Creative Capital

What would a flag for the territory of the Internet look like? Who owns artworks that exist online and are created collectively by visitors to the site? And just what does the “interact” in “interactive” really mean?

These are just a few of the questions tackled by digital media artist and software designer Mark Napier over the last decade. The 41-year-old artist, who currently lives in New York City, has created several of the most noteworthy media art projects in the U.S. and, in the process, has effectively championed a burgeoning movement of politically oriented, art-based critiques of ownership, copyright, national boundaries, and power.

Prior to 1995, Napier was a programmer by day and painter in his spare time. Then a friend urged him to investigate the Internet. “I found that it was the perfect place for me to put together my knowledge as a painter, and my knowledge as a programmer,” explains Napier. “Painting offers great training in visual aesthetics and it has always had a conceptual underpinning, so when you’re painting, you’re learning how to get a message across through this very simple form. As a software developer, I was working with similar ideas.”

Painting for Napier, however, was never completely fulfilling. “It’s a record of a process, but it’s static,” he says. “It’s one form, and it will stay that way. But with a computer interface, you have the beginning, and once the user begins to interact with the site, it changes. So there’s a dynamic temporal quality that I really enjoy.”

One of Napier’s first Internet-based artworks was The Digital Landfill (1998), a piece that quickly garnered much attention due to the way it calls into question the status of art. “It’s about the boundaries of Net art and who has the authority to change it,” explains Napier. The piece allows users to deposit unwanted email, spam, and obsolete data as if it’s junk being heaped into a landfill. Each addition changes the piece in terms of tone and appearance, creating a kinetic, ever-changing site made by its visitors.
Napier has continued to create compelling web-based artworks, including Feed (2001), which Napier likens to an action painting, except that it uses URLs (website addresses) instead of paint as its raw material; Riot (1999), which was shown in the Whitney Biennial in 2002; and net.flag (2001), which was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum for its permanent collection and allows users to contribute to the creation of a flag for the territory of the Internet. In each of these projects, Napier strives to facilitate the interaction of visitors. “In all my work, I’m really looking for ways in which the viewer is a participant and can creatively engage with the artwork and enhance it by participating.”

Napier is currently working on 0×1 (zero by one), which he describes as a “digital mandala.” A mandala is a cosmograph, literally a drawing of the universe. Napier says he wants to visualize the online universe in order to illustrate the very active creativity that drives the web at every moment. “It will be an imaging of that creative flow as a global process,” he says, adding that he hopes to condense the process into a constant flux of colors, textures, shapes, and forms that viewers will see unfolding in an ambient meditative experience. To make the site, he will use algorithms that read the web, image by image, sound by sound, and that will then translate them into abstract material. He adds that because any viewer at any point will be able to erase the entire mandala, the piece has a very direct connection to Tibetan sand mandalas, which similarly lack permanence. “We need to let go, to know that things are not permanent,” Napier says. “zero by one is a reminder of that — we don’t possess this thing, and it may be gone at any point.”