H, T, T, P, colon, slash, slash, dub, dub, dub, blah blah blah. Type that into a browser's address bar, and data would come back from some server far away, and information would appear on the screen. A self-introduction, notes on hobbies, something like a diary, a guestbook where visitors could leave messages. And a list of links, clues that led to the next unknown site. Net surfers of that era were something like adventurers, moving from link to link.
Following one link after another, I found a certain site. Green ASCII characters floating up out of the dark. The site felt like wandering through the ruins of corrupted data, and it turned out to be the work of an artist duo called JODI. wwwwwwwww.jodi.org. An address with nine w's strung together looks like a typo, or maybe a misspell. But open the source code, and behind the text that looked broken on screen, an image resembling nuclear weapon blueprints appears. Not just what shows up in the browser, but the address and the source code itself, could become the work. This piece embodied that idea vividly, a symbol of early net.art.
Heath Bunting's _readme (1998) took a newspaper article written about him and linked each word to "word.com." When it was first published, most of those links led nowhere, to addresses that didn't exist. But within a few years, companies and individuals had registered even the most ordinary words as domains, and the article was gradually filled with entry points to real, existing websites. Its subtitle was Own, Be Owned or Remain Invisible. It's a work that recorded the future, simply by waiting, the process by which everyday words turned into domain assets.
In 1997, when documenta X announced it would shut down its official site once the exhibition ended, Vuk Ćosić copied the entire site and put it back up on his own server in Ljubljana. This was Documenta Done. What changed wasn't the site's content but where it lived, its address. Even data that can be copied endlessly changes meaning when "where it is" changes. The act was a piece of digital appropriation, and at the same time an attempt to treat a website as a readymade.
In 1999, the Swiss art group etoy was sued by the online toy retailer eToys over the use of "etoy.com." etoy had already been using the domain, but the fast-growing eToys argued that the similarity in names would confuse consumers and demanded that etoy give it up. In response, etoy organized its supporters as "soldiers" and launched an online campaign called Toywar. Legal battles, media strategy, and online protest merged into one, and eToys eventually dropped the suit. The dispute over ownership of a domain became, itself, the work.
Since the 2000s, Rafaël Rozendaal has given each of his works its own domain, with the URL itself serving as the title. Buying the work transfers the rights to that domain to the buyer. But the buyer also takes on an obligation to keep the work published on the internet. The work can be owned, but it can't be made private. Here, the administrative act of transferring and renewing a domain becomes, itself, the condition for the work's continued existence.
Aleksandra Domanović took up the event of March 30, 2010, when the country code domain ".yu," assigned to the vanished nation of Yugoslavia, was formally deleted from the internet. That address space had lingered for a while even after the country disappeared from the map, but eventually it, too, was lost from the DNS system. When a country disappears, the "land" it once held online disappears with it.
Looking back at these examples, a domain turns out to be more than a technical identifier. It's a place where ownership, language, and territory intersect. Scarcity isn't common on the internet. Data can be copied endlessly. But no two domain names can be the same. A domain is one of the few scarce goods built into the internet's design.
Short, memorable names are bought and sold as prime real estate, held by speculators, bought up by corporations. Tuvalu has earned significant national revenue from licensing its ".tv" country code domain. ".io," assigned to the Chagos Islands, whose residents were forcibly displaced, has become a favorite domain among tech companies and startups. Even on the blockchain, names like ".eth" are traded as assets, and the speculation and land-grabs once seen in the domain market of the 90s are being repeated today, on different technical foundations.
Any land recognized as valuable has long since become someone's property. What survives the buying and selling, the staking of claims, is only what's long, meaningless, and wanted by no one. People say the internet's frontier is already gone. But what's gone is the entrance to the good land. The wilderness itself keeps spreading.
"Own the last acres of the internet. This is where your real dream comes true."
Opening with a photograph of wilderness and the tone of a real estate ad, exonemo's The Last Acres of the Internet is a project that sells this remaining territory as "the last land." What it sells is a domain made of a random string of 63 characters, the maximum allowed for registration, with ".land" attached. Unmemorable. Impossible to say out loud. In a domain market where value has always been decided by shortness and memorability, this sits at the exact opposite end from digital Manhattan. A name whose land value approaches zero.
This 63-character address is converted, as is, into a landscape. Covering the surface of the land are Unicode characters. Code points that haven't yet been assigned a character appear as rows of tofu (□). Because no font is fixed within the work, if a new character is assigned to one of those positions in the future and implemented in people's browsers, a character will appear where tofu once stood, without the file itself ever being changed. This land isn't a finished view. It stays open to the future of the writing system, carrying the possibility of changing over time.
What transfers to the buyer isn't only the work. The responsibility to keep renewing the domain and keep the site published transfers as well. Neglect it, and the address lapses. Much of the net art from the 90s has disappeared along with addresses whose renewals stopped. Owning the work and maintaining it can't be separated.
JODI's ruins, Bunting's bought-up words, the expired ".yu." After that history, The Last Acres of the Internet points to the land that's left. It's an HTML wilderness that stretches to the horizon. Land that no one wanted, left behind once the internet's frontier closed. Whether someone builds a house on that land, or whether it meets the same fate of disappearance as so many works before it, is left to the will of the buyers.