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My Blog through the Shredder: 2011 entries

My blog entries through The Shredder 1.0: some of the results!

My Blog through the Shredder: 2010 entries

My 2010 blog entries after being put through Mark Napier's Shredder 1.0

Mark Napier: Shredder 1.0

  

Mark Napier created Shredder in 1998. Its aim was not to appropriate from the web, but to emphasise the materiality of the web. Napier cites Pollock and Smithson as inspiration as  both call attention to the materiality of there art. Napier explains his approach: “I wanted to expose the raw material that make up the ‘design’, ‘content’ and ‘information’ of the web and use of information directly. Of course, this material is a construct of software and the graphics display. It is ‘raw’ only by virtue of the context The Shredder creates” (Green, R., 2004 p.100).

“What we see when we browse the web” argues Tribe and Jana, “is a carefully designed veneer, an orderly facade that conceals the jungle of the code” (2007 p.70). Napier’s Shredder 1.0 “lets us peek behind the curtain, revealing a colourful jumble of text and images” (2007 p.70)..

When you visit the site you are encouraged to enter a web address in the location field at the top of Shredder 1.0’s interface and Shredder literally deconstructs the original site. The result of the dicing and slicing of the web pages is an abstract composition.

There is a similarity to here to Photosynthing in that it deals with the DNA of the visual.  It does sometimes disrupt an image.

The results of The Shredder are closer to abstraction and abstract expressionism in particular.  I have seen examples that look like Hoffman.The reference to the materiality of the web seems close to modernisms idea of honesty of materials.

References:

 

Greene, R., (2004) Internet Art,  London: Thames and Hudson

Tribe, M., (2007) New Media Art Los Angeles: Taschen

Mark Napier: Shredder 1.0

Visit here with a URL to put into The Shredder 1.0

Virtual Sighseeing Augmented Reality Scenic Viewer - Cascais Lookout Point

Joiners

I have written a lot about a number of practitioners that can be described as “joiners”. This is a term I discovered in John A. Walker’s invaluable dictionary of art: Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design Since 1945 Third Edition. My copy was withdrawn from Beverly Hills Public Library on North Rexford Drive, Beverley Hills.

Anyway, back to the business of “joiners”. This is a term, Walker says, that was:

invented by the British artist David Hockey to describe those of his works produced in the 1980s which are composed of a series of small photographs joined together. The photographs are taken from different viewpoints and then arranged so they link up or overlap with the result that the finished collage resembles a photographic version of cubism. Due to his fame, Hockney has come to be regarded as the inventor of this form of art but in fact artists such as Jan Dibbets and John Stezaker were making ‘Joiners’ long before Hockney.

I would also add Gordon Matta-Clark to the list. Matta-Clark is refered to in the same breadth as Hockney by Zelnik-Manor and Perona,in 2008 in there discussion of automatic-joiners, produced through software.

Other key figures I think are important to mention are John Harper, Luo Yonglin, Thomas Kellner and Sohei Nishino.

There is also Doug and Mike Starn and image joiners like Christopher Marclay that may tie in here.

Further reading:

Hockney, D., & Joyce, P., Hockney on Photography: conversations with Paul Joyce, London: Jonathan Cape

Zelnik-Manor & Perona (2008) ”Automating Joiners”
http://webee.technion.ac.il/~lihi/Publications/ZelnikPerona.AutoJoiners.pdf