mark napier :: riot

Riot was created by Mark Napier of potatoland.org (way) back in 2000. It is similar to some of his other work (feed, shred, landfill) in that it uses java programming, user input, and all the information on the world wide web to create the work. Some might ask, who then is the artist? Is it the programmer (mark)? Is it the user who selects the sites that become "rioted" (you)? Could it even be the original creators of the billions of possible websites that riot steals from (everyone else)? The answer is obviously mark, since the 1950's art has become less about the object and all about the idea. Yes, the user imputs the urls that affects how the object is generated, but seriously, how fucking hard is that? And I am sure that the lawyers would argue that all the designers of the billions of webpages are the "artist" and to have their intellectual property raped and pillaged in such a way is yet another way to sue for no reason.

I would like to experiment more with riot, try to see how far I can manipulate it (hack the hack). I heard that mark writes code that actually slows down cpu cycles so that it emulates the environment that it was created in (anyone know anything about that?). Unfortunately, riot does not seem to be accepting my url's, I am using mac w/ both safari and firefox (do i really have to download crappy exploder?) and yes Rick, I know macs suck, so you tell me... everyday. Does anyone have a piece of shit pc running the shittiest operating system ever so I can play with riot?