Joan Heemskerk (Dutch, b. 1968) is an artist whose practice treats the internet, its code and interfaces, and emerging network technologies as raw material, and has since expanded into quantum computing and blockchain cryptography.In 1994 she and Dirk Paesmans formed the artist duo JODI, among the earliest artists to treat a website's own code as their subject rather than just its content.
She studied photography at the St. Joost Academy in Breda and met Paesmans at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, where both studied photography and video. In 1993 the pair began an eighteen-month residency at the CADRE electronic arts laboratory at San Jose State University, where they learned about digital media and the internet, and the following year formed JODI, launching the website jodi.org in 1995. The site, whose html code has to be inspected to make full sense of it, was included in the net art section of documenta X in Kassel in 1997.
Since 2019 Heemskerk has made work with quantum computers, including PROTOTYPE (2022) and Q&Q (Qliza) (2020), made using IBM's public quantum computer access and quantum computing resources at TU Delft's QuTech.A two-month residency split between CERN, where the World Wide Web was invented, and Copenhagen Contemporary produced the video NO-MATTER (2024), which applies particle-physics image recognition to draw lines between points,and the work entangled binary network (Hello, world!) (2024), made after visiting the quantum network and sensing labs at the Niels Bohr Institute.In DoAW (2023), she used an algorithm that generates cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases to turn exposed private keys into music, exploring the vulnerability of blockchain encryption.Her generative collection Chameleon, 272 works released on Folia,and the work This Is Not <A, a stock-market-style projection that becomes a self-referential QR code when minted as an NFT on objkt.one,extend that interest in loops and reference into web3.,
