| As a pioneer in digital art, Mark Napier started the potatoland.org site in 1995 and made the interactive piece Digital Landfill in 1998. I had a talk with Mark about his view on the position of new media arts, the dissapperance of the object in art and the new role of the artist. Matilde Digmann: Can you tell me a little bit about the idea behind and function of works like Shredder, Landfill and Riot? Mark Napier: These works look at power and the human desire for control. In particular, they explore how this desire for control plays out on the web, as the chaos of this new environment pushes many of these issues to the surface where we can get a better look at them. |
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Digital Landfill – Matilde Digmann talks with Mark Napier
As a pioneer in digital art, Mark Napier started the potatoland.org site in 1995 and made the interactive piece Digital Landfill in 1998. I had a talk with Mark about his view on the position of new media arts, the dissapperance of the object in art and the new role of the artist.
Matilde Digmann: Can you tell me a little bit about the idea behind and function of works like Shredder, Landfill and Riot?
Mark Napier: These works look at power and the human desire for control. In particular, they explore how this desire for control plays out on the web, as the chaos of this new environment pushes many of these issues to the surface where we can get a better look at them. Digital Landfill, Shredder and Riot explore notions of permanence, authorship and ownership that permeate property in our society. Shredder and Riot are alternative browsers that rewrite the rules of the web. The viewer enters a website address or can click links to surf through the web transformed by the artwork. In Digital Landfill, viewers submit digital "debris" that they want to dispose of.
MD: I know you have a BFA in painting. Can you tell me what path directed you towards this somewhat unconventional artform?
MN: I was frustrated by the static nature of painting. I enjoyed the process of painting more than the final result and often painted over older paintings in order to explore the process of creating and destroying images. I looked for ways to make art that incorporated that evolving, changing process. When the web came along I felt a strong pull to explore that form. In 1995 I started making websites and in 1998 I made Digital Landfill, which you could say was my first truly interactive piece.
MD: How did potatoland.org start, and what is the idea behind the site?
MN: Around 1995 I had been working with hypertext and treating the webpage, in part, as a form of writing. As the browsers became more sophisticated, I started thinking of the browser as an interactive space and the web as an environment. Then, I started thinking about visual artwork that used this environment, sort of like earthworks art, but in a digital form. What would Smithson’s the Spiral Jetty look like if it was made for the web? I realized that I needed a place for these pieces to live, and that’s when I got the potatoland.org domain.
MD: What is interesting to me is that your artworks deal with themes of physical vs nonphysical spaces. Can you elaborate on this?
MN: Shredder, Riot and Digital Landfill all look at the collision of the physical and the virtual world and focus on the relationship of the physical body and this digital medium. In Shredder, the visitor can vicariously destroy a webpage, as if tearing it up. The software provides the physical experience of destruction in a world that doesn’t work that way. Digital Landfill questions how we assign value in a world that does not have decay.
Riot, in particular, deals with the idea of neighborhoods. In our own environment, we build fences around homes and towns in order to protect them and reinforce our own identity as a group. Before fences were invented, land was not seen as something that could be owned. On the web, the domain name serves as a means to establish identity, but there is no physical fence around domains. The browser software keeps each domain separate from the others by following the rules of the web. Riot breaks these rules and allows multiple websites to flow together. It merges not just the sites that you are surfing to, but also the sites that anyone else is surfing to in Riot at that moment. The browser window becomes a public space that you share with other visitors to Riot.
MD: Do you think aesthetics still define art, and how do you relate to these terms in your work?
MN: I choose to make visually engaging work because the art that has most affected me has been visually engaging. Art communicates across generations. Other forms, such as entertainment, need only to communicate at this moment to be effective. For art to communicate, however, it must first seduce. It has to connect with the viewer on some level, even if the viewer is just walking past, or surfing past, and has no interest in this artwork or any idea what it is about. If the art fails to make this first connection, then nothing further will come of it.
This does not mean "pretty" or "beautiful" art. When I first saw Pollock’s paintings, I found them to be confusing and ugly. But there was something in the works that compelled me to look at them longer. I sat in front of a large Pollock for a half hour before I could get a glimpse of the ideas that Pollock was pointing to. The visual nature of the painting is not superfluous to those ideas. It is instead an integral part of those ideas. Yet, the idea alone, without the visual engagement, could not fully be expressed.
MD: What are your thoughts on the nature of art?
MN: Art is experience. The object is the trigger for this experience. An artwork in a closet is dead.
The art object is no longer central to the artwork, and most of the artists selling objects today do not make these objects themselves. The mystique of the unique, handmade object was fading well before the internet came along. Look at Matthew Barney and the “Cremaster” series. "Cremaster" is a brand. It exists primarily as a reputation, some clips from the films and the props from the films. The props, I’m sure, are fabricated. They are significant only in relationship to the larger story of the artwork. If one is lost or broken, it can be replicated. Artists know that the object is replaceable. Art dealers don’t know this, or they don’t acknowledge it because their business model depends on unique objects.
MD: Do you feel that your works are changing the concept of “artist”?
MN: My artwork includes the viewer as an active participant in the work. The artwork is not a final, complete object. It is instead a process that is activated and, in a sense, completed by the viewer. The viewer becomes a part of the creative act of the work. This changes the authority of the art object, which, traditionally, is protected from the viewer, behind glass or a velvet rope. The artwork is an algorithm, a design, a virtual machine, a process. When that process is activated, the artwork happens. This certainly has changed my role as an artist. I don’t author a final work. I author a design that has the potential to do certain things. The final work happens at a later date, often without my intervention.
