“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.
