Immobilité in Brazil (and beyond)

In addition to an upcoming solo show of Immobilité at a major American museum this fall, the work will be screened and presented by yours truly in Brazil both this summer and fall.

In less than three weeks, I'll be Salvador, Bahia, for the VI Seminário Internacional de Cinema e Audiovisual. This event looks "totally awesome" (to quote a local high school kid) in that both the screening as well as my artist presentation will take place in a viewing theater with a 1300 seating capacity. The screen is huge which should make for a very unique projection of the entire work. For more on how Immobilité is more than just a film / video art work and positions itself in the field of distribution as part of a larger Conceptual practice that experiments with scale and location, read this post on "Trading in Images".

In addition to my presentation and screening as well as an exhibition of another one of my shorter works in the exhibition gallery inside the main venue, the event program will feature a huge Pasolini retrospective. My hosts have also invited a few other international film directors / screenwriters including Lucrecia Martel, the wonderful Argentinian film director and founders of the "New Argentinian Cinema" movement, and Tariq Ali, the British-Pakistani historian, novelist, filmmaker, and political campaigner who co-wrote the new Oliver Stone movie "South of the Border".

I am honored to be invited to the fantastic Afro-Brazilian city of Salvador, home of reggae samba as well as the rhythms of Candomble rituals and the martial-arts dance style known as Capoeira. I have had my eye on this location for a long time.

Immobilité will also be featured and premiere in Sao Paulo and Belo Horizonte in the fall as part of Arte.Mov, where I'll be touring both cities to discuss not only the screening of the work but also the position of the networked artist in digitally distributed economies. There will also be an exhibition of my work Mobile Phone Video Art Classics in both cities as well. More on all of this, including the solo show in the big US museum, soon ...

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Metadata: VI Seminário Internacional de Cinema e Audiovisual, Immobilité, Mark Amerika, Brazil

The Coming of Googleheim

In a recent post of just a bit over a month ago, I wrote:

Our goal should be to produce a multi-media, collective autobiography of practice that spatializes the narrative of new media forms of art and the mutant offspring that will grow out of this network distributed mind-mesh (what in other posts I have referred to as a co-poietic unfolding).

How will this co-poietic unfolding alter the art market of the 2020's?

One of the more difficult aspects of investigating this last question as deeply as one would like to relates to the use of sociological methods that challenge the subject-position of the voices of the artists themselves, many of whom invent their digital personae as instrumental narrative devices to further build their own personal mythologies on the Internet and thus continue the creative process of making (art) history up as they go along.

This will serve as a wake up call to contemporary media art historians who think they have the final say on how history gets read.

Especially given the fact that by the time the 2020's roll around, history will no longer be read per se but rather will be invented (yet again) as part of this collaboratively generated, network distributed creative act.

But what has emerged in that last month that makes me want to take it all back?

How about:

Digital Art @ Google

YouTube Play: The Creative Biennial of Creative Video

Adobe Museum of Digital Media

Art Basel's special panel on "Contemporary Art and New Media: Toward a Hybrid Discourse" featuring Nicolas Bourriaud, Peter Weibel, and Michael Joaquin Grey

Forget the 2020s. And while we're at it, let's delete this whole idea of the voices of the artists themselves, many of whom invent their digital personae as instrumental narrative devices to further build their own personal mythologies on the Internet and thus continue the creative process of making (art) history up as they go along..

These developments above will serve as a wake up call to contemporary media art historians who think they have the final say on how history gets read.

Make no mistake about it: we are all working for Google now...

... which makes everything so much easier.

I just need the perfect all-in-one mobile tablet to serve as the distribution medium and exhibition display context.

Oh wait, that's already out now too: the iPad.

But is there more to the future of digitally networked media art than i-Apps chained to the iOS?

Apple, what's your next move?

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Metadata: Apple, Google, YouTube, Adobe, where art thou art now?