MARK NAPIER
new software art and prints

Thursday, April 12, 2007
6:30-8:30 pm

bitforms gallery
529 West 20th Street, NYC
(btw. 10th & 11th avenues)

If you live at a relative stone's throw from the Empire State Building, what does the ultimate symbol of capitalism become before your very eyes? How is this place tranformed by digital culture after 9/11?

In the creative mind of Mark Napier, the ESB is a cyclops formed of brick and mortar yet powered by flesh and cicuits. It is a symbol of a crumbling physical power caught in the webs of immateriality forged by software and the net. It is the very essence of the shifting structures of power.

Mark has been at work on this project for about 2 years now. It's interesting and horrific to live with a working artist. There is no reason for him to code the software that created the print for the sites or the actual artwork, yet it's more than just like a disease. He codes because he has to. That's how he builds his sculptures and paints his digital canvases.

Via Jib-Jab.

Via Left Behinds comes this, on an art show currently running at Bellwether Gallery:

If you get a chance in the next couple of weeks, check out Trevor Paglen's show BLACK WORLD at Bellwether Gallery (10th Ave. between 18th and 19th). Paglen photographs and videotapes secret government bases through telescopes from around 20 miles away; the videos in particular shimmer like the surface of a scrying pool. More recently, Paglen has gotten interested in the CIA's use of shell companies and clandestine flights to transport suspects to unacknowledged prisons in Eastern Europe. [...]

Perhaps my favorite piece is a simple 2-minute video taken at a distance of a mile, showing commuters at McCarran airport in Las Vegas getting on the 737 to either Area 51 or the Tonopah Test Range. They're ordinary fat Americans and they waddle, which tickles me. His photo of the "Salt Pit" CIA interrogation facility outside Kabul is also quite moving, in the hell-looks-like-an-ordinary-building sense.

Maybe not quite what I'd like to have hanging on my dining room wall, but it's interesting to consider out of what unpromising material aesthetics are made.

Mark Napier @ bitforms gallery

New media art pioneer Mark Napier returns to bitforms gallery with a solo exhibition of new, interactive artworks, running from October 22 through November 26. Empire, a series of interactive installations, explores power in a post-national world through an unlikely merger of monumental architecture and software. Napier’s home-grown software puts a scale model of the Empire State Building in a three-dimensional environment. Both fragile and unbreakable, the virtual monument can be destroyed and recreated in a moment.

"I’m a little obsessed with the Empire State building." Napier says. "I love the beauty of the building, but I’m also struck by how prominent it is since the towers collapsed. I see it as a symbol of power, both economic and cultural. Empire is about a virtual monument, my personal take on the real building." In this computer-generated space, a ghostly scale model of the Empire State building wobbles, bends, and tilts. Using a mouse, the viewer can lift, throw, bounce, squeeze, bend, and break the building. Every motion of the building leaves a trail behind. Like thin wisps of paint, these traces coalesce as smoky backdrops starkly contrasting with the building’s facade. With programming techniques borrowed from high-end computer games, Napier creates a unique environment and a rich visual vocabulary.

Mark Napier is my ball and chain. He has his first US show in 2 years at his art HQ, BITFORMS gallery.