Potatoland is the home base of Mark Napier, the American ex-painter who, since 1995, has only made art for and using the Web. As an artist, he has already shown a wide variety of Internet projects, including the playfully destructive software product called 'The Shredder'. This is an application that graphically puts randomly chosen sites through a mincer to give you a new Internet experience. Or the 'Digital Landfill' project that deals with the pixel pollution on the Web, or more graphically oriented works like 'The Desiring Machine – a global sexual organ' and 'Opposable Thumbs'. The website 'Potatoland' is a combination of experiments in interactivity that we also know from jodi.org and Alexei Schulgin (such as his Form Art Contest) and extensive graphic experiments that still betray a leaning towards aesthetics. The mentality of the work is contrary and fresh. It's a relief given the increasingly uniform portals and e-commerce websites, and nourishes the hope that net.art is not something that was only viable in the early days of the Internet, when it was still a 'hype'. Particularly successful is the graphic sound environment 'Ripple', a black world where every click in the field produces a sound and an expanding sphere. The spheres come towards you and interfere both with the sound and graphics in each other's domain. This produces a kind of interactive screensaver that demands ever-new combinations and forms. This project was brought about with help from John Maxwell Hobes and Kees van den Doel. As an alternative interactive world, 'Potatoland' is a welcome change to the increasingly monotonous Internet menu.
– Willem van Weelden |
Mark Napier, 1961, New Jersey (USA)
Lives and works in New York (USA)
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