[spectre] Review of Mark Napier's Venus 2.0 by Angela Ferraiolo

[marc garrett]

Sorry for cross posting...

Review of Mark Napier's Venus 2.0 by Angela Ferraiolo.
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=379

Angela Ferraiolo meets Mark Napier in New York and asks him what's 
behind the Venus 2.0 project.

Venus 2.0 was created from software written by the artist, collecting 
images of various body parts of Pamela Anderson, an erotic icon of our 
time. All images were scraped from the hundreds of pictures of Pamela 
Anderson available on the Internet, recreating mobile, three-dimensional 
figures out of these flat fragmentary pictures. Mark Napier reflects and 
redefines on our perceptions of images in this Internet age, on network 
structures and on the Internet's influence on our lives.

"Now that I'm done' I find the artwork disturbing. It freaks me out. 
Maybe I'll do landscapes for a while to detox." -- Mark Napier

Mark Napier (http://www.potatoland.org/), well-known for the net 
classics Shredder (http://www.potatoland.org/shredder/) Riot 
(http:www.potatoland.org/riot/) and Digital Landfill 
(http://www.potatoland.org/landfill/) recently exhibited his latest work 
Venus 2.0 at
the DAM Gallery (http://www.dam-berlin.de/) in Berlin.

Mark Napier (1961, USA) lives in New York. He became inspired by 
software development soon after completing his training as a painter. He 
has been working on Net art since 1995 and was one of the first artists 
to deal thematically and formally with the Internet. His works explore 
terms such as 'ownership' and 'authority' in the Net and interrogate 
browser functions and Web design. He has been commissioned to create Net 
art works by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the San Francisco 
Museum of Modern Art and took part in the Whitney Biennale in 2002. 
Institutions and festivals that have exhibited his works include the 
Centre Pompidou in Paris, P.S.1 New York, the Walker Art Center in 
Minneapolis, Ars Electronica in Linz, The Kitchen, Künstlerhaus Vienna, 
ZKM Karlsruhe, Transmediale, iMAL Brussels, Eyebeam, the Princeton Art 
Museum, and la Villette, Paris. He has also received awards from 
Creative Capital, the Greenwall Foundation and the New York Foundation 
for the Arts.

Angela Ferraiolo is an interactive writer and filmmaker experimenting 
with text, video, and animation for the web, installation, and mobile 
applications. She is currently working on a new interactive movie titled 
"The Loop". Her digital story "Map of a Future War" was published in the 
Fall 2008 issue of the New River Journal. Her plays have been produced 
at La Mama Galleria and Expanded Arts in New York City and at the Brick 
Playhouse in Philadelphia, USA. She is also the author of the RPG Aidyn 
Chronicles and the MMORPG Earth and Beyond. Angela teaches game 
programming and theories of game design in the Film and Media Department 
of Hunter College in New York.


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