About The Shredder
Mark Napier
April 1999

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.

This project is about the web as an art medium.  This is an object-less medium, 
yet much of the technology of the web works to re-create the familiar, to 
create a consistent look and feel, to create a sense of place, of location.  
We 'navigate' through the web.  Art on the web often exists as an object in 
the environment of the web - a specific website, clearly defined and bounded 
within a larger space.

The Shredder dematerializes art, not just because it is digital art with 
no physical component, but because the Shredder is an activity, not a thing.  
It is something you do to something else.  It is non-localized, 
non-deterministic - a roaming, mobile artwork.  In itself it is content-less, 
opening with a blank screen.  By participating in the interface, the visitor 
creates and completes the artwork.

By shredding that which is not material, the Shredder applies a familiar 
'real-world' action to a medium that breaks with the familiar.  The resulting 
collision of sensibilities reveals the frailty of the world of web pages, 
in which content is a figment of the browser software's 'rendering engine', 
and can be radically altered simply by adjusting a few rules.  This is where 
the human inhabitants of the net meet the digital interface, and attempt to 
recreate the familiar and comfortable nuances of the physical world.  The 
Shredder inserts itself into this medium, like a drug altering the functioning 
of nervous synapses, and transforms the signals that pass through it to 
create a hallucinatory world - a web that is parallel to the 'true' web, 
yet is every bit as real.

The Shredder appropriates design, graphics, and text as input for its 
own aesthetic algorithm.  It re-purposes other people's aesthetic 
statements, and communications. A machine-driven aesthetic, the Shredder 
parses HTML into a raw form, analyzes the structure and attributes 
of the incoming page, then applies a series of rules to the raw data 
to output a page that is re-engineered yet fully functional: links 
can be clicked to navigate indefinitely through the Shredded web.

Written in Perl and Javascript, the Shredder is not a browser, it 
is a filter (a CGI script) accessed through a webpage that mimics 
the browser interface. It's purpose is not to replace the browser, 
but to reinvent it from the inside. It is important that the project 
be technically accessible, public in the technical sense.  There are 
no plug-ins required, nothing to download, and the Shredder works in 
both Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer.  Anyone with a browser 
can Shred the web.