The new media art
The new media art as a concept was created when people started making art using codes, which are often delivered through the Internet. In the early days, websites were, most of the time, just plain text, hyperlinks, and pictures, with animations seldomly making an appearance. Aesthetics and design was not one of the top goals when creating a website. New media art was a new, re-imagination the web needed. They showed people how imaginative and beautiful the web can be. Although there are still a lot of brilliant new media artist in the new era of the web, I think more importantly the spirit of new media art carried on as a revolution to the whole web dev industry. The websites nowadays put a huge emphasis on the aesthetic and design, making people’s online experience way more interesting.
Shredder 1.0
Shredder 1.0, the database engineer Mark Napier’s new media art project, featured a special browser experience that “butchers” the website you put in and put it together in a barely recognizable way. It is beautiful in a chaotic way. The Shredder broke the traditional approach to present the web as if it is a printed media.
As long as all browsers agree (at least somewhat) on the conventions of HTML there is the illusion of solidity or permanence in the web. But behind the graphical illusion is a vast body of text files — containing HTML code — that fills hard drives on computers at locations all over the world. Collectively these instructions make up what we call ‘the web’. But what if these instructions are interpreted differently than intended? Perhaps radically differently?
The web browser is an organ of perception through which we ‘see’ the web. It filters and organizes a huge mass of structured information that spans continents, is constantly growing, reorganizing itself, shifting its appearance, evolving. The Shredder presents this global structure as a chaotic, irrational, raucous collage. By altering the HTML code before the browser reads it, the Shredder appropriates the data of the web, transforming it into a parallel web. Content become abstraction. Text becomes graphics. Information becomes art.
Mark Napier is a painter-turned-programmer, which is probably one of the reason why he was one of the early adopter of the new media art form.
Prepared PlayStation
Radical Software Group’s art installation *Prepared PlayStation* was a bugged playstation that plays itself. It is a very interesting installation, as although they are not the first to exploit games, they sure are the first to show it in a art museum. Game exploiting is one of the most iconic video game culture of the modern time, and I have always admired game exploiter’s passion on pushing the game to its absolute limit, it can absolutely be a art form.
Radical Software Group is a loosely defined ensemble of artists and programmers, working collaboratively in digital media. Radical Software Group, or RSG, is named in honor of Radical Software, the short-lived but seminal 1970s magazine, which investigated nascent video technology with much the same irreverent spirit that RSG now brings to digital culture.