2026 Whitney Museum of American Art - artport: A History of Internet Art (Opening November 21st, 2026 in museum)
2002 Whitney Museum of American Art - Whitney artport
2003 Bank Gallery, Los Angeles
website, archival prints
When I first conceived of Goodworld in 2001, the world and the internet were in a very different place. The dot-com bubble of the mid-to-late ’90s had burst, the World Trade Center had been attacked and destroyed, and the commercialization of the web was in full force. It was now more difficult to get lost late into the night exploring abstract sites such as jodi.org or the generative works of lia. These sites had no cookies, no advertising, no notion of selling you anything. They were pure digital experiences, a new kind of expression.
At the time, my studio was on Broadway, just a few blocks from the World Trade Center, in a space I shared with Yoshi Sodeoka and others. That morning I was setting up a desk when the first plane flew right past our window. I’ll never forget the sound. Downtown was desolate for months before we were allowed back in.
I share this to give context for where the piece came from, and for what helped give birth to the idea of erasing everything and starting over. There was a longing for simplicity alongside deep uncertainty about what was coming next. I was driven by a desire to quiet the noise, and by my punk rock roots: to take over the web and, in a sense, destroy it, then wrap it all in real time.
The Whitney’s artport helped me realize the piece in 2002 and gave it a platform. Working with programmer Charlie Killian, I created goodworld.ws. It went through many iterations as I experimented with different colors and algorithms.
I’m excited to reintroduce Goodworld to a new audience, and to re-enter it myself. Revisiting this work feels like a chance to discover a new side of my practice, one that predates many of the frameworks and expectations that have since formed around technology, productivity, and authorship.
In this new chapter, Goodworld is less a response and more a re-centering: a shift toward presence, intuition, and restraint. It feels like a quiet paradigm shift, a meditation on where we’ve been and what is yet to come in a vastly changed world.
— Lew Baldwin, 2026
For many people, the online experience has become a bombardment of pop-up windows and sneaky ad tactics, i.e. seemingly endless spawning windows, fake windows, etc. We've grown accustomed to being interrupted by flashing ad banners selling investment services while reading the latest news about a pending nuclear attack. Goodworld neutralizes the Web by wiping out content and unifying all pages into one creation. Hence the whole world becomes a 'Good World' in the eye of the artist -- or possibly an unsettled dilution of the safe and familiar we've come to expect.