Maarten’s Note
I’ve crossed many borders where flags were treated as unquestionable facts—stitched onto uniforms, printed on documents, fixed above checkpoints. Traveling long enough teaches you something else: identity is rarely that stable. It shifts, overlaps, and sometimes contradicts itself. When I first encountered Marc Napier’s net.flag, it felt less like digital art and more like a map of how the world actually moves—colors detached from authority, symbols released into transit. This piece is not about flags as they are meant to be seen, but about what happens when they start to travel too.
Flags are meant to be obedient objects.
They hang where they’re told, follow strict rules of color and proportion, and perform identity on demand: at borders, on passports, above government buildings, and at the tail end of aircraft. A flag is not supposed to improvise.
Marc Napier disagreed.
The internet as territory
Marc Napier is one of the pioneers of net.art, a generation of artists who, in the 1990s and early 2000s, treated the internet not as a gallery but as a place—a space with its own politics, borders, and power structures. As a co-founder of Rhizome.org, Napier helped define how digital art could live online: unstable, participatory, and constantly reshaped by its users.
Rather than producing fixed objects, Napier creates systems. His artworks behave like networks: open, messy, and resistant to control.
net.flag (2002): a flag without a state
In 2002, Napier launched net.flag, a deceptively simple online artwork.
He extracted the official colors of every national flag in the world and placed them into a shared digital palette. Visitors to the site could then drag and combine these colors freely to create new flag designs. No symbols. No emblems. No heraldic rules. No authority.
Each user-generated flag was saved, becoming part of an ever-growing archive of unofficial, hybrid banners.
The result was not a new flag for a new nation, but thousands of flags for no nation at all.
Identity as remix
net.flag quietly dismantles the idea that national identity is fixed, natural, or sacred. When the colors of states are reduced to draggable rectangles, their authority weakens. Blue is no longer “French” or “European.” Red stops belonging to revolutions or empires. Black, green, yellow, white—everything becomes negotiable.
This is not a call to erase nations, but to expose how designed they are.
Just like borders on maps, flags are human agreements—visual shortcuts for stories we choose to believe.
From border posts to browser windows
There is something deeply geographical about net.flag. It mirrors how people actually move through the world: crossing borders, accumulating layers of identity, belonging partially and temporarily.
In airports, flags line up neatly again—printed on boarding passes, stitched onto uniforms, painted onto tail fins. But online, Napier lets them misbehave. They mix like travelers in a transit lounge: anonymous, unequal, briefly aligned, then gone.
Why it still matters
More than twenty years later, net.flag feels uncannily current.
At a time of resurgent nationalism, digital borders, and algorithmic identity, Napier’s work reminds us that symbols only have power because we collectively agree to give it to them. The internet, for all its flaws, still offers spaces where those agreements can be tested, bent, or temporarily suspended.
net.flag does not propose a utopia. It proposes a question:
What happens to identity when everyone is allowed to rearrange it?
A flag in permanent transit
Marc Napier’s flags don’t represent countries. They represent movement. They are flags for people who don’t quite fit inside one box, one passport, one narrative.
In that sense, net.flag may be the most accurate flag of our time: not fixed to a pole, but permanently in transit.
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