Mark Amerika

Interview by Simon Mills

SM: I’m interested in how you perceive artists and critics practice has changed over the past 10 years with regard to New Media. 10 years ago there seemed an awful lot of hype surrounding techno-culture although not too much interest from the establishment. What is you perception of that era? In what ways do you think things having changed since then?

MA: New media is much more integrated into daily practice. I guess that’s standard knowledge these days, but I can see it in my classes. Even five or six years ago I was considered a radical because I was pushing digital cameras and manipulation of the captured data (as opposed to what we used to call "photos" – and still do, although it’s wrong). Now, most camera companies are dropping their film business and going all digital, so there’s really no choice! Then there is the writing aspect. Hypertext has been morphed into a much broader network of folksonomic media, like blogging, Flickr, P2P sharing software, etc.

And since the new media have become integrated into all aspects of life, we also see it becoming attached to us as we move around. Mobile blogging, pocket cinema, podcasts, etc. I actually prefer it the way it is today – it’s much easier to teach and work with – and gives us more focus on the writing style itself instead of the fascinating new technology!

SM: How do you see your practice as an artist has changed over the past 10 years? What do you see as the next area that needs to be worked on?

MA: I have become much more of an interdisciplinary artist. Check this quote from Vito Acconci:

"...if I specialize in a medium, then I would be fixing a ground for myself, a ground I would have to be digging myself out of, constantly, as one medium was substituted for another – so, then instead of turning toward ‘ground’ I would shift my attention and turn to ‘instrument,’ I would focus on myself as the instrument that acted on whatever ground was available."

Now, anyone who has seriously read GRAMMATRON, knows that I see writing as an instrument, so the diff between the writer, the writing machine, and the instrument that acts on whatever ground is available, is blurred for me. So basically I am applying my instrument to all kinds of media and platforms including novel writing, hypertext, sound art, Flash art, DVD with surround installations, VJ performance, blogging, 24 hour "distributed blog jams," and feature-length works of interactive cinema. The latter is what I see working on over the next few years and imagine many other artists playing with too.

SM: How do you see the state of Electronic Literature/New Media Writing? How do you see the future of writing/literature using New Media?

MA: It’s alive and well. Again, the blogosphere has absorbed much of the current energy in the field. Ebooks are strong too, but that’s because the print world has no time or interest in producing and promoting literature or theory. We saw this happening 10 years ago, yes? So we’re not too surprised by it all. What is exciting, is that for relatively little cost, we are building "communities of interest" that regularly connect over the network vis-a-vis their writing, reading, linking, metadata, and theory practice. My only complaint is that the work itself tends to be less creative, more subdued, and conceptual in nature. Pointing to things and commenting on them is OK; I do it too. But I would still like to see more STLYE in the writing itself. Or else I get bored and move on…

SM: Conversely how do you now view traditional print media having worked in New Media for so long?

MA: Print media, like museums, is useful as an alternative archive. As long as people read print books and conduct research in print libraries, then an artist wants to have presence there too. True, there is some overlap in the audiences, and so if it’s available on the net for free, then most readers would be less inclined to buy the print book or even check it out of the library. But for those who do want the printed object, I like to compose and publish my source material for them as well.

Still, I am basically doing the same thing I was 10 years ago. Trying to innovate and expand the concept of writing to include multi-media forms that can be distributed in a gift-economy via the net.

SM: Do you think the commercialisation of the web has affected artists use of it as a site to challenge established art culture? Is there still an avant-garde aspect to New Media art and literature?

MA: Well, I’ve always thought of it more as avant-pop. The self-reflexivity that is embedded in our currrent meta-culture, where you are always aware of the media apparatus you are interacting with as part of the artistic or literary experience, suggests that the popularization of digital tools will change the way we approach what we have formerly called avant-garde. I have this artist theory I have been developing for my forthcoming book META/DATA (MIT Press, 2007) that says we are all born avant-garde. This means that we are born ahead of our time, and that we have the opportunity to really develop our unconscious, "readiness potential" over the course of our lives, but that the rational "I" of consciousness interferes with this developmental creative process and oftentimes sets us off on futile journeys to more disciplinary, rationalistic practices that work against our creative spirit. The digital pop culture can be used to either continue down that path of becoming nothing but a rational, bureaucratized, consumer of products whose job it is to "make the trains run on time," or it can be used to further the avant-garde tradition we are born into but that must now be transformed so that it takes into account the way we experience post-contemporary digi-pop culture. You can see this in politics with the move from grassroots to netroots, but also in the spirit of art works like The Yes Men (www.yesmen.org), USDAT (www.usdat.us) and Society of the Spectacle (A Digital Remix) and 24 Hour Count (both located at www.djrabbi.com).

SM: Robert Coover once wrote, "The constant threat of hypermedia: to suck the substance out of a work of lettered art, reduce it to surface spectacle". What do you feel about the constant suspicion that hypertext and New Media art are somehow superficial?

MA: Although I understand where Bob is coming from, I think the general argument is bogus. It’s the old word vs. image battle. But in Net Art 101, you learn that a gif or jpg of a word is an image of a word, not just a word. And then you look at digital images and try to see how they are composed of ones and zeroes and how you can "script data" to "make pictures". It’s not an either/or situation. I can play a hardcore VJ set in London with my DJRABBI collective and the Light Surgeons, and then go back to my blog the next morning and write about my reaction to Joan Didion’s book on the death of her husband, "The Year of Magical Thinking."

SM: How do you deal with the environmental reception of your work? People read on the Internet in many different ways and situations and these can often totally change the original work. How do you write/create for a New Media audience which isn’t always a static audience in terms of level? How/where does ‘literacy’ feature for you?

MA: You know, the truth is that on one level, I never really think too much about the audience. My best work comes out of nowhere (literally -”erehwon” – utopia). It’s connected to the unconscious release of whatever creative potential I have ready to let go. I just intuit my next move and follow my body wherever it takes me (Allen Ginsberg referred to this as having a physiological spasm” – in my novels it became something else, the so-called “white-hot chemical decomposition” of the artist-body while writing). But your point about the different levels of literacy is important, and one I have struggled with over the last ten years. When I first started making my net art and writing projects, I tried to negotiate with what I imagined to be the “end-user” (art patron?) who would interact with the work. This then meant that new media art and writing would have to immediately begin investigating aspects of “audience reception” – which I had a great opportunity to play around with with GRAMMATRON because it was so popular (unexpectedly so). So there is a lot of analysis I may burden myself with some day to get a better idea of how audiences received that particular work. Still, with time, and especially over the last six or seven years, I have gone back to my old ways, i.e. I just make shit up and then when I release it, I support it because I believe in it, and let others decide its fate in the network culture.

SM: I’m interested in how you teach all this stuff to your students. How do you contextualise things like VJ’ing, remixology and blogging within the traditional art history structure?

MA: There’s a lot of remediation going on. I borrow that term from Bolter and Grusin’s book of the same name. The first part of this year I have been fortunate enough to see many great large-scale exhibitions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s retrospective of Robert Rauschenberg’s "combines" (essentially performative and plug-in paintings), the big DADA show at the National Gallery in Washington D.C., and the 40 Years of German Video Art exhibition in Bremen, Germany, where I also happened to be invited to the memorial for the late Nam June Paik and got to hear stories about his participation in Fluxus and early video art. What I learned by seeing all of these shows is that everything we are doing now grows out of these (and many other) 20th century art practices and that there are direct connections or lineages to be made between contemporary new media art and literature and many of these 20th century practices. I call it open source lifestyle, and invite my students to rip off ideas of the past and remediate them for the art of today. The big difference is that today everybody (loose term) is doing it, and it’s becoming much less elitist and has very little to do with the gallery scene. The most interesting artists I’m paying attention to these days are ones who are intentionally dissing the commercial art world in favor a more intense social networking or peer-to-peer scene. That is to say, there will never be a big retrospective of a net artist’s work at the Met. You can quote me on that.