From "Rhizome", 11 May 1999

open_source_hell.com

www. HELL.COM was born in 1995 as a conceptual art piece, an anti-web that sold and promoted nothing and was not accessible to the public: a sheer b(l)ack hole of the web. For almost three years, HELL.COM, a site with no content, never listed in any directory nor linked anywhere, averages of a million hits per month from people typing the name in search engines. It becomes therefore a conteiner for net.art sites and art galleries in which is possible to get in only if you are invited and whom list of member s is kept secret; it's what themselves call "a private parallel web." The idea behind HELL.COM is to create a launching pad for cyber-artists extremly elitist and with badly hidden venal ambitions... a fuckin' museum!

During february 1999 HELL.COM organized "surface": a show with several superstar net artists like zuper!, absurd, fakeshop and many more. Like all the events by HELL.COM also this one was not available to the public, but was opened exclusively to RHIZOME subscribers.

During the 48 hours opening 0100101110101101.ORG downloaded all the files of the site; the clone has been put on line, this time anticopyright, visible, reproducible and freely diffusible and, thanks to some technical devices, even more easily downloadable.

According to 0100101110101101.ORG "the convinction that information must be free is a tribute to the way in which a very good computer or a valid program work: binary numbers move in accordance with the most logic, direct and necessary way to do their complex function. What is a computer if not somthing that benefit by the free flow of information? "

At the moment the site is on line at the url:
HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/hell.com The situation is constantly changing and nobody knows if and how long the site will remain active; actually HELL.COM has already threatened legal proceedings for copyright violations.

HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/hell.com
http://HELL.COM