Digital Landfill >>
Mark Napier
"Now, with Digital Landfill, web citizens have an economical, safe, clean, and
environmentally friendly way to dispose of unsightly scrap data." --Mark Napier
----------------------
||| HIAFF 3.0 | university of colorado | department of art and art history | digital arts area | in conjunction with alt-x | atlas | blurr
|
|
|
[Reviews] Tired of eating spam? Feeling guilty for throwing away unused ideas? Is the
trashcan on your desktop overflowing? Mark Napier comes to the rescue with the
Digital Landfill. Anything can be thrown in: text, images, rotting bits of
javascript. Everything gets added to the heap and redisplayed in a manor that
one might even consider to be a work of art. Similar to the way that junk
sculptures weld and glue together collected pieces of cultural refuse, Napiers
landfill digitally bonds diverse media together to create a kind of recycled
junk art.
Much of Napierâs work stems from his creative mixing and blurring together of
intellectual objects with concrete real (?) space objects. This concept is not
so far-fetched; many enlightened philosophers have written of their being no
difference between the two. Landfill is an example of this concept extrapolated
to include the Internet. As people begin to wonder whether their email
relationships are becoming more important that their physical relationships,
this art object becomes increasingly poignant as the difference between the on
and off-line world becomes indistinct.
Not only is this a work of art, but it is also a fairly serious bit of
programming. The Landfill is an automated mechanism, with the final product
ultimately assembled by a computer, which decides the overall arrangement of
human input. This presents a certain machine aesthetic, which may not stir a
tremendous amount of human emotion. Nevertheless, depending on what gets thrown
in and on which day one decides to look, a seemingly random grouping of digital
junk may combine to create a momentarily moving piece. Anything is possible.
Although this piece may also be seen as little more than a clever, humorous, and
sarcastic play on words, it also poses a question of just how much intellectual
property becomes junk, and what should be done with it? The junk mail that we
throw away each day was at some point painstakingly created by someone and some
amount of time was spent on its production. Consumerism relies on the continual
process of throwing away. As we become conditioned to this process, we tend to
spend much time formulating and dwelling upon thoughts that ultimately will
become intellectual refuse. How many moments of life, if not entire lives, get
wasted in this way? Napierâs Digital Landfill is also an intellectual landfill,
one that presents a picture of just how much intellectual thought becomes
garbage, and asks what can be done creatively to put our thoughts to better use.
|
|
