untitled[rhizome] (2000)

Created at the turn of the millennium, untitled[rhizome] is one of several net.art works in Jan Robert Leegte's ntsqt (netsquat) series, specifically selected for WWW! as a part of Rhizome's 30th anniversary celebrations. The artist copied the source code of famous websites such as Hotmail, Altavista, Etoys and Playboy, extracted all the content and put them back online. What results is what the artist describes as a virtual 'squat', these websites have become the only representing spaces of the websites they once were. They demonstrate the vulnerable and ephemeral nature of the internet, predicting the decay of websites long before the internet became as saturated as it is today. untitled[rhizome] is a relic of a netspace past, long abandoned, yet just one of many websites that have since been lost to the passage of time.

Jan Robert Leegte has worked with the internet as an artistic medium since 1997, placing him among the pioneers of net.art. His early works, exhibited internationally, examined the web browser as sculptural and philosophical object, treating scrollbars, selection marquees, and interface elements as material in their own right.