Artist post 2: Mark Napier

One Mark Napier's works, FEED, was featured in the recent reading: Defining New Media Art. He was included in the section of the article about New media art as a movement. In the article it talks about how new media art did not emerge until the end of the twentieth century, and how net art did not emerge from Germany until after 1997. Exhibitions of Mark Napier's art have been in Paris, New York, Berlin, The Princeton Art Museum and many more. He was also commissioned by Soloman R. Guggenhein Museum to create internet art as a permanent collection in their museum. (bio info)

Mark Napier was one of the first people to explore the internet as a place for public art to be shown. As early as 1998 his work was up on the web: Shredder, Riot (1999) and FEED (2001). More recently he is exploring: permenance, skin, mythology and texture. When exploring his website I found a very interesting collection of his work called PAM. It appears that he takes pictures of the famous Pamela Anderson and then through digital art techniques morphs her into this confusing yet interesting piece of art. He adds other images of her breaking her down by body parts, he adds arrows and numbers also.

I believe the statement he is trying to make with this collection is that the sex industry and just the public in general see people not as a whole but rather piece by piece. We analyze and judge people a lot by what they look like or have: big boobs, nice hair, a big butt, long legs, etc. Then if you notice in his

collection he seems to be taking the best part of each picture and morphing it together. A butt from this bikini shot, these legs, boobs from this picture, face from here and so on. He has his own style of art and meaning behind it but the only thing I think he could do better is to make the pictures a little more clearer and not so choppy.