Mark Amerika in Biennale de Montréal

Mark Amerika has been selected for 7th Biennale de Montréal. According to the BNL-MTL Web site:

In total, some 40 artists stemming from 10 different countries were selected. Whether reputed or emerging, these artists hail from Québec, Canada, Europe and the USA, and have moved forward in an artistic pathway where chance plays an important role. Guest artists work in the fields of visual arts, photography, e-art, video and cinema.

Québec and Canadian artists will represent nearly 50% of all participants. Of note is Daniel Spoerri, who has been a major player on the international artistic scene since the 1960's.

Through its exhibits, conferences, seminars and mediation activities, the BNL MTL 2011 will provide a venue for all explorations, supported by the vitality and originality of artists and their works.

Keywords: Mark Amerika, Biennale de Montréal, e-art

Mark Amerika Interview on South American Premiere of Immobilité

Mark Amerika has a blog post entitled "Remixing the blog: sampling my artist theories into discussions on the future of film." The bulk of the post is a transcript he has made public of an email between him and Brazilian journalist covering the South American premiere of his feature-length film, Immobilité.

"For what it's worth," Amerika writes, "here is a transcript of an interview I just gave for a large daily newspaper in Brazil that will soon go live in conjunction with my appearance in Salvador this upcoming week. I have slightly modified the grammar of the questioner for clarification purposes only and have added quite a few links to other posts throughout this blog as a way to indicate how staying attuned to ones thought process via blogging quite naturally feeds into their thought process when having a dialogue about their Conceptual practice no matter what venue that dialogue takes place in."

You can follow the link above to see how Amerika "links to other posts throughout [t]his blog as a way to indicate how staying attuned to ones thought process via blogging quite naturally feeds into their thought process when having a dialogue about their Conceptual practice no matter what venue that dialogue takes place in."

The Q&A with Mark Amerika goes like this:

Q: Some movie critics (as a local one, André Setaro) believe that "making films has lost its mystery, its magic, because now anyone can make it." What is your opinion about it?

Mark Amerika: If films have lost their mystery it's probably because too much big money controls their distribution and then the bottom line of finance dictates how stories should be told for entertainment purposes. It's still to early to tell, but maybe the new media art that is starting to get made with mobile phones, Flips, webcams, etc., will challenge artists to relocate the mysterious resonance of cinema's past in totally new ways. At least this was the challenge I set for myself with Immobilité.

Q: Semcine‘s director, Walter Lima, believes that it is important to discuss not only form, but also content. Do you think that form is less valorized then "story"?

Mark Amerika: It's hard for me to make a distinction between form, content and even context too. Obviously, when you write a novel or compose a soundtrack, or direct a movie, you develop formal strategies that will indicate a particular style or state of presence for the work to operate under. But you can't even start this process without some sense of what the content will be. For me it's about accessing the content or what, as a remix artist, I would call the source material, and then taking that source material and manipulating it through all kinds of aesthetic filters, some of which I invent before I make the work, some of which I borrow from others, and some of which I discover while making the work. These days I would say that content feels like story data, image data, literary data, philosophical data, etc. For example, with Immobilité I wanted to tell both a love story and a story of loss and so I researched and remixed all kinds of philosophical and literary texts and from these texts I assembled a pool of source material that then became my reservoir of content-data that I would use to tell the story of Immobilité. But the actual form of the final work is very fluid because it takes on many different scales and passes through many different distribution systems. The work is not just the 78 minute screening. It is the entire field of distribution because this too effects the formal inventiveness of any work of art.

Q: Is form as important for fictional films as it is for video art? Do you believe that there exists any differences between them (films and video art)?

Mark Amerika: This is a good question because something that I am discovering is that I am now composing digital narratives that are at once in the tradition of avant-garde film, experimental video art, and postmodern metafiction. Can you imagine what it would be like to look through your mobile phone camera as a literary novelist, capturing low-quality video images, and thinking to yourself that you are in the process of making a feature-length film that is no longer tied to the mainstream or even independent movie distribution system? If you can imagine this, then you are starting to enter my world during the making of Immobilité.

Q: Your name does not appear at the IMDB website, one of most famous film search websites. Does this prove that the film industry does not see connections between art and films?

Mark Amerika: Yes, or it proves that up to this moment I have been successfully resisting the entire movie world apparatus in all of its manifestations. For example, I don't send out DVD screeners, I don't really publicize the film in a traditional industry way, I never enter film festivals, I find funding sources that require no specific product from me but want to support my vision as an artist who makes new work for no other reason than to see what happens, and I work with actors and crews who are friends, fellow writers, intellectuals and media artists. These are people who are not connected to the film industry, not even on the margins. But this may change soon. The fact that, for the first time since I premiered the work in New York at my solo exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum, I am now screening Immobilité outside of a museum exhibition context, says something. Perhaps screening Immobilité at Semcine in Salvador is an indication that we are witnessing a significant turn in the life of this work of art.

Q: Why do you consider Immobilité a "foreign film"?

Mark Amerika: In the US, art house cinema from abroad has always been referred to as foreign film. But more importantly, as Atom Egoyan once wrote, every film is a foreign film. This is a beautiful idea that directly correlates to the philosophical impetus of Immobilité.

Q: Immobilité received financial support grants for innovative art research, artist residencies, and Tate Media. In the future, do you think that big studios can put money on experimental films made using cell phones, for example?

Mark Amerika: Sure, why not? The big studios can do whatever they want. Like the banks, in a way, they are "too big to fail," but again, what kind of mobile phone film would attract this kind of funding? The film's story would probably have to be severely compromised to guarantee a better ROI [return on investment). But what happens when the entire field of distribution goes through its next phase of radical transformation? For example, have you ever viewed cinematic works of art on an iPad? Personally, I find it hypnotic. Do I really need a big studio to produce my work for iPad distribution? There must be a creative alternative.

Q: More and more, people are getting used to watching home-made quality videos at YouTube. Do you think that the industry can find a way to make the public pay to watch this kind of work in theaters?

Mark Amerika: Maybe not theaters, but museums are trying to develop this audience. There is a new initiative, for example, between YouTube and the Guggenheim museum. It is called YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video. So it's already happening, it should be noted, without the traditional film world. The future of cinema is the Googleheim.

Q: What has been the public reaction after viewing Immobilité?

Mark Amerika: As always with very difficult work, I think it's mixed, but mostly positive. Someone in Athens, at UNREALTIME, my comprehensive retrospective exhibition, said that after seeing the whole thing it felt like they had read nine novels. Others said it reminded them of Warhol's experiments in "duration art" and voyeuristic "screen tests." The screen will definitely test any voyeur who tries to sit through it.

Q: At the Tate website, people can download your film. Lots of artists are against free-distribution, and now in Brazil we are having lots of discussions on this topic. What is your opinion about it?

Mark Amerika: Well, people can download the trailer at the Tate and a few other trailer remixes at the film's website which, to my mind, is also part of the entire work. This means the work is not just the 78 minute feature-length "foreign film" although of course that is the main attraction. But the video and audio remixes, the Director's Notebook, the limited edition poster, the experiments in the field of distribution, etc., it all comes together to create something that is modeled after art house or auteur-styled cinema but is in fact something else altogether different.

--

This cinematic style that Mark Amerika projects as being "in fact something else altogether different" refers to what? Perhaps the answer is in his free artist e-book that came out in conjunction with the release of Immobilité. The e-book, "The Postproduction of Presence: A Director's Notrebook," is a philosophical investigation of mobile cinema.

Mark Amerika on Nam June Paik (Part One)

The artist and author Mark Amerika, recently wrote in his Professor VJ blog:

In one of his artist's writing, "Cybernated Art," the video artist Nam June Paik wrote:

Cybernated art is very important, but art for cybernated life is more important, and the latter need not be cybernated.

Riffing on this, I would slightly remix his sentiment and write that making contemporary forms of electronic media art involve the creative use of mediating technologies that are situated to augment our experience of life as we look to achieve other states of mind, but are not in and of themselves the literal portals to these other states of mind. Rather, these portals are still part of a deep "interior shot" that feeds off a network of fringe-flow sensations as we experience them via socially interconnected relations.

"Cybernetics," wrote Paik, is "the science of pure relations, or relationship itself" and "has its origin in karma."

Something I learned from Paik, and that heavily informed the creation of Immobilité, was how to use the creative process to put oneself into a trance state that then unconsciously triggers unexpected visions or what in the work I refer to as autohallucinations. In early 2005, I was invited to the European memorial following the death of Paik, and there in Germany I came upon the loose, handwritten notes from an essay he had written around in the early Sixties called "Experimental Television" – that's what he must have called video art in those days – and I was struck by how he too really found it important to write down, to poeticize, what he felt was happening to him as he became this electronically-infused, experimental persona "out of nowhere" – as when he says, referring to the word (in quotes) "ecstasy"

* to go out of oneself...

* completely filled time

* the presence of eternal presence

* unconscious, or super-conscious

* -- some mystic forgets himself (go out of oneself)

* abnormal

* the world stops for three minutes!
This last phrase of Paik's, "the world stops for three minutes!" seems to come out of nowhere too, but also anticipates Carlos Castaneda's "Journey to Ixtlan" where the impersonal "I" of the narrator is being guided through his philosophical life journey by the teachings of Don Juan, the shaman-trickster. Don Juan says to Castaneda's persona:

I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing.

Stopping the world is not a cryptic metaphor that really doesn't mean anything. And its scope and importance as one of the main propositions of my knowledge should not be misjudged.

I am teaching you how to stop the world. Nothing will work, however, if you are very stubborn. Be less stubborn, and you will probably stop the world with any of the techniques I teach you. Everything I will tell you to do is a technique for stopping the world.

The sorcerer's description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it. I'm going to give you what I call "techniques for stopping the world."

Is this what Paik means by to "go out of oneself..." the way "some mystic forgets himself"? This is my state of mind too while I automatically generate my fictional personas as shareware. Creating my so-called foreign films (so-called in that they are anything but a film of any kind), I realize that forgetting oneself is a necessary aspect of envisioning the work.

The experimental artist Stan Brakhage, who some would say was to experimental film art what Nam June Paik was to video art, often referred to "film as visual music" and spoke about how "the work has to suggest its 'going-on-ness.'"

Which brings up an immediate question: How does a work suggest its 'going-on-ness', especially when you take into account issues of duration, Internet-era attention span, creative momentum, narrative, (re)mixed reality, and interactivity? Immobilité was composed using an unscripted, improvisational method of acting and the mobile phone images are intentionally shot in an amateurish or DIY [do-it-yourself] style similar to the evolving forms of video distributed in social media environments such as YouTube.

By interfacing this low-tech version of video making with more sophisticated forms of European art-house film, the work begins blurring the distinction between the auteur and the amateur, though both may recognize in themselves the desire to become a lover of forms (of formal innovation – as a survival strategy in the co-evolutionary push-pull of the still semi-stable environment).

Brakhage spoke about "a magicwork that makes itself" – a creative force that is filtered through the unconscious and that can only happen once one has freed themselves of the weight of commercial success and other burdens that come with a life fettered with unnecessary attachments. Only then, says Brakhage, can an artist finally blaze the path that they intuitively know they have to make (I'm adding my own associative word-thoughts here now). But before this can happen, you first have to take on the role of prophetic visionary who literally visualize their next creative becoming. How else is the life-art-work continuum to get made?

Sampling from more of Brakhage's phrases that I gleaned from a local TV interview in Boulder, Colorado, we hear him frequently refer to the "buzzing of mind" and "vision of muse" that fills his head like bees in a beehive as the work gets created on its own terms without any interference. He was cautious enough to make clear that not every work will be a magicwork, and any artist who has stuck it out over decades of trial and error via an intense, post-studio, art-research practice knows this to be the case. Sometimes it just comes out, sometimes not. And when the creative momentum one experiences while making a specific work is lost, you are never really sure if you will get it back. These are the risks one takes when developing their new material in a variety of media/mediums, especially when it's time-based new media that they are porting their poetic vibes through.

The instrument needs constant tuning.

The beehive mind needs to buzz.

Some mystic needs to forget themselves.

The unconscious experience of the intuitive body becoming new media...

Think of it as creating an active unconscious momentum, where the proprioceptive artist-medium "knows" where they are going without ever having been there before.

Or: imagine the artist-medium playing out their aesthetic potential via an innate body intuition, flushed with the illogic of sense (data), operating on autopilot.

The history of new media is the history of the world. For example, we can time-travel back to Germany in 1805, where we find a short essay written by Heinrich von Kleist, collected in his now out of print An Abyss Deep Enough. The essay is entitled "On the Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Speaking," where the author intuits the unconscious neural mechanism that triggers creative thought and writes:

For it is not we who know; it is rather a certain condition, in which we happen to be, that 'knows.'

Amerika's forthcoming remixthebook includes a chapter on Nam June Paik.

Who Is Mark Amerika?

Who is Mark Amerika?

This is a question that comes in many popular Google searches about the artist and author whose keyword name, Mark Amerika, is all throughrout his book META/DATA.

But let's see what it says on his website located markamerika.com.

Mark Amerika, who has been named a "Time Magazine 100 Innovator" as part of their continuing series of features on the most influential artists, scientists, entertainers and philosophers into the 21st century, is the producer, director, and writer of an ongoing series of limited edition, feature-length artworks that are part of his Foreign Film Series. The first film released in the series is Immobilité. Immobilité was featured in the Fall 2008 Intermedia Programme at the Tate museum website and premiered at Amerika's solo exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York. The work had its European premiere as part of UNREALTIME, Amerika's 2009-2010 comprehensive retrospective exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece. On October 20, 2010, the work opened in the Fuse Box at the Denver Art Museum where it was scheduled to run until late Februrary 2011.

Amerika featured his Internet art in what is generally considered the first-ever net art retrospective held in the summer of 2001 at the ACA Media Arts Plaza in Tokyo, Japan. The exhibition was called "Avant-Pop: The Stories of Mark Amerika [an Internet art retrospective]". Amerika's first European net art retrospective enjoyed two exhibition runs at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London and was entitled "How To Be An Internet Artist". Both shows covered the years 1993-2001. In 2004, he had two retrospectives, one at Ciberart Bilbao in Spain, and one at the Festival International de Linguagem Eletronica at the Gallerie do SESI in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

In the mid-Nineties, Mark Amerika was a Creative Writing Fellow and Lecturer on Network Publishing and Hypertext at Brown University where he developed the GRAMMATRON net art project. The opening section to what was supposed to be a novel called GRAMMATRON was published in the Penguin USA Avant-Pop anthology entitled "After Yesterday's Crash" [edited by Larry McCaffery]. By the time this Penguin USA excerpt was published, Amerika was already well on his way to creating an online storyworld that has since received over one million visitors and has been praised by many media sites including The New York Times, MSNBC, Time magazine, Die Zeit, Wired, The Village Voice, and Salon. GRAMMATRON has been exhibited in over 40 international venues including the Ars Electronica Festival, the International Symposium of Electronic Art, SIGGRAPH 1998, the Museums On The Web "Beyond Interface" show, the Adelaide Arts Festival, the International Biennial of Film and Architecture in Graz, transmediale in Berlin, and the "Conquest of Ubiquity" traveling exhibition that took place throughout Spain.

In Spring 2000, GRAMMATRON was selected as one of the first works of Internet art to ever be exhibited in the prestigious Whitney Biennial of American Art. After GRAMMATRON, the second project in his new media trilogy is PHON:E:ME, an mp3 concept album with hyper:liner:notes commissioned by the Walker Art Center, the Australia Council for the Arts New Media Fund, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Jerome Foundation. The PHONE:ME project, which was nominated for an International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences Webby Award in the Art category, has been exhibited internationally at venues such as SIGGRAPH 2000, the 13th Videobrasil festival in Sao Paulo, the Zeppelin Sound Festival at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, and at the Centre Georges Pompidou as part of the traveling "Let's Entertain" exhibition.

The third part of Amerika's net art trilogy is entitled FILMTEXT. FILMTEXT is a hybridized online/offline digital narrative created as a net art site, a museum installation, an mp3 concept album, an artist ebook, and a series of live performances. The first version of this work was commissioned by Playstation 2 for Amerika's "How To Be An Internet Artist" retrospective exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the 2.0 version was released in conjunction with his exhibition at SIGGRAPH 2002 in San Antonio. Other exhibitions of FILMTEXT have taken place in many international venues including the Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne), transmediale (Berlin), ISEA (Nagoya), the European Media Art Festival (Osnabruek), SF Camerawork (San Francisco), the American Museum of the Moving Image (New York), the FILMWINTER Festival of Expanded Media (Stuttgart), "prog:me" (Rio de Janeiro), and the "Blur of the Otherworldly" traveling exhibition.

Between 2001-2007, Amerika toured parts of Japan, Europe, Australia, South America, and the USA as a live audio-visual (VJ) performance artist and out of these performances produced a series of large scale digital video with surround sound art installations entitled CODEWORK. Various works in the CODEWORK series have been exhibited internationally and CODEWORK 1 was purchased by the Denver Art Museum where it was on exhibit throughout the summer of 2004. Amerika's continued interest in a practice-based research agenda investigating what he terms "postproduction art" and the "theory of remixology" has led to further experiments in VJ imagery, experimental electronic sound remixing, and a politically-charged hactivist practice. In 2005, he released the CHROMO HACK installation, an elaborate digital video surround sound work made in commemoration of 9-11 and the collapse of mainstream media foundations. CHROMO HACK was featured in the Techno Sublime exhibition at the CU Art Museum.

A collaborative group project, DJRABBI, features Amerika as "Kid Hassid" and includes the DVD "Society of the Spectacle (A Digital Remix)" which has been featured in over 30 international festivals and exhibitions. Society of the Spectacle, which is available at an affordable price here, has been described as a "pulsing, pop-ish and engrossing-the hypertext crowd stoked on Godard [...] [T]he rapid editing and churning information flow reflects the struggle to connect with global politics, the impossibility of slowing down, but at the same time conveys a manic playfulness, a creative resistance against considerable odds" (Realtime).

A familiar presence on the international festival and conference circuit, Amerika gives performances, lectures, and workshops on new media culture, electronic literature, web publishing, Internet art and theory, live audio/visual and VJ performance, hypertext, hactivism, and Web 2.0. A frequent keynoter, some major events he has participated in include the Whitney Museum's "Seminars With Artists" program, the "Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference," the "Disrupting Narratives" symposium at the Tate Modern, the International Network of Performing Arts conference in Zurich, the "Buddhism and New Media" conference at Donguuk University in Seoul, the Lucerne Easter Festival, Transmediale (Berlin), the trAce incubation conference, the "Digital Interconnection" festival in Tokyo, The Adelaide Arts Festival, the Interntional Symposium of Electronic Art "Orai" symposium in Nagoya, the Microwave International Media Festival in Hong Kong, the Digital Arts and Culture conference in Bergen, Norway, the bi-coastal "mal/CONTENT" conferences sponsored by Screamingmedia, the Unified Field Summit at the Aspen Institute in Colorado, the Brown University "Freedom To Write Conference," the Duke University "Assault: Radicalism In Aesthetics and Politics" conference, The German Association of Amerikan Studies Conference on Technology & American Culture, the "Knowing Mass Culture: Mediating Knowledge" conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Center for Twentieth Century Studies, Northwestern University's Center for Writing Arts lecture series on "Electronic Publishing," and a 16-city book tour for his novel Sexual Blood.

Amerika is the Publisher of Alt-X, which he founded in 1993 and the electronic book review. Publishers Weekly has called Alt-X "the literary publishing model of the future." He is also the author of three published novels, two edited anthologies, and two artist ebooks. His first novel, The Kafka Chronicles, is now in its third printing. His second novel, Sexual Blood, has been translated into Italian as Sangue Sessuale. The Philadelphia Inquirer has said "the real counterculture is not gone and Mark Amerika is proof of that...his work is not so much a book as it is a Dadaist demonstration, once again honoring the dictum that it's the artist's sacred duty to destroy what commerce has made common." His artist ebooks are available for free download and enjoy a readership in the tens of thousands. The How To Be An Internet Artist ebook was part of the initial launch of the new Alt-X Press and the cinescripture.1 ebook was exhibited in conjunction with his Internet art retrospective at the ICA in London. In 2007, he published two books, one a collection of artist writings covering the years 1993-2005 entitled META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007), and a new novel 29 Inches: A Long Narrative Poem (Chaismus Press, 2007). His experimental artist essays, poetics, and articles have appeared in many academic, art, and underground journals including Leonardo, New Media and Society, electronic book review, Culture Machine, The European Journal For Higher Arts Education, The Iowa Review, American Book Review, Artbyte, Telepolis, Rhizome, Fibreculture, nettime, and Beehive.

Amerika is currently a Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

You can buy his books here.

But that's just one version of an answer to the question "Who is Mark Amerika?" This blog will occasionally provide more clues as time goes on.

Mark Amerika on "The Field of Distribution"

Mark Amerika writes about The Field of Distribution:

At this point, the Conceptual artist of the 2010s should be addressing questions like, "What are the most innovative ways to continually release yourself into the field of distribution? Do you place more value on inward bound links or those that go out? How is your link strategy tied to your fictionally generated narrative mythology? What does it mean to create a value-added network and how does this relate to both your public persona/presence and your right to privacy and freedom of speech?"

For me, having started addressing these questions in the early 90s, I am still inclined to treat the field of distribution as a core thematic context located in the heart of networked art practice. Conceptually, this is what it means, what it has always meant, to be a net artist.

Of course, by now I realize that I'm just part of a phenomenological moment that contains my lifestylepractice in its concept-polluted gulf. That is to say, I'm just more gushing ego oil in the Google sea. Talk about a job for the Network Roto-Router! Is this another way of saying it's time for a system-wide self-cleansing?

One thing that's kind of cool that's been happening these days is that artists and critics and other nomadic slummers, many of whom do not identify with anything even remotely clued in to the avant-garde lineage that a movement like Art + Language springs forth from, are all jacked in to the same field of distribution. As such, we are all by nature evolutionarily enabled to remixologically inhabit the Source Material Everywhere ("the archive") so that we may create on-the-fly versions of our creative selves as instances of short-term illumination that, if we're lucky, shine in the darkness for just enough time to convert our high-def personas into cash equivalents. This is the American way, no?

But then the question becomes, "How do you sustain this conversion process over the course of lifetime?" That's a question that comes up in a million variations with Graduate art students all over the world. Of course, there is no one perfect answer that can be applied to everyone. The reason? Fictionally generated narrative mythology in the field of distribution requires a constantly innovative Conceptual remix practice at the core of ones artistic skills set. You should probably throw in hard work and good timing as well, i.e. the intangible qualities of historical luck, although this is something that pervades every budding lifestylepratice no matter how one may occupy their time.

Of course, for some, hard work results in wasted labor and good luck is as easy as being born into the right set of circumstances. For example, what are the advantages given to artists whose parents help pay for their advanced college education, generously provide the down payments on their mortgages, and promise even certain "guarantees" on future net worth via contracted inheritance procedures? I have no idea since those are not the circumstances I have lived under (though many artists I know do have at least some of that in their background). Still, how does one create their own luck? How do they distribute their morphing creative selves so that they are in the right place at the right time? Is that distribution / release strategy now to be considered the ultimate Conceptual art form?

One option available to a select few Conceptual mythmakers is to ramp up postproduction on their micro-edited existences so that they can then up-rez their latest imaging to such a degree that it turns into ... what? Debord would say capital. But I would disagree. I up-rez my postproduction imaging to the utmost possible degree so that it creates yet more superhuman potential. One needs superhuman potential if they hope to ward off the complete commodification of their persona. If there is one thing I have learned over the years, it's that you can't let the corporate culture (in whatever form it manifests itself in) write your story for you. You lose the narrative, you may as well throw in the towel. This is why, as Price writes in his electronic dispersions, "you must fight something in order to understand it."

This is what drives the contemporary Conceptual artist to keep reinventing themselves over and over again. You can do it all: write novels, invent new forms of creativity like "net art," deliver international keynote speeches on body-brain-apparatus achievements, engage in a series of international live A/V (VJ) tours, produce - write - and direct feature length films shot on mobile phones or Flips or webcams, sustain a vast web publishing empire for 25 years or more, produce your own comedy album, talk to yourself while developing a new strain of yoga on the beach, or simply go to the gym and challenge yourself to do 500 more sit-ups while singing your own version of Johnny Lydon's "Psychopath."

The field of distribution is itself the space where Conceptual art is most ideally processed in the 2010's. One conceptual strategy would be to do it all throughout this upcoming decade without ever once signing up for Facebook. This act of defiance would signal to all of those who do sign on to Facebook that they have essentially given up, have truly caved in to the corporate death routine, as it were.

But that's just a Conceptual work of mine I am still in the process of performing. Perhaps the work will change over time. It usually does.

--

About Mark Amerika:

Mark Amerika, who has been named a "Time Magazine 100 Innovator" as part of their continuing series of features on the most influential artists, scientists, entertainers and philosophers into the 21st century, is the producer, director, and writer of an ongoing series of limited edition feature-length films that are part of his Foreign Film Series. The first film released in the series is Immobilité. Immobilité was featured in the Fall 2008 Intermedia Programme at the Tate museum website and premiered at Amerika's solo exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York. The work had its European premiere as part of UNREALTIME, Amerika's 2009-2010 comprehensive retrospective exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece. On October 20, 2010, the work opened in the Fuse Box at the Denver Art Museum where it was scheduled to run until late Februrary 2011.

Amerika featured his Internet art in what is generally considered the first-ever net art retrospective held in the summer of 2001 at the ACA Media Arts Plaza in Tokyo, Japan. The exhibition was called "Avant-Pop: The Stories of Mark Amerika [an Internet art retrospective]". Amerika's first European net art retrospective enjoyed two exhibition runs at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London and was entitled "How To Be An Internet Artist". Both shows covered the years 1993-2001. In 2004, he had two retrospectives, one at Ciberart Bilbao in Spain, and one at the Festival International de Linguagem Eletronica at the Gallerie do SESI in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

In the mid-Nineties, Amerika was a Creative Writing Fellow and Lecturer on Network Publishing and Hypertext at Brown University where he developed the GRAMMATRON net art project. The opening section to what was supposed to be a novel called GRAMMATRON was published in the Penguin USA Avant-Pop anthology entitled "After Yesterday's Crash" [edited by Larry McCaffery]. By the time this Penguin USA excerpt was published, Amerika was already well on his way to creating an online storyworld that has since received over one million visitors and has been praised by many media sites including The New York Times, MSNBC, Time magazine, Die Zeit, Wired, The Village Voice, and Salon. GRAMMATRON has been exhibited in over 40 international venues including the Ars Electronica Festival, the International Symposium of Electronic Art, SIGGRAPH 1998, the Museums On The Web "Beyond Interface" show, the Adelaide Arts Festival, the International Biennial of Film and Architecture in Graz, transmediale in Berlin, and the "Conquest of Ubiquity" traveling exhibition that took place throughout Spain.

In Spring 2000, GRAMMATRON was selected as one of the first works of Internet art to ever be exhibited in the prestigious Whitney Biennial of American Art.

After GRAMMATRON, the second project in his new media trilogy is PHON:E:ME, an mp3 concept album with hyper:liner:notes commissioned by the Walker Art Center, the Australia Council for the Arts New Media Fund, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Jerome Foundation. The PHONE:ME project, which was nominated for an International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences Webby Award in the Art category, has been exhibited internationally at venues such as SIGGRAPH 2000, the 13th Videobrasil festival in Sao Paulo, the Zeppelin Sound Festival at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, and at the Centre Georges Pompidou as part of the traveling "Let's Entertain" exhibition.

The third part of Amerika's net art trilogy is entitled FILMTEXT. FILMTEXT is a hybridized online/offline digital narrative created as a net art site, a museum installation, an mp3 concept album, an artist ebook, and a series of live performances. The first version of this work was commissioned by Playstation 2 for Amerika's "How To Be An Internet Artist" retrospective exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the 2.0 version was released in conjunction with his exhibition at SIGGRAPH 2002 in San Antonio.

Other exhibitions of FILMTEXT have taken place in many international venues including the Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne), transmediale (Berlin), ISEA (Nagoya), the European Media Art Festival (Osnabruek), SF Camerawork (San Francisco), the American Museum of the Moving Image (New York), the FILMWINTER Festival of Expanded Media (Stuttgart), "prog:me" (Rio de Janeiro), and the "Blur of the Otherworldly" traveling exhibition.

Between 2001-2007, Amerika toured parts of Japan, Europe, Australia, South America, and the USA as a live audio-visual performance artist specializing in VJ (video jockey) remixing, and out of these performances produced a series of large scale digital video with surround sound art installations entitled CODEWORK. Various works in the CODEWORK series have been exhibited internationally and CODEWORK 1 was purchased by the Denver Art Museum where it was on exhibit throughout the summer of 2004. Amerika's continued interest in a practice-based research agenda investigating what he terms "postproduction art" and the "remixology" has led to further experiments in VJ imagery, experimental electronic sound remixing, and a politically-charged hactivist practice. In 2005, he released the CHROMO HACK installation, an elaborate digital video surround sound work made in commemoration of the events of 9-11. The work critically reflects on the collapse of mainstream media foundations, particularly the inability of the corporate media's news anchors to articulate the day's devastating events in realtime. CHROMO HACK was featured in the Techno Sublime exhibition at the CU Art Museum and in Amerika's comprehensive retrospective at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece.

A collaborative group project, DJRABBI, features Amerika as "Kid Hassid" and includes the DVD "Society of the Spectacle (A Digital Remix)" which has been featured in over 30 international festivals and exhibitions. Society of the Spectacle, which is available at an affordable price here, has been described as a "pulsing, pop-ish and engrossing-the hypertext crowd stoked on Godard [...] [T]he rapid editing and churning information flow reflects the struggle to connect with global politics, the impossibility of slowing down, but at the same time conveys a manic playfulness, a creative resistance against considerable odds" (Realtime).

Amerika is the Publisher of Alt-X, which he founded in 1993 and the electronic book review. Publishers Weekly has called Alt-X "the literary publishing model of the future." He is also the author of three published novels, two edited anthologies, and two artist ebooks. His first novel, The Kafka Chronicles, is now in its third printing. His second novel, Sexual Blood, has been translated into Italian as Sangue Sessuale. The Philadelphia Inquirer has said "the real counterculture is not gone and Mark Amerika is proof of that...his work is not so much a book as it is a Dadaist demonstration, once again honoring the dictum that it's the artist's sacred duty to destroy what commerce has made common." His artist ebooks are available for free download and enjoy a readership in the tens of thousands. The How To Be An Internet Artist ebook was part of the initial launch of the new Alt-X Press and the cinescripture.1 ebook was exhibited in conjunction with his Internet art retrospective at the ICA in London. In 2007, he published two books, one a collection of artist writings covering the years 1993-2005 entitled META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007), and a new novel 29 Inches: A Long Narrative Poem (Chaismus Press, 2007).