Review of Mark Napier's Venus 2.0 by Angela Ferraiolo

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

[img]http://www.furtherfield.org/pics/p_3506.jpg[/img]

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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