Shredder 1.0

Mark Napier created the website Shredder 1.0 in 1998. When you launch the Shredder, you type in a website address or choose from the many listed and the Shredder does exactly what you would think. It shreds the website. Breaks it down to html coding and distorted images. A very boring website can be shredded to become interesting. "The Shredder dematerializes the web. Posing as a browser, it prompts the user for a URL, then appropriates that web page to use as raw material for its own fragmented output. It exposes the frailty of a medium that relies on software instructions to create the appearance of a consistent environment. A voracious public artwork, the Shredder feeds on the web to propagate its own aesthetic agenda."Once shredded, the website becomes a chaotic mess that is oddly beautiful. The creator of Shredder 1.0 had this to say:

"The web is not a publication. Web sites are not paper. Yet the current thinking of web design is that of the magazine, newspaper, book, or catalog. Visually, aesthetically, legally, the web is treated as a physical page upon which text and images are written.

Web pages are temporary graphic images created when browsing software interprets HTML instructions. As long as all browsers agree (at least somewhat) on the conventions of HTML there is the illusion of solidity or permanence in the web. But behind the graphical illusion is a vast body of text files -- containing HTML code -- that fills hard drives on computers at locations all over the world. Collectively these instructions make up what we call 'the web'. But what if these instructions are interpreted differently than intended? Perhaps radically differently?

The web browser is an organ of perception through which we 'see' the web. It filters and organizes a huge mass of structured information that spans continents, is constantly growing, reorganizing itself, shifting its appearance, evolving. The Shredder presents this global structure as a chaotic, irrational, raucous collage. By altering the HTML code before the browser reads it, the Shredder appropriates the data of the web, transforming it into a parallel web. Content become abstraction. Text becomes graphics. Information becomes art." - Mark Napier