Pulse

From Rhizome Artbase
Mark Napier
1999
Description

Pulse is an abstract, browser-based experience. Bands of color shift within a soothing palette, inviting viewers to gaze and drift through their moods.

Rhizome staff
2021

A purely visual experience. Tap into a broad color palette, drift through your moods. Lazy and soothing.

Mark Napier
19 August 2001

I've always been attracted to the mundane details of the ordinary world, the overlooked beauty of the surfaces, textures and colors of the environment that we live in. Billboards, old advertisements painted on walls, sidewalks spotted with discarded bubblegum, rusted metal doors, crushed coffee cups - they all contain a story about the human life that created them.
When I painted, I treated paint like a found object. I let the material show. I let its character direct the painting. In my art made for the web, I look for the character in the medium itself. What is the web, and what isn't it? I make art from the mundane realities of the web: the browser, the buttons, the text, other people's web pages, Spam, discarded e-mail. Not even found objects, these are the 'unfound' objects too trivial to be noticed in all the noise of this growing medium.
In my work I use the web as raw material. I create art from the software that is readily available to anyone with access to this medium. I make the art low bandwidth and simple in design so that it can be accessed by a broad audience. The artwork is at once fragile and fleeting. It evolves over time and changes based on the actions of the visitor. A design may dissappear in moments, and perhaps can never be reproduced exactly. Yet it is by the same token very durable because it can immediately regenerate itself.
Ultimately what I'm exploring is not the technology, but the human life that inhabits it, creates it, re-creates it, and consumes it. My artwork is an exploration of the human nature of the web.

Mark Napier
19 August 2001
Legacy descriptive tags
Pulse
Attribution: Mark Napier
Formalist, interact, design, Javascript, HTML, Visual, Animation
Attribution: Rhizome staff
Metadata
Variant History
static files
19 August 2001
cloning
Rhizome staff