Mark Daggett: <referrer.link.referrer>

April 2001

Pinkish red bars on the sides of the image, with compressed horizontal green bars of what appears like text stacked in the center. On top a sequence of human faces are squished and distorted.

Mark Daggett’s <referrer.link.referrer> highlights the architecture of the web as streams of information that users tap into or divert. The project pushed against the dominant metaphor of the page and book at a time when “browsing” and “bookmarking” webpages had become common language. If a user came to <referrer.link.referrer> through a Google search or another site that linked to the artwork, images from that site became raw material for the visual color field at the center of the project. The images of the original “referring” site would literally travel along with the user to construct Daggett’s work. If visitors directly typed or pasted in the URL without a referrer, however, the artwork would load some images from a hidden cache.

Enter project View original Gate Page

Mark Daggett (b. 1975; Lynchburg, Virginia) is a pioneering new media artist, published author, and the CEO of Humansized Inc. He developed the website flavoredthunder.com (1997–2004) as a series of ongoing experiments related to early new media “lifestyle” and has worked for over two decades in the fields of experience and user interaction design, concept development, and strategy. His work has been displayed at Thirtieth International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands (2001); DOMUS, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany; Protein Network; Rhizome; and Prix Ars Electronica (1998). He has also developed games and DVDs for major films, including The Matrix and The Exorcist. A Rockefeller New Media Arts Fellowship grant nominee, Daggett has been profiled in the New York Times, Le Monde, WIRED, and Surface, among others. He received his MFA in new media from University of California, San Diego.

Gate Pages

Every month from March 2001 to February 2006, the Whitney invited an artist or collective to present their work in the form of a “Gate Page” on artport. Each page was meant to function as a portal to the artist’s own sites and projects. The Gate Pages comprise a range of artistic approaches to the format—while some of them are designed as entry points to the respective artist’s website or promote a recently launched work, others take the form of a more complex stand-alone project.

Wherever necessary and possible, these works are made functional through emulation and reconstructions from the Internet Archive. Not all of them have been restored to their original state and their conservation is ongoing. You can also view the original Gate Pages archive to see how they were presented at the time of their creation.

artport

View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art.