
and tweet glitchy status updates. With currently more than 600 tweets,
Punk’s project works within the hyper consumptive pace of Twitter and utilizes
it as an alternative platform for formalized making. While Twitter
predominately exists as a website used to communicate in short, concise bursts
of text, with users usually promoting an event or revealing the banal
adventures crucial to their own existences, Punk’s Twitter demonstrates the
formal exploits of such a system; its purpose, re-purpose and what it is
capable of doing.

In a time when the capture and dispersal of
information seems crucial to maintaining productivity, Jim Punk decides that
playfulness and experimentation are still worth pursuing.

Follow and contribute here.