Screen Play

Here's the VJ RABBI show reel from about five years ago.

This is a transcript of the screen/writing/play going on in the video:

But what about the Unreal?

With out the Unreal,

there is no Real.

His Moving Visual Thinking

Performs a narrative function.

This function is to improvise

a digital dreamwork always in process.

To become a theory-to-be.

Ad nauseum.

Add nausea.

Add museum.

[add musing...]

VJ Persona is an i.d. entity

forever in search of meaning

[add musing...]

He uses his hyperimprovisationally constructed

fictional memory as source material.

[add musing...]

This proactively constructed fictional memory

is performed as digital flux persona.

Does it happen in realtime?

Unrealtime?

U n r e a l time?

Without unrealtime,

there is no realtime.

How about timeless time?

Just-in-time?

For what?

The important thing is

to annihilate the important thing.

The important thing is a feeling.

The important thing is Losing Sight of Yourself

so you can find yourself again.

The important thing is to use experience

as base for knowledge-invention.

The important thing is to remix

digital flux persona.

The important thing is

to outthink premeditation.

The important thing is to proactively

situate the artificial intelligentsia

in the networked space of

performative flows

so as to prompt wild mutations of

bodily lust

just within reach of the collective unconscious...

...

...

...

...

...

The elliptical nomad,

VJ persona.

IN the images?

Are they bio-images?

Do these images actually think?

Do they hallucinate other images?

When I say “this is VJ Persona,

streaming my digital flux identity,”

who is the “I” and

who is the “my”?

Whose story is it?

Machinic story on

machinic time?

Machinima.

My Life As A First Person

Digital Flux Persona.

A VJ theory-to-be.

What You See Is What You Get.

What You See Is What You Get.

What You Get Is Simultaneously

Cinematic and Pixilated.

What You Transgress

Is Video Art.

What You Pint Back To

Is Video Art.

What You Refrain From Repeating

Is Video Art.

What You Do IS

Change The Way You See.

What What You Steer Clear of

Is Conceptual Art.

What You Reinvent

Is Beauty As A Subliminal Force In Consciousness.

What You Avoid

Is Theorizing Your Practice To Death.

...

The concept of UNREALTIME has been permeating my work for about seven years now. It began seeping into my thinking with the blur-motion remix style of FILMTEXT, was articulated in my spontaneous artist theories in META/DATA, and will come to the foreground in my upcoming retrospective exhibition in Athens that includes the European premiere of Immobilité.

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Metadata: UNREALTIME, VJ narrative, live cinema, digital screenwriting

META/DATA in Paperback

The official publication date for the new paperback version of my MIT Press / Leonardo Book META/DATA is October 30th, but there's no need to wait as the book is already back from the printers. I just received my copies in the mail and they look fantastic.

Amazon has copies ready to ship and at a significant discount to boot -- (under $13).

There are still limited amounts of the hardback version of META/DATA available too.

It's the same exact version so the description stays the same:

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.

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Metadata: META/DATA, Mark Amerika, net art, digital artists, remix, VJ book, theory, art history, creative writing, new media

Mediartz

Liquid Line, the group show I participated in in Sao Paulo at the Galeria Marta Traba do Memorial da America Latina, has now closed, apparently to great media play. Another group show, Mediartz, opened in the Portland-Vancouver area on Friday. Close to 500 people attended the opening although unfortunately I was not one of them. The show includes the 85-minute version of DREAM CUM TRUE, my electronic meditation on the rhythmic nature of the creative process experienced as a deep interior shot. This work was conceived in Kailua and ends up being a work that I feel quite attached to for its serene yet still linguistically playful vibe. It's great to make artwork in different parts of the world as it helps mark the artist (and their narrative trajectory) as a nomadic networker who drifts through the psychogeographical space of flows.

I wrote about DREAM CUM TRUE here for its premiere solo exhibition in Seoul in 2008 and for the MPVAC solo exhibition at the Experimental Art Foundation also in 2008.

Once my UNREALTIME retrospective exhibition in Athens opens in less than three weeks, that will mean I have had four solo shows in two years (this includes the Chelsea Art Museum exhibition earlier this year). Not bad given the state of the economy and particularly the art market. But then again, and I claim no special skills at playing the speculative markets, I did anticipate a lot of these horrific outcomes in the world of global finance months before the collapse (here, here and here). At the time I referred to this artist-generated crystal ball reading of the near future collapse of the economy as a premonition algorithm. The term came to me in a dream, a dream that included a rare, endangered, and molting Hawaiian sea lion (monk seal) that stayed parked on my beach for an unusually long time (over a month). The monk seal came to be known to us locals as Chester because of the large scar he had on his chest. We never found out what caused the scar but two months later, to breaking local news updates, we found out that Chester was dead.

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Metadata: media art, exhibitions, economy, art world, speculating, molting,