Most websites try to make interfaces easier to understand. JODI spent decades asking the more entertaining question: what if the interface itself became the thing you had to figure out? CityFonts belongs to that tradition.
The site is associated with JODI, the net-art partnership of Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans. Heemskerk’s current portfolio explicitly lists CITYFONTS among her web works, and JODI’s broader history goes back to the mid-1990s, when the duo became early practitioners of what came to be called net.art.
JODI’s specialty was never making polite online galleries. They treated browsers, source code, error messages, maps, games, and interface conventions as raw material. A visitor could arrive expecting a website and instead get something that looked broken, hostile, nonsensical, or suspiciously like the computer had developed opinions.
CityFonts fits that method. A related JODI project at geogeo.jodi.org labels part of its Google Maps experiment “Cityfonts,” turning geographic data and map behavior into visual material rather than merely using a map to tell you where the nearest sandwich is.
The browser was the canvas
That distinction matters when looking back at old Web art.
A lot of digital art shown online is fundamentally ordinary art placed inside a webpage: an image, a video, a scan, a portfolio. Net.art projects such as JODI’s often made the webpage, browser behavior, navigation, and user confusion part of the work itself.
The result ages strangely well because the conventions being attacked became even more standardized. Modern interfaces are relentlessly trained toward predictable buttons, cards, menus, feeds, and engagement funnels. JODI’s work comes from a period when artists were still treating the browser as unexplored territory rather than a rectangular delivery tube for content.
There is also a preservation problem built into work like this. Interactive Web art can depend on redirects, scripts, APIs, browser quirks, abandoned domains, or services that change underneath it. Saving a screenshot records appearance but can erase the behavior that made the piece interesting. A net-art archive therefore has a harder job than simply keeping JPEGs around.
That is part of why CityFonts belongs in an Ancient Web list. The address is not merely an old curiosity. It points into a lineage where artists were actively testing what a website could be while the grammar of the Web was still being invented.
CacheRat’s larger 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many pages that are useful because of their information. CityFonts is useful for almost the opposite reason: it reminds us that the Web also became a medium people could deliberately misuse.