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Indepth Arts News:
"Mark Napier: Sacred Code"
2003-12-12 until 2004-01-17
bitforms gallery
New York, NY,
USA United States of America
bitforms Gallery presents Mark Napier in his first solo show in New York
City. "Sacred Code" is a rumination on three holy texts: The Old Testament,
The New Testament and the Koran, as seen through a digital lens. In this new artwork, Napier has created algorithms that read these three
books bit by bit, literally reading the text as a stream of zeroes and ones.
At this lowest level of information, the text becomes a topography, a
marking of electronic impulses.
The artwork translates the stream of bits
into motion: two calligraphic marks, one black and one white, chase one
another in a seemingly endless dance on screen, leaving behind faint trails
as the move. Rather than interpreting the meaning of the texts, the artwork
reads the "shape" of the texts: the shifting topography of binary code
drives the motion of the black and white trails on screen. In the process, a
binary world is represented as a cloud of shifting shades of gray.
The artwork is presented through physical installation with the "live" work
running on computers, and as large scale prints that show the cumulative
effect of a complete translation of one text.
IMAGE
Mark Napier
Old Testiment, 2003
Roland Print on Watercolor
44"x64"
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