May 5, 2002

7:03 PM

Potatoland takes code and images from any site and turns it into web art, if it doesn't crash your browser instead. Start with the NetFlag link and work your way down. If you only have time to check out one distraction, pick RIOT; it's an alternative web browser that builds its page and makes art by combining text, images and links from the recent pages that any RIOT user has surfed to. You can check out what's been surfed and combined recently, and add your own sites to the mix. Right this minute the combo is Wired, Fray, and ABC.
posted by iconomy (11 comments total)

Gadzooks! For a few minutes there, I thought that all the myths about drugs I'd ever heard were true and that acid I dropped at Laser Floyd 11 years ago was coming back on me.

The RIOT link was wigginess of the highest order though. It's like your browsers subconcious being reguritated. or something.
posted by jonmc at 7:17 PM on May 5, 2002

The RIOT link was all MeFied when I got there. It was like Andy Warhol decided to paint "100 Cans" again, but with the MetaFilter logo...way cool. That, and I swear I saw remnants of Heather Locklear thrown in there for good measure. Very cool site.
posted by gummi at 7:25 PM on May 5, 2002

I've always loved the Shredder.
posted by mkn at 7:42 PM on May 5, 2002

Does anyone remember a site that rendered mirror images of pages you fed into it? I can never seem to find it.
posted by donkeyschlong at 7:46 PM on May 5, 2002

The, erm, New York Times also had a story on Mark Napier, whose site this is, and his quest to find a revenue model for online art, just this past week. Napier is selling 50 "shares" of "The Waiting Room" for $1000 a piece, and has apparently sold 3 so far.
posted by mattpfeff at 8:26 PM on May 5, 2002

Reminds me of the Netomat -- featured at a Whitney Museum exhibition last year. :)
posted by metrocake at 10:08 PM on May 5, 2002

I am completely unable to make sense out of this, but it sure feels cool.
posted by Mars Saxman at 10:14 PM on May 5, 2002

Another of Napier's projects -- FEED -- is pretty cool too:

"FEED consumes the web. A play on the technical term "data feed", FEED does not supply information, it consumes information, reducing structure, meaning and content to a stream of text and pixels. An anti-browser, FEED unravels the web. Contemplative and meditative where the web is commercial and raucous, homogeneous where the web is varied, visual where the web is textual, FEED strips away the distracting veneer of content in an automated, machine driven search for the underlying beauty of the web."
posted by ludicdruid at 10:15 PM on May 5, 2002

Came across RIOT a couple years ago via a hell.com "show." Try it with a site that contains lots of animation -- the resulting page becomes even more frenetic.
posted by me3dia at 6:30 AM on May 6, 2002

donkeyschlong : is this it?
posted by mkn at 7:06 PM on May 6, 2002

Hmmm ... the one I'm thinking of actually turned the text around too ... I don't think I imagined it. I guess it's lost to history.
posted by donkeyschlong at 12:05 PM on May 7, 2002