Mark Amerika’s commissioned artwork, Crapshoot, is included in the ZKM | Karlsruhe Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition, Writing the History of the Future, curated by Peter Weibel and Margit Rosen. The exhibition features highlights from the museum’s collection.
Crapshoot was first released in 2015 as both an web-art application for mobile devices and a work of electronic literature as part of the ZKM Art on Your Screen series of commissioned net art works. The work is a generative remix that mimics the form of Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous 1897 poem Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance).
From the ZKM website:
In an extraordinary compilation, ZKM presents the main works from its globally unique collection.
The collection of the ZKM | Karlsruhe ranks among the largest media art collections in the world. It exemplifies the transformation of art in the face of changing technologies of production, reception, and distribution. Artists react to changes in media and sometimes anticipate developments that only years later will be taken for granted by society as a whole: they write the history of the future.
Media determine to a great extent how we express our thoughts and feelings, how we communicate, and how we remember the past. Johannes Gutenberg’s movable metal letters fundamentally changed Europe’s culture of knowledge in the middle of the 15th century, just as photography changed the fine arts in the middle of the 19th century, and the Internet transformed our entire private and public communication at the end of the 20th century. The development of art went from moving letters to moving images and moving viewers; from the book page to the website, from the canvas to the screen.
Writing the History of the Future looks at art from the middle of the 20th century onwards. The exhibition shows aesthetic experiments with script and language that engage with different media. It presents the first attempts at computer-generated graphics and poetry as well as contemporary works dedicated to the automation of the creative act. It also addresses the material conditions of individual and cultural memory – between erasing and forgetting, storing and remembering.
About Crapshoot:
Crapshoot is a generative remix that mimics the form of Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous 1897 poem Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance).
In the construction of the poem, Mallarmé’s inventive use of spatial composition and innovative typography was a precursor to 20th century experiments in experimental poetry, language art, hypertext, and graphic design. Mallarmé’s specific instructions challenged the readers of his (and now our) time to rethink the way they engage with a text. In the case of Un Coup de Dés, he spread the poem over twenty pages inviting the reader to view each pair of consecutive facing pages as a continuous panel where the text moves across the entire plane of the open book. Various type sizes as well as use of bold and italic print keep the reader’s eyes dancing across the surface of the pages inviting the reader to participate in a more interactive reading style. One could say that Mallarmé’s visually pronounced interface plants a seed for what will, over a hundred years later, become the screen-based “apps” found on present-day tablet computers like the iPad. It is for this reason that Crapshoot, an artistic web application developed especially for electronic tablets, is conceived as a work of text-based Net art and electronic literature. By presenting an interface that requires swiping the screen instead of rolling the dice, the work invites the reader to trigger spontaneous “versions” of the work in what is commonly referred to as landscape mode but that in Crapshoot becomes an interactive poetics.
Over a century has passed since the original publication of Mallarmé’s groundbreaking, intermedia poetics, and nowadays his advanced compositional strategies can seem mainstream while the content of the writing itself may appear to be disconnected from the contemporary lives of those who read it. Keeping that in mind, although Crapshoot draws its energy from Mallarmé’s innovative use of typography and spatial composition, contrary to his original version, my remix is not produced as a fixed set of words destined for print publication (although an artist book, or what Mallarmé, in a different context, once referred to as a livre d’artiste, may eventually grow out of the project). Rather, like all existential crapshoots, it takes its chances and ventures into the risky realm of the unpredictable. In this case, by embracing the dynamics of responsive web-based publishing using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, the work reveals itself over time as an ongoing, generative performance of Net art, experiential literature, and mobile media performance.
The words and phrases that populate Crapshoot were constructed over eighteen months. As an instantaneously triggered field of poetic expression, the various texts that appear with each swipe of the finger (or, in the case of laptop use, each hit of the arrow key) addresses important philosophical issues related to chance operations, the creative act of writing, the art of remixology (the subject of my last book, remixthebook.com), the return of psychic automatism, as well as the unconscious desire to manipulate language in a highly charged rhetorical field of distribution. As a work of practice-based research and creative postproduction, the work also attempts to create a more subtle critical and theoretical response to recent high-profile philosophical works that address Mallarmé’s famous work, particularly Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé’s Coup de Des and Jacques Ranciere’s Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren.
