In the fall of 2013, Mark Amerika has been appointed the visiting International Research Chair at the University of Paris 8 as part of the Labex Arts-H2H research center. Paris 8 is known for its reputation and influence in contemporary philosophy and theory, particularly the seminars taught by its internationally renowned scholars including Hélène Cixous, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Lacan.
Over the years, Amerika’s interdisciplinary art practice and experimental theoretical books such as remixthebook and META/DATA: A Digital Poetics have sampled from and engaged with many aspects of French Post-Structuralist thought as well as the work of avant-garde French artists including Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Derrida, Comte de Lautréamont, Guy Debord, and others. Two forthcoming art projects Amerika is in the process of finishing include an “auto-translation / remix” of Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus and a newly commissioned web app modeled after Stephané Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Des. The web app will be released in late 2014 at the ZKM Museum of Modern Art in Germany.
While in Paris, Amerika will be conducting a transdisciplinary seminar on The Transmedia Writer in Network Culture. According to the Labex Arts-H2H website:
Mark Amerika’s seminar at the University of Paris 8, The Transmedia Writer in Network Culture, focuses on contemporary approaches to experimental digital writing as it relates to electronic literature, net art, mobile media/cinema, art applications, hactivism, and live audio/visual performance. The seminar will explore the emerging field of remix practice and theory as it relates to both Amerika’s own portfolio of contemporary art projects as well as many of the philosophical concepts he explores in his two most recent books, META/DATA : A Digital Poetics (MIT Press) and remixthebook (University of Minnesota).
Amerika will also deliver a hybridized keynote performance at “The Digital Subject” international conference while serving as Labex Arts-H2H research chair. His evening presentation, Remixing Personae: The Life and Times of the Artist 2.0, will take place on the evening of November 20th at the Théâtre du Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique (CNSAD) in Paris. The Labex Arts-H2H website describes the event as follows:
In Remixing Personae, Mark Amerika will reveal how his background as an avant-pop literary artist informs his current digital arts practice. Amerika’s body of work constructs fluid, metafictional identities that he strategically remixes into an ongoing “pseudoautobiographical” performance. In his presentation, he will remix samples from a variety of sources including French post-structuralist theory, Beatnik poetry, hypertextual consciousness, contemporary art history, and the language of new media. Remixing his digital flux personae across various intermedia platforms, Amerika will read, lecture, perform and play with a curated selection of his new media artworks over the last two decades.
