Mark Amerika

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Mark Amerika is an American artist and author.

Contents

[edit] Career

Amerika received his MFA from Brown University. After publishing two cult-novels, The Kafka Chronicles and Sexual Blood, he turned his energy towards net art. His goal is to expand the concept of writing so that it includes writing in and with new media technologies. He is the founder of the Alt-X Online Network, one of the oldest online art and literary networks. Originally founded as a Gopher site by Amerika in late 1992, it features the art, fiction, poetry, and critical theory of over 500 international contributors.

Amerika is also the creator of GRAMMATRON, "a virtual writing machine that translates your experience for you as you experience it." The experiential aspects of hypertext fiction were thoroughly investigated in GRAMMATRON. GRAMMATRON was the first of three major net art works that Amerika created over a decade of pioneering new media forms. The second work in the net art trilogy is PHON:E:ME, an mp3 concept album with hyper:liner:notes. Whereas GRAMMATRON explored the nature of multilinear narrative in cyberpace, PHON:E:ME looked back at the influence of conceptual art on new media culture. The work deals with the interrelationship between writing, sound, and hypermedia narrative, and features Amerika's unique vocals (he was the former lead vocalist for the now defunct art-rock band, Dogma Hum). The final work in the new media trilogy is FILMTEXT which premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London as part of Amerika's HOW TO BE AN INTERNET ARTIST retrospective, the first-ever European net art retrospective (Amerika's "Avant-Pop: The Stories of Mark Amerika" net art retrospective in Tokyo, was the first net art retrospective in art history). FILMTEXT is an exploration into digital narrative across new media platforms and incorporates a Flash art website, an mp3 concept album, an experimental artist ebook, and a series of live performances. These live performances eventually morphed into Amerika's international tour as "VJ Persona," a nomadic net artist whose intuition and improvisatory artwork plays before audiences the world over. The Wall Street Journal wrote that FILMTEXT sold to a private collector for a price that far exceeds any other work of net art.

Amerika's major collection of artist writings from 1993-2005 is entitled META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press).

His latest work is a series of feature-length "Foreign Films" made in various media formats including HDV and mobile phone video. The first of the series is entitled "My Autoerotic Muse" and the second is entitled "Immobilité". He is an Associate Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

[edit] Awards and honors

Amerika has been named a "Time Magazine 100 Innovator," and his digital artwork has been shown at museums around the world, including four major retrospectives, one each at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Media Arts Plaza in Tokyo, Ciberart Bilbao, and FILE in São Paulo. He has received art commissions from venues such as the Walker Art Center, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, IBM, Sony PlayStation, and the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in Tokyo. His net art work PHON:E:ME was nominated for a Webby Award in 1999. In 2007, he delivered the keynote address at the "Disrupting Narratives" symposium at Tate Modern and will do the same at the "Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference" in Vancouver.

[edit] Bibliography

  • The Kafka Chronicles
  • Sexual Blood (ISBN 0573660000), 1995
  • How to Be an Internet Artist (ISBN 193156003X), 2002
  • META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007)

[edit] External links