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.
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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).
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