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Mark Amerika’s latest experimental publication is Creative Evolution: natural selection and the urge to remix. The work is part of the new “Living Books About Life” series of titles published by the Open Humanities Press in conjunction with Coventry University and sponsored by the JISC in the United Kingdom.

The freely accessible, multimedia “book” is open to being remixed and opens with the words:

The concept of novelty or more specifically
novelty generation as the modus operandi of
all living creatures mutating in the remix pool
relates to current trends in networked art
where the artist-as-medium postproduces
the Source Material Everywhere
as part of a larger co-poietic unfolding
inside the networked space of flows

The entire press release can be found here.

Continue reading »]]> Mark Amerika recently toured throughout Australia presenting his latest book, remixthebook, and continued developing new creative work as part of his virtual artist-in-residency at the new Centre for Creative Arts at La Trobe University. Amerika, who has been a Principal Research Fellow at La Trobe, is creating a new body of work in collaboration with sound artist Chad Mossholder entitled “Micro-Cinematic Essays on the Life and Work of Marcel Duchamp dba Conceptual Parts, Ink.” The work is scheduled to be released in early 2012.

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“Think of remixthebook as DJ Tool made from rhythms downloaded, ripped, mixed, spliced, diced, and burned into our collective hard drives, then re-uploaded. It’s a piece of conceptual hardware that exists somewhere between how we experience information and how information aesthetics has transformed the human condition. It’s that deep.”
—Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid

You can pre-order remixthebook here.

Mark Amerika’s remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) is a both print, digital, and performance art hybrid publication and online exhibition. The project began as a series of experimental theoretical writings appearing in Amerika’s Professor VJ blog. These playful and extemporaneous artist writings, what Amerika terms theoretical performances, have now been remixed into a collection of philosophical, literary, theoretical, pseduo-autobiographical and conceptual art mash-ups that foreground selectively sampled phrases and ideas from visual artists, poets, novelists, musicians, theorists, comedians, and process philosophers who have influenced Amerika’s art, theory, and creative writing practice.

One of the main reasons remixthebook is more than a print book published by a prestigious university press is that the work expands the concept of writing so that it includes digital forms composed for networked and mobile media environments. Along with the print book, this summer an accompanying website located at remixthebook.com will become the online hub for the digital remixes of many of the theories generated in the print book. Over twenty artists, theorists, new media scholars and musicians will be sampling source material from remixthebook and postproducing it into their own remix/theory performances.

Since one of the main aims of the project is to create a cross-disciplinary approach to the way contemporary theory is performed and to anticipate future forms of writing that challenge traditional modes of scholarly production while still taking on the philosophical issues of our time, remixthebook drops all academic pretense and turns Amerika’s theoretical agenda into (a) speculative play.

Continue reading »]]> UNCONTAINABLE: Hyperstrata was held at the Kasa Gallery in partnership with ISEA2011 Istanbul and is part of the Official Parallel Program of the 12th Istanbul Biennial.

The exhibition was curated by Lanfranco Aceti and Özden Şahin and took place from September 14 to October 20, 2011.

The opening night reception had over 300 people in attendance including Mark Amerika, Roy Ascott, and the other participating artists.

Also in the show:
Roy Ascott’s transmediation of La Plissure du Texte in virtual worlds with co-authors Elif Ayter, Max Moswitzer and Selavy Oh is another example of contemporary hyperstrata that layer previous and new evolutionary developments of artworks.

Sean Montgomery shows an artwork where the layering and sedimentation is made of different biological and sensory inputs and outputs that allude to and allure the viewer into future aesthetic landscapes.

Continue reading »]]> The remixthebook.com website, the digital component to my new book, remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press), is now live.

From the About page:

One of the main reasons remixthebook is more than a print book published by the prestigious University of Minnesota Press is that the work expands the concept of writing to include multimedia art forms composed for networked and mobile media environments. The remixthebook.com website is the online hub for the digital remixes of many of the theories generated in the print book and features the work of artists, creative writers and scholars for whom the practice and theory of remix art is central to their research interests. Since one of the primary aims of the project is to create a collaborative and cross-disciplinary approach to the way contemporary theory is performed, and to anticipate future forms of art and writing that challenge traditional modes of scholarly production while still taking on the philosophical issues of our time, the remixthebook project could be considered an open content platform for others to use as source material for their own art work, literary creations, 21st century multimedia theory, and/or innovative coursework.

I highly recommend checking it out as it features amazing art and writing from some of our most provocative artists, theorists, literary writers, and musicians including Janneke Adema, Giselle Beiguelman, Julie Carr, David Gunkel, Gary Hall, Frieder Nake, Out-of-Sync, Craig Saper, Joe Tabbi, Darren Tofts, Gregory Ulmer, Chad Mossholder, Michael Theodore, Michelle Ellsworth, Rick Silva, Will Luers, Yoshi Sodeoka, Mark McCoin, Curt Cloninger, Kate Armstrong, Maria Miranda, Norie Neumark, mez, jonCates, Mark River, and Tim Whid.

If anyone is interested in teaching the book and website to their classes, please feel free to email me directly with any questions you may have.

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A disembodied voice telepathically communicates with a “Digital Thoughtographer” in CODEWORK, a self-contained multimedia installation by artist Mark Amerika.

CODEWORK was on solo exhibition from August 20-October 21 in Salisbury University’s Electronic Gallery, Teacher Education and Technology Center Room 153. Mark Amerika visited the gallery and delivered a visiting artist’s talk on Thursday, October 6.

The work’s painterly video style is synchronized with 5.1 surround sounds, which were made in collaboration with sound artist Chad Mossholder using the voice of German actress Jutta Wolfert. Amerika developed the abstract motion image sequences after having toured Japan and Europe as a VJ at museums, universities, festivals and techno clubs.

The video source material came from footage shot in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Hawaii and the Australian Outback. The soundtrack was developed in close consultation with Mossholder, who uses Wolfert’s vocals, scripted by Amerika, as well as sounds captured on video and other manipulated sources to further intensify the experience of watching the trancelike images.

CODEWORK is in the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum where it was recently included in the Blink! group exhibition.

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The video above is an experimental “book trailer” that plays with source material from remixthebook, Mark Amerika’s forthcoming publication on remix culture, new media art and literature, and theories of digital performance.

The book, now available for order here, is being published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Here’s what the YouTube site says:

A provocative textual performance that is at once a dazzling model of the literary remix and a state-of-the-art reflection on remix culture, REMIXTHEBOOK captures the unique and continually shifting digital moment in which we live and situates the remix as an art form and literary intervention. To coincide with the publication of REMIXTHEBOOK, Amerika will launch a companion website, remixthebook.com, to facilitate new ways of participating in remix culture by inviting other artists and writers to create remixthebook mashups of their own, pushing the boundaries of art and literary culture further, beyond the current publishing paradigms.

Video Remix: Rick Silva
Audio: Chad Mossholder
Micro-Cam Footage: Mark McCoin
Voice: Mark Amerika

“Think of remixthebook as DJ Tool made from rhythms downloaded, ripped, mixed, spliced, diced, and burned into our collective hard drives, then re-uploaded. It’s a piece of conceptual hardware that exists somewhere between how we experience information and how information aesthetics has transformed the human condition. It’s that deep.”
—Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid

Continue reading »]]> Niels Bohr:

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

Ron Sukenick:

Without the unreal the real is unreal.

[...]

Bad innovation serves up ignorant repetition of the past; good innovation is the thumbprint, the genetic code, of the innovator.

Good innovation will pass the same criteria of taste as other writing, while at the same time changing them.

The question is not taste but who has the power to impose it.

Collage and cutup are ways of interrupting the continuity of the controlling discourse – mosaic is a way of renewing discourse.

Mosaic: new tiles, old fragments, odd scraps – remix. Out of remnants new design. Continuous not discontinuous.

Professor VJ:

The audiences are changing so it’s very tricky to try and anticipate what kind of art experience one can deliver to an imaginary other. For example, some of my live performances are also simultaneously distributed over the net and then archived for future research or remix purposes. One is tempted to say that these changes are almost all technologically induced. But then again, I am the one pulling the trigger. Although once I am performing a live set or enable my online presence to get distributed 24/7 over the matrix, then I start feeling like a network distributed “other” more than I feel like anything I might want to call “me” (“me” who?). This might have something to do with the way we now “play ourselves” as we live out the (re)mixed reality narratives that we call our lives. Perhaps this is what Rimbaud meant when he wrote “I am another.” I too am another. And another, and another, and an/other …

Given the (re)mixed reality narratives that we call our lives, how essential is it for (con)temporary artists to develop a networked practice?

Continue reading »]]> American artist Mark Amerika was one of the selected artists for the 2011 Biennale de Montréal. In Spring 2011, BNL-MTL announced the 40 artists from 10 countries who would be participating in the seventh edition of the event, May 1 to 31 in the former École des beaux-arts de Montréal building on the corner of St. Urbain and Sherbrooke Sts. About half the artists work in Quebec and Canada; the rest are from Europe and the U.S.

The biennale’s theme was Elements of Chance, inspired by a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé: All Thought Expresses a Throw of the Dice. “Chance is as important as rationality in guiding our lives,” co-curator Claude Gosselin said in a phone interview. Gosselin, director of the Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal, which organized the event, is sharing curating duties with David Liss, artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto.

Daniel Spoerri, an 80-year-old Swiss performance artist and author of An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, staged a fundraising dinner on May 2, at which the 80 guests paying $250 had to chance upon the menu.

Gosselin said that before he died, Guido Molinari made a long painting in which he blocked out the phrases of Mallarmé’s poem in colour. The painting was displayed as was Sophie Calle’s account of the nose job she never got because the surgeon committed suicide the day before the operation. And Mark Amerika created a new-media artwork for the show. Among his accomplishments is what he calls the world’s first feature-length film made with a mobile phone, in which he addresses the future of cinema.

That accounts for four of the 40 artists. To find out more about them, the other 36 artists and the event, go to www.biennalemontreal.org.

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The new markamerika.com web site is now live and features links to many aspects of Mark Amerika’s interdisciplinary art practice including a link to his forthcoming book of new media theory titled remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, September 2011).

“Redesigning the new site took some insight,” says web developer Tom Zamir. “Mark is a serious artist with a multitude of works extending in many directions that experiment with different media types. The previous version (see classic site) was designed about a decade ago by artist Joel Swanson who was the first undergraduate at the University of Colorado to graduate with summa cum laude honors in digital art. Joel is currently director of the Technology, Arts & Media program in the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado where I also studied. As a student of both Mark and Joel, I feel that my redesign is closing one circle while starting the next one.”

The main features of the new markamerika.com website are searchability, accessibility, relativity, and sociability. Visitors to the site now have easy access to Amerika’s net art works, new media books, Twitter streams, Professor VJ blogs, and other electronic publications.

“Merging elements of the previous design with new trends in web technologies, we created an innovative design style that represents Mark’s multitude of works,” said Zamir.

For more information on remixthebook, you can visit the remixthebook web page University of Minnesota Web site.

Continue reading »]]> META/DATA: A Digital Poetics collects the writings of pioneering digital artist Mark Amerika who mixes (and remixes) personal memoir, net art theory, fictional narrative, satirical reportage, scholarly history, and network-infused language art. META/DATA is a playful, improvisatory, multitrack “digital sampling” of Amerika’s writing from 1993 to 2005 that tells the early history of a net art world “gone wild” while simultaneously constructing a parallel poetics of net art that complements Amerika’s own artistic practice.

Unlike other new media artists who may create art to justify their theories, Amerika documents the emergence of new media art forms while he creates them. Presenting a multifaceted view of the digital art scene on subjects ranging from interactive storytelling to net art, live VJing, online curating, and Web publishing, Amerika gives us “Spontaneous Theories,” “Distributed Fictions” (including his groundbreaking GRAMMATRON, the helpful “Insider’s Guide to Avant-Garde Capitalism,” and others), the more scholarly “Academic Remixes,” “Net Dialogues” (peer-to-peer theoretical explorations with other artists and writers), and the digital salvos of “Amerika Online” (among them, “Surf-Sample-Manipulate: Playgiarism on the Net,” “The Private Life of a Network Publisher,” and satirical thoughts on “Writing as Hactivism”). META/DATA also features a section of full-color images, including some of Amerika’s most well-known and influential works.

Provocative, digressive, nomadic, and fun to read, Amerika’s texts call to mind the cadences of Gertrude Stein, the Beats, cyberpunk fiction, and even The Daily Show more than they do the usual new media theorizing. META/DATA maps the world of net culture with Amerika as guide and resident artist.

Reviews

“META/DATA perfectly captures the essence and style of pioneering net artist and online fiction writer Mark Amerika. Featuring a mix of scholarly theory, personal narrative, and conversations with peers, the book provides both meta data on the artist’s multifaceted body of work and insightful commentary on digital poetics and culture. The personae Amerika has created for himself–from ‘digital thoughtographer’ to VJ as artist-researcher–are reflected as different viewpoints in the book’s stories, theoretical essays, and dialogues, and make it a multilinear read that mirrors the diversity of digital culture.”
–Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art

“Mark Amerika is at the cutting edge of developments in both art and technology. META/DATA is an indispensable guide to the promises and potentials of new media–and also to the hype, irony, and disappointment that all too often surround them.” –Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University

“Mark Amerika is a hacker. He hacks language, image, sound, identities, cultures. He plays space, time, and tech like a saxophone. He plays out, way out sometimes, but he will always beckon you to join him. His writings are like invitations to a happening party you don’t know you are already at. It’s dense, it’s hard, but it flows, and it’s fun. What more could you want?” –McKenzie Wark, author of Gamer Theory

Continue reading »]]> The Immobilité Remixes are being exhibited in the Contemporary Crosscurrents: Portraits and Electronic Arts exhibition Dubai. The show is curated by Streaming Museum director Nina Colosi and happens in conjunction with another Streaming Museum event featuring Mark Amerika’s work on stage at Juilliard at Lincoln Center in the new Willson Theater.

According to the PR, Contemporary Crosscurrents is the first-ever exhibition of electronic art in the Middle East. Perhaps what’s most wild is that the work is appearing as a public art exhibition in one of those post-pomo designed shopping malls Dubai is noted for.

According to Nasser Rafi, Chief Executive Officer of Emaar Malls Group:

The digital art show is a unique exhibition that highlights the creative flourish of local and international artists, integrating the elements of modern technology. Bringing such innovative attractions to the Dubai Marina Mall underscores our commitment to provide new experiences for our visitors – something the residents of the Marina appreciate.

Mark Amerika’s Immobilité remixes are part of the show along with work by Eduardo Kac, Sarah Lahti, John Simon, Janet Bellotto, and many others.

Continue reading »]]> Dig the press release from the Streaming Museum:

Selections from the Streaming Museum global touring exhibition, “We Write This To You From The Distant Future” as well as recently created artwork will be presented as a dramatic exhibition/performance hybrid, co-produced with Juilliard’s Music Technology Department. The performances will take place March 26 at 8pm and Sunday March 27 at Juilliard at Lincoln Center in the new Wilson Theater.

The program title, “We Write This To You From The Distant Future,” comes from the narration found in the feature-length version of Mark Amerika’s Immobilité.

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The world’s first feature-length mobile phone art film.

A story about a future world where the dream of living in utopia can only be sustained by a nomadic tribe of artists and intellectuals, Mark Amerika’s Immobilité mashes up the language of “foreign films” with landscape painting and literary metafiction. The work was composed using an unscripted, improvisational method of acting and the mobile phone images are intentionally shot in an amateurish or DIY [do-it-yourself] style similar to the evolving forms of video distributed in social media environments such as YouTube. By interfacing this low-tech version of video making with more sophisticated forms of European art-house movies, Amerika both asks and answers the question “What is the future of cinema?”

Amerika describes Immobilité as “a feature-length foreign film shot entirely on a mobile phone in Cornwall, UK.” The work includes an original soundtrack by renowned sound artist Chad Mossholder and introduces Camille Lacadee and Magda Tyzlik-Carver as on-screen personas that drift in and out of the film’s otherworldly landscapes and ghostly narrative sequences.

The story of Immobilité is driven primarily by the innovative use of subtitles as an alternative literary track that situates the work in the rich history of experimental art-house cinema. Bringing to mind the deep philosophical cinema of European auteurs Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, Amerika mashes up the language of “foreign films” with landscape painting and literary metafiction to reveal a future world where the dream of living in utopia can only be sustained by a nomadic tribe of artists and intellectuals.  Tapping into the contemporary angst that fills our own contemporary lives, Immobilité investigates the innate desire of living organisms to release their creative energies as part of a collective strategy of cultural renewal.

Continue reading »]]> Mark Amerika’s CODEWORK is one of the featured works at the Blink! show at the Denver Art Museum. Amerika’s CODEWORK (2003-2004) is exhibited in the main gallery on the first floor of the museum along with work from Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, Stacey Steers, Bruce Nauman, Bjorn Melhus, and Christian Marclay.

CODEWORK is a self-contained, multi-media installation that includes digital projection and 5.1 surround sound.

CODEWORK centers around two figures, an artificial intelligence known as the “Digital Thoughtographer,” and a disembodied woman whose scripted voice-over telepathically communicates with this alien shadow figure. Amerika’s painterly video style is synchronized with the 5.1 surround sounds which are made in collaboration with the sound artist Chad Mossholder and utilize the voice-over of Berlin actress Jutta Wolfert.

Amerika developed the abstract motion image sequences after having toured Japan and Europe as a VJ in museums, universities, festivals, and techno-clubs. The video source material comes from footage shot in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Hawaii and the Australian Outback. The soundtrack was developed in close consultation with Mossholder who uses Wolfert’s vocals, scripted by Amerika, as well as sounds captured on video and other manipulated sources, to further intensify the experience of watching the trancelike images being projected on the wall inside the black box the installation takes place in.

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GRAMMATRON is perhaps Mark Amerika’s most famous work of art. Exploding on to the digital art scene via the Web in early 1997, GRAMMATRON experiments with what were then emerging forms of art such as online hypertext narrative, Internet (or Net) art, and digitally expanded forms of cinema. GRAMMATRON invites the visitor to navigate through the narrative by clicking on the highlighted words while viewing the accompanying gallery of digitally animated and collage images that complement the text. The work also comes with its own WWW soundtrack featuring the vocals of Mark Amerika.

GRAMMATRON was the first part of Amerika’s major Internet art trilogy (followed by PHON:E:ME and FILMTEXT). GRAMMATRON experiments with what were then the new Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) of the Web to create a unique work of art firmly rooted in the rival or avant-garde tradition of experimental literature.

In one interview, Amerika was asked “What is GRAMMATRON?”

His answer was that “GRAMMATRON is many things at once. It’s one of the earliest and more elaborate works of Internet Art created exclusively for the Web as a way to track the developments of ‘Web culture’ in a networked-narrative environment. I was especially interested in how some of the vaporware language that was coming out of the growing new media scene could be used against itself, to rub and/or remix alternative discourses together, everything from cyberpunk, dialectical materialism, and California ideology, to experimental narrative riffs from the likes of James Joyce, Arno Schmidt, and Jean-Luc Godard, to name a few.

Then there is the Cabala: the old scripture, the metacommentary, the Book of Creation, and the Golem myth. In many ways, GRAMMATRON is a retelling of the Golem myth remixed with narratological/rhetorical effects sampled from the alternative narratives and discourses mentioned earlier.

I also was very conscious that I wanted to experiment with many of the evolving technological features that the Web could offer me — features that I would never have reason to consider when writing my novels. So there are time-based meta-tags, javascript-encoded cookies that create alternative and/or random linking structures, some very detailed and labor-intensive animated gifs, and an original digital audio soundtrack, among other things.”

In many ways, the actual story being told in GRAMMATRON prophesizes the coming reign of viral marketing that was to take hold with the rise of the dot.com and the Internet bubble economy that appeared soon after its release. Anticipating what has now become an endless flow of unwanted email and instant messaging, the GRAMMATRON narrative satirizes the way computer networked environments become breeding grounds for unethical marketing practices, particularly the penetration of our creative and research spaces with the mindless info-spam of an invasive technocapitalism gone awry.

GRAMMATRON’s parallel investigation of spirituality in the electronic age touched on a subject that permeates most of Amerika’s work, namely, how does the contemporary artist, one who is bound by the historical circumstance they are born into, develop a personal aesthetic style in a culture of information that may at times stifle creativity? Amerika’s main strategy for addressing this issue in GRAMMATRON was to experiment with the media economy itself and to employ the new media technologies that were available to him at the time of production. By distributing his own narrative content through the Internet, Amerika was intentionally constructing an alternative art experience that investigates the positioning of reader-subjectivity in computer-mediated cyberspace. The work was considered a major breakthrough signaling a new form of contemporary media art and was selected for the 2000 Whitney Biennial of American Art. Since it’s release, GRAMMATRON has been exhibited on over 40 international venues and was included in the “The Conquest of Ubiquity” exhibition, an international retrospective of major works of Internet art that traveled throughout Spain in late 2003 and early 2004.

Upon its release, GRAMMATRON garnered over 500,000 visitors and was written about in the New York Times, MSNBC’s The Site, the Village Voice, Die Zeit, the Guardian, The Australian, Wired, and many other international media outlets.

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PHON:E:ME is an “orchestration of writerly effects” contributed by network artists, writers, designers, DJs, programmers and curators. Their combined efforts created a transformational online narrative environment that tells the story of how net culture is altering our received notions of authorship and originality, and how emerging digital artists are helping to break down the boundaries between the virtual and the real, between art and non-art, and the various disciplines that have too often led to rigid compartmentalization and weak critical speculation. The project was promoted as “an mp3 concept album with hyper:liner:notes” that deeply explored the relationship of new media technologies, sound, and writing. The project was commissioned and exhibited by the Walker Art Center. Collaborative artists included Erik Belgum, Anne Burdick, Cam Merton, Tom Bland and Brendan Palmer.

PHON:E:ME investigates the way auditory media pervades our daily lives and how this in turn effects the way we experience what have become routine cultural practices such as reading, writing, listening to music, and surfing the Internet. With a multitude of viable media formats and cultural objects fighting for our attention, questions of how we choose to design our own interactive experiences come to the fore. By experimenting with both the design interface as well as the artistic content constructed especially for the PHON:E:ME web site, Amerika attempted to find ways of expressing the impact of this audio-visual “noise” we encounter in our everyday life while simultaneously inviting the participant — the artistic “co-conspirator” –  to create their own alternative version of the work within the programmed parameters the artist has constructed. The work has been exhibited in many international venues including Videobrasil in Sao Paolo, the Zeppelin Sound Festival in Barcelona, and the Walker Art Center’s “Art Entertainment Network” exhibition as part of the traveling “Let’s Entertain” exhibition.

PHON:E:ME was one of five works of art nominated for the prestigious International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences Award in 2000.

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FILMTEXT is a hybrid work of art that has appeared as a museum installation, a work of Internet art, an original World Wide Web soundtrack, and elabrorate artist e-book, and a series of live performances.  The work premiered at Mark Amerika’s How To Be An Internet Artist net art retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and was commissioned in part by Sony Playstation 2′s “Third Space” program.

Subtitled ‘MetaTourism: Interior Landscapes, Digital Thoughtography’, FILMTEXT investigates the interrelationships between biotech, games studies, digital narrative, and network culture. The work traces the nomadic movement of an alien light formerly known only as “The Digital Thoughtographer,” loosely inspired by the life and work of Ted Serios, who had the ability to psychically burn images from his mind onto film. Set in the language of computer games, FILMTEXT’s techno music, eerie alien lifeforms, space travel, and sound collages burdened with static and transmission noises, precariously negotiate the netherworlds between sound and noise, film and literature, human body and networked being.

Upon entering the URL, the work automatically launches the introduction. The work is highly interactive and the visitor is encouraged to seek out different areas of interaction. The use the navigation bar in the upper right corner is the suggested way of navigating from scene to scene (new scenes can be triggered by clicking on the Japanese characters located in this upper right corner navigation bar). There are eight scenes in total.

Created in the tradition of experimental filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov, Jean-Luc Godard, Maya Deren, and Chris Marker, the online version of FILMTEXT attempts to translate cinematic language into digitally expanded and interactive forms of art associated with emergent new media genres such as Internet art, hypertext, and motion graphic pictures.

The story of FILMTEXT resonates with pop culture genres such as science fiction movies, cyberpunk fiction, and interactive video game culture. The work challenges the interactive-participant to navigate their way through an ambient game space where “going to the next level” never guarantees anything except the chance to continue struggling to create a meaningful experience out of the cumbersome human-computer interface. In this regard, FILMTEXT is a philosophical investigation that plays with the animated Internet environment and its supposedly liberating potential to help free us from some of the encumbrances of material reality.

In addition to its premiere at Amerika’s retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, FILMTEXT has been exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (Australia), as well as group exhibitions at venues such as the European Media Arts Festival (Germany), the Center for Visual Art and Culture (Baltimore), The American Museum of the Moving Image (Queens), and SIGGRAPH 2002 (San Antonio).

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Mark Amerika’s CODEWORK is a self-contained, multi-media installation that includes digital projection and 5.1 surround sound.

CODEWORK centers around two figures, an artificial intelligence known as the “Digital Thoughtographer,” and a disembodied woman whose scripted voice-over telepathically communicates with this alien shadow figure. Amerika’s painterly video style is synchronized with the 5.1 surround sounds which are made in collaboration with the sound artist Chad Mossholder and utilize the voice-over of Berlin actress Jutta Wolfert.

Amerika developed the abstract motion image sequences after having toured Japan and Europe as a VJ in museums, universities, festivals, and techno-clubs. The video source material comes from footage shot in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Hawaii and the Australian Outback. The soundtrack was developed in close consultation with Mossholder who uses Wolfert’s vocals, scripted by Amerika, as well as sounds captured on video and other manipulated sources, to further intensify the experience of watching the trancelike images being projected on the wall inside the black box the installation takes place in.

A limited edition version of CODEWORK was purchased by the Denver Art Museum and was on exhibit there during the summer of 2004 and again as part of the Blink! exhibition in 2011. Other exhibitions of CODEWORK have occured at Amerika’s META/DATA retrospective exhibitions in Bilbao, Spain, and at the Gallerie de Arte do SESI in Sao Paulo, Brazil. A limited edition DVD of CODEWORK is still available for purchase. For more information, please contact the artist.

The CODEWORK Experience

CODEWORK no longer tells the story of Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera. Instead, it tells the story of the Digital Thoughtographer, an artificial intelligence living in the digital afterlife. The narrative is presented as a kind of philosophical game that invites the viewer to constantly search for new forms of meaning, and is composed as a serial network of interconnected moving image sequences with an addictive soundtrack. These sequences are projected as a fluid yet perfectly time-coded cluster of short, dream-narrative events that slowly reveal how the protagonist is using a digital video camera as a writing instrument that simultaneously records and translates the trancelike states of mind being experienced in realtime. The curators and directors at the major exhibitions the work has appeared in convey the same phenomenon: a rise in the number of visitors who never go to art venues but come from other parts of the youth culture, particularly club, DJ/VJ, and rave culture, and who are then introduced to other aspects of the host’s art collection.

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Starting in 2001, Amerika began receiving international invitations to perform his Internet art works including two small national tours, one in Switzerland (Lucerne, Bern, and Basel) and one in Japan (Nagoya and three venues in Tokyo).  This immediately set up a challenge for him since at the time of the invitations there were no preexisting models for performing one’s Internet art before a live audience. One major issue immediately emerged: “Why navigate through your Internet artworks before a live audience when the audience could just as easily navigate through these same sites themselves on their own time over the Internet?”

The answer was in what we would now call creative remixology (the subject of Amerika’s remixthebook).  With no prior experience in live image manipulation and performance, Amerika began his international VJ Persona tour which lasted from the years 2001-2006. For these live A/V performances, Amerika taught himself new VJ [visual jockey] software that was just beginning to be developed by networked groups of artist-programmers who were frustrated with available commercial software. These “software art applications” were beginning to have a meaningful impact in the DJ and VJ culture which enabled digital performance artists to further blur the distinctions between high and low culture (the difference can be seen in Amerika performing the same work in a small techno-club space in Paris as well as the opening night of a museum exhibition in Tokyo).

Experimenting with these new software art applications, Amerika immediately began researching ways to remix the digital source material he had already captured for his major work of Net art, FILMTEXT. FILMTEXT was composed by reconfiguring a library of experimental digital video files, electronically composed sound files, and poetic texts that the artist had created especially for that project. These “assets” were archived in Amerika’s laptop studio in different file formats but were now going to be reformatted and deployed as multimedia data in his live A/V performances. Given the fact that FILMTEXT was developed as an abstract, multilinear narrative about “locating one’s self in the flow of data,” the ensuing remix of the work’s source material was ideally suited to both the live performances as well as Amerika’s scholarly investigations of subjectivity in both physical and data spaces (as well as hybrid or “(re)mixed reality” spaces). Each performance was completely improvised with a sound art collaborator and averaged 50 minutes in length. The venues varied and included the Museum for Communication in Bern, the Plug-In New Media Center in Basel, the International Symposium of Electronic Art in Nagoya, and the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in Tokyo.

These initial live A/V performances and the many others that followed in locations such as London, New York, San Francisco, and the Canary Islands, increasingly influenced both Amerika’s creative work trajectory as well as his theoretical writings like “Portrait of the VJ.”. The entire first section of META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (MIT Press, 2007), is a response to the experience of performing live with new media technologies. The imagery generated during these live performances made such an impact on Amerika’s creative research process that he was soon compelled to generate a series of digital prints made from stills of recorded events (these prints were later exhibited at the Rule Gallery in Denver and are now in private art collections). Perhaps even more importantly, these experiences led Amerika to conclude that he wanted to experiment with these digital processes in his various studio enviroinments and as a result, he immediately began constructing a new body of work conceived as digital video and surround sound installations (see CODEWORK and CHROMO HACK).