Being Trance-Ported

Cinema Junkie has just published an interview with me about Immobilité.

An excerpt reads:

Tell me a little about your use of subtitles in the film?

The subtitles in all of the works in the Foreign Film Series serve a literary and philosophical purpose. If you watch a film like Godard's Alphaville, and read the subtitles, all of a sudden you are reading philosophy while watching images. But in the case of foreign films, the subtitles we read are usually translated dialogue or voice-over, right? In my work, the subtitles are actual "characters." They are inside someone's head and we are thinking along with them as we watch the images. We are, in a word, reading. Or even mind-reading.

More here.

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Metadata: Immobilité, interview, Mark Amerika, film, exhibition, new media, Immobilite.com, mobile phone

Director's Notebook: The Postproduction of Presence

The free e-book that is available at the Immobilité website is entitled "The Postproduction of Presence: A Director's Notebook" and for those who may have downloaded the file some time before Wednesday mid-afternoon, I suggest downloading it again as the server was caching an older, uncorrected version.

The postproduction of presence ...

What does that signify?

In an excerpt from the manifesto that opens the book, it is written:

Any formal art experiment that captures and manipulates data is postproduction art.

For the interdisciplinary artist who creates hybrid works of postproduction art, composing a new work with a so-called mobile phone as their primary data capturing apparatus is an aesthetic decision.

Each aesthetic decision made by the artist while composing their work of postproduction art is filtered into the ongoing process of rendering their aesthetic vision into the world (itself an ongoing work of postproduction art).

This rendering process enables the artist to envision the visionary potential of their work of postproduction art.

Envisioning innovative works of postproduction art can only take place through an unconscious process of selectively capturing, sampling, filtering, reconfiguring, and rendering the chosen source material.

Source material is everywhere and postproduction artists are always searching for data rich in its postproduction potential.

By embodying the chosen source material as an ongoing act of natural selection, the artist becomes a medium that acts on whatever ground is available and in so doing is in a constant state of flux, an aesthetic state where the postproduction of presence can manifest itself as a biological force in nature.

But it's also just a remix theory mash-up of two titles, Gumbrecht's "Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey" and Bourriaud's "Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: how art reprograms the world". Does this e-book in any way reflect some continuity with either of those books? Perhaps. Definitely the latter. A bit. But for the most part it circles in its own orbit.

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Metadata: Immobilité, postproduction art, Mark Amerika, film, exhibition, new media, Immobilite.com, mobile phone

Immobilité On All Seven Continents

In addition to the opening tonight at the Chelsea Art Museum, alternative iterations of the work will appear in other locations. The Streaming Museum, a new hybrid museum for cyberspace and public space on seven continents, will also be featuring the work in the following locations:

Cyberspace locations: Streamingmuseum.org; Second Life, Ars Virtua New Media Center - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Butler/244/13/72

Public space locations: Africa: Ubuntu Center, Port Elizabeth; Asia: Art Center Nabi, Seoul, Korea; Antarctica: British Antarctic base and Jubany Scientific Base of Argentina; Australia: Federation Square, Melbourne; Europe: Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) Liverpool and 17 BBC screens throughout the UK, Urban Screen Piazza Duomo, Milan, Italy; North America: Chelsea Art Museum, NYC and Victory Park, Dallas, Texas, USA; South America: Centro Municipal de Exposiciones Subte, Montevideo, Uruguay; and other locations to be announced.

Video and audio remixes of the work can be found in the "extras" area of the project site here.

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Metadata: Immobilité, visual art, Mark Amerika, film, exhibition, new media, Chelsea Art Museum, Streaming Museum,mobile phone

immobilite.com goes live

The site for Immobilité, the first work released in my Foreign Film Series, has just gone live. If you dig the design as much as I do, then you'll want to send your props (and business) to candystations.

There is a substantial "extras" section at the site full of video and audio remixes, randomized excerpts from the subtitles, film stills, production photos, a 60+ page Director's Notebook as a freely downloadable e-book, and another site-related blog.

The only glitch in our launch plans is that all of the rumors you have heard about Apple being understaffed in their iPhone application approval process are true. We submitted the app over 10 days ago and even though one department has approved it for release, it's still pending in legal. Go figure.

The 75-minute work begins looping in the Chelsea Art Museum around noon today and runs through May 8, 2009. The opening is Wednesday, April 8th, from 7:00 - 9:00PM.

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Metadata: Immobilité, visual art, Mark Amerika, film, exhibition, new media, Chelsea Art Museum, mobile phone

Immobilité Exhibition Opening

Please join us for the opening of the premiere exhibition of Immobilité this upcoming Wednesday at the Chelsea Art Museum from 7:00 - 9:00 PM.

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Metadata: Immobilité, visual art, Mark Amerika, film, exhibition, new media, Chelsea Art Museum, mobile phone