Heath Bunting
«_readme»

In Heath Bunting's project «_readme,» each word of a newspaper article on Bunting contains a link to a dot.com web site of the same name. In 1998, when it went online, most links run into dead ends. But within only a few years, firms have purchased the most absurd and banal words as domain names, so that today most links invariably lead to corresponding web sites. With this project, Bunting refers to the commercializing of perceptibility in the Internet since the end of the 1990s, as addressed in the sub-heading «Own, Be Owned or Remain Invisible.» As everyday language becomes totally occupied by the owners of Internet domain names utilizing almost the entire vocabulary, Bunting turns this experience into a hypertext guide for casually surfing through an endlessly linked information space. Bunting demonstrates how the structure of perception in the Internet addresses the question of the conditions of ownership, as determined by links, search engines, and the names of domains. So the ruins of «great story» are simultaneously made visible as the fundament of the «new economy.»