Death gives you insight
into where the epidemic was,
not where it is.
Fast moving —
Think starlight.
That light isn’t from now,
it’s from however long
it took to get here.
Thus begins Planet Corona, artist Mark Amerika’s dark satire documenting life in America during the early months of the worst viral pandemic in over a century. This experimental novel, subtitled “words, voices, poems, waves, plague, death, breath and starlight” features a “pandemic poet” named COVID-19, a hybrid human-AI sheltering-in-place in the bottom half of a former AirBnB being rented by an overleveraged landlord. While in self-quarantine, C-19 finds solace using an advanced transformer-based language model to train itself to remix the writings of Albert Camus, Clarice Lispector, William Carlos Williams, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Antonin Artaud and William Burroughs as well as quotes from various social media posts and newspaper articles depicting the global epidemiological struggle taking place in the dark era of Trump and his GOP sycophants. Co-authored by Amerika and a large GPT-2 text generation model created at OpenAI, Planet Corona cuts deep into the soul of our dystopian moment.
This new publication is being gifted to all readers in celebration of the author’s 60th birthday.
Click HERE to download the free PDF.
Mark Amerika’s artwork has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Whitney Biennial of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the Walker Art Center. In 2009-2010, The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, hosted Amerika’s comprehensive retrospective exhibition entitled UNREALTIME. In 2009, Amerika released Immobilité, generally considered the first feature-length art film ever shot on a mobile phone. He is the author of many books including The Kafka Chronicles (FC2), Sexual Blood (FC2), remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press — remixthebook.com), META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press), remixthecontext (Routledge) and Locus Solus (An Inappropriate Translation Composed in a 21st Century Manner) (Counterpath Press). His transmedia art work, Museum of Glitch Aesthetics [glitchmuseum.com], was commissioned by the Abandon Normal Devices Festival in conjunction with the London 2012 Olympics. The project has been remixed for Amerika’s solo exhibitions “Glitch. Click. Thunk” at the University of Hawaii Art Galleries and “GlitchMix: not an error” at Estudio Figueroa-Vives and the Norwegian Embassy in Havana, Cuba.
Selected as a Time Magazine 100 Innovator, Amerika is a University of Colorado Professor of Distinction where he is the Founding Director of the Doctoral Program in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance in the College of Media, Communication and Information and a Professor of Art and Art History. Amerika is the Director of TECHNE, an arts-centric research lab investigating speculative forms of Artificial Creative Intelligence (ACI).
