Christoph Wachter / Mathias Jud
New Nations

Like many of the net-based works of the Swiss artist duo Wachter and Jud, New Nations illustrates the power structures of the Internet. The work is a router designed to display the limits of the freedom of the digital-communications community. While nations and governments have their own control areas (.de, .fr, .ch, .com, .mil, .gov), there are no official top-level domains for unrecognized communities such as the Tibetans (.ti), Kurds (.ku), Uyghurs (.uu) and Tamils (.te). In order to make tangible the political power interests that the virtual world shapes in the background, the artists set up their own domain-name server (DNS), which corresponds to the website www.new-nations.net. Via DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), the router automatically links the connected computer with the DNS server New Nations. If the user does not change the network settings on his/her computer, the websites of the above-named top-level domains remain inaccessible.