www: vanity veils violence

Country-code domains, originally positioned as neutral geographic markers, have become platforms for economic stratification and displaced power. The project »www: vanity veils violence« by Lucia Rebolino interrogates how digital infrastructure carries inherited violence through commercialized naming systems. Created as an interactive web simulation, it invites users to navigate and expose these hidden layers by manipulating URLs themselves.

Lucia Rebolino, London, UK — Sep. 17, 2026

Altering Google’s platform perception of Anguilla.ai ©Lucia Rebolino, 2026.

www: vanity veils violence is a web-based simulation that exposes vanity domains as sites of violence. By applying forensic methodologies, the project maps conflicts embedded within computational infrastructures as they unfold into spatial and environmental impacts. This makes the continuation of exploitative structures visible for audiences even in the digital realm.

The full point » . « functions as a sentence break, signaling a shift in meaning. But a point in an internet address serves as separating layers. It presents an engineered break making the two digits after the dot (web domain codes) not neutral labels but infrastructural mechanisms that recognize geography, and therefore politics.

Country-code domains, introduced as neutral locators in 1985 by Jon Postel, became a market around 2000. Hot »vanity domains« such as .io, .tv and .ai produce uneven digital distributions and economies, extending colonial logics. The recent .ai hype, widely used to brand artificial intelligence tools, grounds the economy of Anguilla, where state-owned domain revenue is »saved for a rainy day« – a projection of resilience contrasting with the island’s hurricane exposure.

Lucia Rebolino aims to investigate web domains that reveal geographies of veiled violence such ethnic cleansing linked to .io in Chagos, and environmental injury associated with .tv in Tuvalu, among other cases.

At the same time, .uk, .us and .il (UK, US, Israel), the first country codes established, raise questions of digital authority and spatial control. As domains become globally traded assets, the artist investigates how two digits become a commercial and financial layer through which violence and risk are spatially redistributed.

www: vanity veils violence will be published as a web-based simulation that exposes vanity domains as sites of violence. A rule-based »world-web« simulator maps ccTLD (Country Code Top-Level Domain) ownership, revenue, and climate exposure, using »vanity scores« (traffic, URLs, branding) to morph and choreograph webpages into a living cartography of economies and risk. Ego and control become variables, the audiences navigate by editing URLs, activating a decompression aesthetic that countermaps the spatial effects compressed into two-digit domains.

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