When was the last time you cleaned out the bulging trash-can icon on your desktop?
If Web artist Mark Napier has his way, you won't just double-click those unwanted bits into the ether, you'll contribute them to his latest work of collaborative online culture: the Digital Landfill.
Like a cross between Ghost Sites of the Web, an uncensored office bulletin board and a high-tech graffiti wall, Napier's landfill accepts almost any kind of digital trash, from bad hair day GIFs, to the latest "Just released! 10 million!!" spam, to entire defunct Web sites, to scraps of text and code that no longer deserve partitions on your hard drive.
If you have a 4.0 browser or higher, the "layers" of landfill are compacted into a collage by the site's "composting" software. This can create some arresting juxtapositions. Imagine funky animated tableaux from a porn site blended up into a stew with Microsoft press releases, random JavaScript, and navigation icons from some former cool-site-of-the-day, and you have an idea of what Napier's work is about.
Earlier-generation browsers display each layer of the compost separately, which holds its own interest.
The point, Napier says, is to offer "a slice of the subconscious" of the Web.
"Underneath the confusion and possible conflict, there's a driving force -- creativity," Napier says, comparing his site to a wall in New York City, where overlapping layers of advertising posters and graffiti create a palimpsest of urban life.
The Digital Landfill is not Napier's first bit of thought-provoking Web art. The Distorted Barbie -- his deconstruction of one of the most beloved icons in the world -- brought down the censorious wrath of Mattel's lawyers, who were not amused by Napier's Photoshopped riffs on the Pink One with eating disorders and satanic tendencies. The site is now officially called "The Distorted $arbie."
Napier, a financial-software designer from Manhattan's Lower East Side, sees collage as a necessary medium of expression in the current cultural climate.
"There have been so many ideas in art, so many trends since the '60s, to go in any one direction esthetically is virtually impossible for me. It's better to treat each trend as an element in a larger work," he observes. "The only way to sort it out is to put it together."
