Hyper_Runt

Mark Napier


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©BOTS

Mark Napier has created an entire system which lets the public construct its own kind of Hyper-Runt out of a menu of body parts scanned from media celebrities. Taken as a whole, his ©BOT system has jumped out of its usual cage within the "experimental digital art" niche and has been adopted by thousands of users on the internet, it's destiny still unfolding.

I first met Mark Napier at a new media conference put together by the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Although many of the artists selected for the gathering were bright folks who managed to integrate digital technology into their more traditional work, Mark was one of the few who seemed native to the territory. His instinct for working the internet and other streams of data into a living stew were quite palpable. I have no doubt that the art world will entirely miss the genius of his work as it has so many digital innovators over the years (especially when it's force-fit into their temples). It doesn't matter. His creations and the extended planetary temple in which they thrive, are far more interesting on their own terms.

--Ebon Fisher

Copyrighted memes live in our minds, influence our thoughts, even shape our decisions. We are hosts for these memes, yet we have no say in their design, nor do we have the legal right to alter them. Like sacred icons they are controlled by corporate high priests and defended by armies of lawyers. To defile a corporate memetic property is a sacrilege that incurs harsh punishment in the form of legal action and exorbitant fines.

Corporations compete for your attention, for access to your memory, fertile ground where they can install their memes. Your mind is the most valuable real estate in cyberspace. Memes infiltrate and multiply in this real-estate, usually without the host even knowing. Squatting in mental territory, corporations pay no rent to the owner of that property.

We at ©Bots urge you to reclaim your mental real-estate. Evict the sponging memes by sending ©Bots in after them. With ©Bots you can spread your own counter-memes into our collective mental space. ©Bots are built from familiar pop-culture components, so they can be readily absorbed into memory, yet they combine those elements into surprising and contradictory new forms. Over time ©Bots disrupt and dislodge entrenched memes, raising them to the conscious level where the host can control the impact of the meme in their lives.

Since the ©Bots project started in February 2000, visitors have created more than 4000 playful counter-culture icons. Collaged from the fragments of pop-culture icons (Bugs Bunny's ears, Darth Vaders head) the ©Bots range from weird to sublime to scary. Each day two or three are added to the site, each one unique, yet all of the strangely familiar.

Bio

Mark Napier, painter-turned-digital-artist, is one of the early pioneering artists of the Internet to explore the potential of a worldwide public space. Creating artwork exclusively for the Web, including such works as The Shredder, Digital Landfill, and Feed, he has embraced an unprecedented artistic form that gives the viewer the freedom to re-contextualize the medium, to shred its contents, and filter its huge mass of structured information that spans continents.

Drawing on his experience as a software developer, Napier explores the software interface as an expressive form, and invites the visitor to participate in the work. His online studio, potatoland.org, is an open playground of interactive artwork.

Napier has created a wide range of projects which appropriate the data of the web, transforming content into abstraction, text into graphics, and information into art. His works have been included in leading exhibitions of Digital Art including: the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial Exhibition, the Whitney's Data Dynamics exhibition, the San Francisco Museum of Art's 010101: Art in the Age of Technology, and ZKM's (Center for Art & Media in Karlsruhe, Germany) net_condition exhibition. A recipient of grants from Creative Capital (2002), NYFA (2001) the Greenwall Foundation (2001), Napier has been commissioned to create artwork by SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum, and the
Guggenheim.

For more information: http://www.potatoland.org/