Mark Napier is an early adopter of the web and a pioneer of digital and Internet art (net.art) in the United States, known for creating interactive online artwork that challenges traditional definitions of art. He uses code as an expressive form, and the Internet as his exhibition space and laboratory.
Napier developed his first web-based applications for financial data in 1996. He is the author of his own website, potatoland.org, his online studio where many of his net artworks can be found, such as Shredder 1.0, net.flag, Riot, etc.
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Personal life
Mark Napier was born in 1961 in Springfield, New Jersey. Napier lives and works in New York city. Currently, he is a consultant for a new personal finance company.
Education
Mark Napier graduated in 1984 with a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from Syracuse University.
Life and work
Trained as a painter, Napier worked as a self-taught programmer in New York's financial markets until 1995, when a friend introduced him to the web. With Levi Asher, Napier collaborated on his first website ("Chicken Wire Mother") and began several experiments with hypertext in which he explored juxtaposing meanings and pop culture symbols. In The Distorted Barbie site, Napier created a family of Photoshopped Barbie also-rans that riffed on the "sacred cash-cow" status of the capitalist icon. Mattel was not amused and threatened Napier with a cease-and-desist letter, which prompted a wholesale copying of the site by enraged fans.
In 1997, shortly after the Distorted Barbie episode, Napier opened potatoland.org, an online studio for interactive work where he explored software as an art medium with such pieces as Digital Landfill and Internet shredder 1.0 (1998). Both pieces were included in the seminal "net_condition" show at ZKM in Karlsruhe and attracted critical attention: Shredder was shown at Ars Electronica and Digital Landfill was written up in the Village Voice. Over the next five years Napier explored the networked software environment, creating work that challenged the definition of the art object. The salient features of these pieces: 1) The artwork can be altered by the viewer/visitor, 2) it responds to actions from the viewer/visitor and 3) typically relies on viewer/visitor actions to enact the work. The work can change, possibly unpredictably, over time, and often appropriates other network property to use as raw material, e.g., websites, flags, images. The art is "massively public": it is accessible to and can be altered by anybody with access to the network.
These pieces exist in part as performances, in part as places that a viewer visits, in part as compositions, like music, that unfold differently when played under different circumstances. The overriding experience is that the art object is disembodied, existing in many places at once, with many authors contributing to the piece, with many appearances, over time, with no clear end point. The artwork is in the algorithm, the process, which manifests itself in an unending series of appearances on the screen.
During this time Napier produced Riot, an alternative browser shown in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Feed, commissioned by SFMOMA and shown in the "010101" show at SFMOMA (2001), and net.flag, commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum. In 2002 net.flag and John Simon's Unfolding Object became the first network-based artworks to be acquired by a major museum.
Notable projects
The Distorted Barbie (1996)
Digital Landfill (1998)
Shredder 1.0 (1998)
Riot (1999)
©Bots (2000)
net.flag (2002)
Black and White (2003)
Kaarme Scholarship Search (2013)
Awards and honors
2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Computer Arts
2002 Creative Capital grant
2001 Nominated for a Webby Award in the Arts category
2001 New York Foundation for the Arts, fellowship in Computer Arts
2001 Greenwall Foundation grant for “Point-to-Point”
2000 Fraunhofer Society prize for “Point-to-Point”
1999 The Shredder awarded honorable mention by Ars Electronica 99.
1998 Digital Landfill receives first prize in ASCII Digital 99 festival
