This rich collection of writings by pioneering digital artist Mark Amerika mixes (and remixes) personal memoir, net art theory, fictional narrative, satirical reportage, scholarly history, and network-infused language art. META/DATA is a playful, improvisatory, multitrack "digital sampling" of Amerika's writing from 1993 to 2005 that tells the early history of a net art world "gone wild" while simultaneously constructing a parallel poetics of net art that complements Amerika's own artistic practice.Unlike other new media artists who may create art to justify their theories, Amerika documents the emergence of new media art forms while he creates them. Presenting a multifaceted view of the digital art scene on subjects ranging from interactive storytelling to net art, live VJing, online curating, and Web publishing, Amerika gives us "Spontaneous Theories," "Distributed Fictions" (including his groundbreaking GRAMMATRON, the helpful "Insider's Guide to Avant-Garde Capitalism," and others), the more scholarly "Academic Remixes," "Net Dialogues" (peer-to-peer theoretical explorations with other artists and writers), and the digital salvos of "Amerika Online" (among them, "Surf-Sample-Manipulate: Playgiarism on the Net," "The Private Life of a Network Publisher," and satirical thoughts on "Writing As Hactivism"). META/DATA also features a section of full-color images, including some of Amerika's most well-known and influential works.Provocative, digressive, nomadic, and fun to read, Amerika's texts call to mind the cadences of Gertrude Stein, the Beats, cyberpunk fiction, and even The Daily Show more than they do the usual new media theorizing. META/DATA maps the world of net culture with Amerika as guide and resident artist.
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 an influential media artist, novelist, and theorist of Internet and remix culture.
Amerika's newest book is titled remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press). A provocative textual performance that is at once a dazzling model of the literary remix and a state-of-the-art reflection on remix culture, remixthebook captures the unique and continually shifting digital moment in which we live and situates the remix as an art form and literary intervention.
Prior to publishing remixthebook, Amerika's two most recent titles include a collection of artist writings covering the years 1993-2005 entitled META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007), and 29 Inches: A Long Narrative Poem (Chaismus Press, 2007).
He is also the author of many novels, anthologies, and artist e-books. 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."
He has had five retrospectives of his interdisciplinary artwork. The first-ever net art retrospective was held in the summer of 2001 at the ACA Media Arts Plaza in Tokyo, Japan, and 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. UNREALTIME, a comprehensive retrospective of Amerika's art and language, took place from October 2009 through January 2010 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece.
Amerika 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 was Immobilité. Immobilité was featured in the Fall 2008 Intermedia Programme at the Tate Modern, a solo exhibitions at the Chelsea Art Museum in spring 2009, UNREALTIME in Athens, Greece, in 2009-2010, and the Denver Art Museum on 2010-2011.
Amerika is the Publisher of Alt-X [altx.com], which he founded in 1993 and the electronic book review [electronicbookreview.com]. Publishers Weekly has called Alt-X "the literary publishing model of the future."
Mark Amerika is a Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder. His website is markamerika.com
