The Last Acres of the Internet (2026)

The Last Acres of the Internet offers the web’s least desirable real estate for sale. While short domain names sell for colossal amounts, like land in Manhattan, exonemo trades in the opposite. The duo registers meaningless domain names of 63 characters, the maximum length permitted, and grows an HTML wilderness generated from random strings on each one. Whoever buys a website owns both the domain name and its wilderness, free to build there as they wish. Each parcel of “land” is sold via an auction that opens at 24 dollars, a nod to the sum Dutch colonial director Peter Minuit is said to have paid the Lenape for Manhattan Island in 1626. The work visualizes the analogy often used to describe the early internet as a vast and open terrain. In contrast to the artists raised within today’s platform economy, exonemo reflects on what was lost as the web became centralized, asking who holds its territory and what remains for those arriving next.

exonemo is an artist duo formed by Kensuke Sembo and Yae Akaiwa in 1996, celebrating thirty years of practice this year. Working across digital and analog realms, they examine the transformations of a networked society with critical insight and humor. Beyond the gallery, they founded the Internet Yami-Ichi, a flea market style event bringing internet culture into physical space, now held in over thirty cities worldwide.