RIOT Version 1.5 About Mark Napier

In a continuous, negative gesture, RIOT 1.5 trumps website design parameters in favor of its own logic: placing jumbled, decentralized elements in one browser window. Users enter into competition to keep websites they choose to enter into the RIOT 1.5 engine, on top of the heap.

RIOT 1.5 adds features such as a rating mechanism to track the progress of entries and to give users the ability to load up and otherwise monopolize the space with what they want to see by clicking on active links and images. Napier also upped the rate at which it recycles (refreshes) content from URLs added by viewers to ensure that whatever content appears in the RIOT window will be trumped as soon as another user joins in.

Napier and I have entered into collaboration, but in suggestion only as the reciprocal relationship between artist and curator, typical to any offline art commission, stops at the point where NapierŐs position as author of the RIOT computer code also ends. Control of the ultimate form that the "artwork" takes (what appears in the RIOT window) is ultimately up to the viewer or user who visits RIOT, outside the ideological apparatus that affiliation with an artistic exhibition space provides. I have provided Napier with an "artist's fee" for his participation in this exhibition.

Mark Napier's work, which appears at his online studio, Potatoland.org, attempts to make the web an artistic space as opposed to just a commercial, educational, or governmental one. Projects like the Digital Landfill, Shredder, Graphic Jam, and RIOT refuse to take the Internet at face valueĐa place to get stock quotes, to buy things, to look up information. What if we could use the language of the Internet to create different spaces outside the realm of information architecture as we know it, "to make it our own?"

Designers, Napier says, rely on the careful fabrication of navigational structures to "keep users at the site," to facilitate the transmission of information in a coherent, stable, and familiar way. Designers work like architects at the request of a client to create spaces and ways to access them within a set of parameters.

The Net artist's imperative is to suggest that these parameters, the limits, standards, and conventions of website architecture, are mirages and that by revealing its structure and norms, an aesthetic dimension emerges. As navigational conventions on websites reproduce and self-impose social orders, information is obtained across websites in compatible ways. It is a language that those who use the Internet learn while they increasingly utilize it. It is this language that artists manipulate and in the process reveal more about it.