_readme – own, be owned, or remain invisible by Heath Bunting

This pioneering work of net.art transforms a newspaper article about Heath Bunting, the artist, into a hyperlinked guide, where each word links to a corresponding website. Initially leading to dead ends in 1998, the project highlighted the commercialization of online visibility, as banal words led to purchased domain sites. Through this hypertext exploration, Bunting explored how Internet perception structures ownership conditions, exposing the ruins of the grand narrative as the foundation of the new economy. This project anticipated the blockchain and NFT’s contemporary exploration of ownership.