Jimpunk is an anonymous net artist whose work turns glitches, recycled web video and deliberately confusing site navigation into disorienting, non-linear pieces. His own website replaces conventional menus with a scrambled ASCII keyboard of symbols that must be clicked one by one to reach each project. Based in Paris, he has kept his identity anonymous even from close collaborators.
He began inviting other artists into his blog experiments in 2003 with noblog, where twenty to thirty artists posted to a single shared Blogspot site. He then ran 544x378(WebTV), on which the artist Rick Silva, working under the alias Abe Linkoln, was one of about a dozen contributors. The project ended in 2004. Jimpunk and Silva then continued together as Screenfull, a two-person blog that streamed videos and sounds automatically on load and ran for about two years. Silva later said Jimpunk originated the shared-posting blog format that came to be known as the surf club. The artist Marisa Olson has said Screenfull, run under the motto “We crash your browser with content”, predated the term postinternet. She has said it also influenced her thinking about internet art and the surf clubs that followed, including Nasty Nets, which she co-founded.
