Outernet Arts inaugurated the exhibition programme on October 16th 2022 with Dotcom Séance, a new public project by artist Simon Denny. Dotcom Séance is an expansive digital installation reflecting core facets of Denny’s work, which explores technology’s sustained influence upon global cultural and political development, with particular focus on the tech industry. For this project, the artist has selected 21 dotcom era companies declared ‘dead’ in the wake of the ostensible dotcom crash in the early 2000s, with the purpose of “resurrecting” their existence as it stands in a contemporary setting.

In bringing these companies back to life, Denny seeks to re-evaluate their relevance in the context of Web3, motivated by the resurgence in popularity today of many dead companies’ business models. In doing so, Denny highlights the cyclical nature of business strategies within the history of the technology industry.

Each company was given a number of new logos produced by text-to-image Artificial Intelligence, created in collaboration with Cosmographia, thus demonstrating the relationship between Web1 and Web3 through a visual manifestation of these companies’ “ghosts” and respective histories. These new logos, which take the form of NFTs, entitle their holders to register an ENS subdomain and serve as “employees” of the reanimated company. The artist Guile Twardowski also designed a bespoke new logo for each company, drawing on the AI outputs. The project’s first iteration went live through the online gallery Folia.app.