Professor VJ

Beyond GRAMMATRON: 20 Years into the Future

Announcing the Beyond GRAMMATRON: 20 Years into the Future Symposium and Exhibition

June 26, 2017
London

20 years ago today, artist and novelist Mark Amerika released GRAMMATRON, one of the pioneering works of internet art and electronic literature. The work has since been exhibited in many venues including the Whitney Biennial of American Art, the Walker Arts Center, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, and just this year as part of the Glitchmix exhibition at the Norwegian Embassy to Cuba in Havana. Celebrated as both a significant work of late 20th century American art as well as a prototype for future forms of digital writing, "GRAMMATRON is grappling with the idea of spirituality in the electronic age" (New York Times).

The British Computer Arts Society in collaboration with Ravensbourne and the Electronic Literature Organization are happy to announce the Beyond GRAMMATRON: 20 Years into the Future symposium and exhibition. The all-day symposium will take place on Friday, September 15 starting at 10:00 at the British Computer Society in Covent Garden. The symposium will feature an international group of guest speakers including Christiane Paul (Whitney Museum of American Art and New School), Frieder Nake (University of Bremen), Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett (Furtherfield Gallery), Dene Grigar (President, Electronic Literature Organization and Washington State University-Vancouver) Arnaud Regnauld (University of Paris 8), Beryl Graham (University of Sunderland), Sue Thomas (Bournemouth University), Cristina Figueroa-Vives (Casas de las Americas in Havana) and Kerry Doran (Postmasters Gallery). The event is chaired by Dr. Nicholas Lambert, Head of Research at Ravensbourne and will include a rare spoken word performance of GRAMMATRON by artist Mark Amerika (University of Colorado).

The "Beyond GRAMMATRON" pop-up exhibition is curated by artist and scholar Dene Grigar and features GRAMMATRON alongside the work of other artists that were gaining prominence in the mid-late 90s net art and electronic literary culture.

Event location:

British Computer Society, 5 Southampton St, London WC2E 7HA

All events are free and open to the public.

For more information on the Beyond GRAMMATRON event, visit the website at beyondgrammatron.com

To experience the original 1997 version of GRAMMATRON, visit grammatron.com

In celebration of the 20 year anniversary of GRAMMATRON, Mark Amerika has created a new work of art - “Detail(s) from GRAMMATRON (Animated GIF Remix)” - opening on July 1, 2017 at the Upfor Gallery’s online exhibition space located at upfor.digital

Mark Amerika's Glitchmix Survey Exhibition in Havana!

Mark Amerika's exhibition GlitchMix, not an error, opened on March 24, 2017 and is the first exhibition of Amerika's work in Havana. The exhibition takes place at The Estudio Figueroa-Vives and the Norwegian Embassy in Cuba. This is the first exhibition in Cuba featuring glitch art and also includes Amerika's early works of net art GRAMMATRON (1997) and FILMTEXT (2001-2002). Other works in the exhibition include Lake Como Remix, (2012), Getting Lost The Long Dérive (2012), Micro-Cinematic Essays on the Life and Work of Marcel Duchamp dba Conceptual Parts, Ink (2012), Crapshoot (2015), and wall-sized prints from Amerika's 8-Bit Heaven series (UK, 2012; Brazil, 2016). The exhibition also features new work from Yonlay Cabrera and Fidel García, two of Cuba's most exciting and internationally exhibited contemporary digital artists.

GlitchMix, not an error is curated by the Estudio Figueroa-Vives and is the ninth exhibition in collaboration with the Norwegian Embassy and the first one that includes an international artist.

According to the gallery, "[g]litch art is the practice of using or appropriating digital or analogical errors, either by corrupting data or software, or physically manipulating electronic devices, TV, videos, music, and web sites. The exhibition GlitchMix, not an error showcases contemporary art practices that research new forms of digital video, sound art, net art, photography and/or installation that investigate the creative use of error and the aesthetics of 'the happy accident' – prompted or spontaneous – in contemporary art."

Amerika, who was born in Miami, said "I have never had an opportunity to visit Cuba and am thrilled to be able to participate in this exciting artistic and cultural exchange with the Estudio Figueroa-Vives as well as meet with young Cuban artists who, like myself twenty years ago, are experimenting with digital technologies to create new forms of art."

"By highlighting the intermedia connections between established American and emerging Cuban artists, the GlitchMix exhibition brings a fresh perspective to our curatorial program," the announcement said. Amerika discussed his work at the Norwegian Embassy in Cuba on March 27 at 3:00 pm.

Here are some images from the exhibition and opening night event:

Glitchy Textures Keynote Performance

Mark Amerika delivered the keynote performance at this year's Glitchy Textures conference in Paris. During the performance, Amerika featured an encore presentation of his "Glitch Ontology" manifesto in conjunction with his Lake Como Remix video art work and launched his new music video, What's the Glitch. Glitchy Textures took place at ENSAD lab and was coordinated by University of Paris 8 Professor Gwen Cor.

The international conference, according to Cor, "explores how the glitchy textures of works – whether they originate in malfunctions, glitches, defects, flaws or subversion of the system – create zones of resistance that challenge their manipulation and touch. Sampling from Amerika Museum's of Glitch Aesthetics, Cor asks "what happens when flaws are conceived of as a 'glitch aesthetics' or as a mission designed 'to disrupt mainstream perceptions' and practices? Along what necessarily paradoxical modalities can glitches become part of the system while concurrently undermining conventional artistic practices?"

A book featuring work from the conference will be published in 2017.

London Premiere of Immobilité

After being exhibited in museums around the world, my first feature-length "foreign film," Immobilité, is finally having its UK premiere in London on May 11. 2016. The film will be screened at the Regent Street Cinema. The Regent Street Cinema has a great heritage:

On 20 February 1896, the Polytechnic’s theatre became the birthplace of cinema in the UK, when the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe machine was demonstrated to the press and these earliest of moving images given their first presentation to a paying audience the following day. The Lumière brothers’ show had first been seen by the public in Paris on 28 December 1895 and after London continued its tour to New York, Bombay and Buenos Aires.

Here's a sample from the press release from my sponsors at the University of Westminster:

Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster is delighted to announce a UK premiere of Mark Amerika’s work of early mobile phone video art, Immobilité.

Released in 2009, Mark Amerika's Immobilité appropriates the stylistic tendencies of the "feature-length foreign film." The artwork introduces the creative use of subtitles that double as a literary text depicting a future world where the dream of living in utopia can only be sustained by a nomadic tribe of artists and intellectuals living on the edge of apocalypse.

According to Amerika, "Immobilité mashes up the language of auteur-driven 'foreign films' with a more amateur video vernacular we now associate with social media platforms like YouTube and Vine." By experimenting with a low-tech glitch aesthetic associated with pre-HD mobile phone video recording technology as well as more sophisticated forms of motion picture narrative found in European art-house movies, Amerika makes an attempt at interrogating the question: "What is the future of cinema?"

Shot entirely on a Nokia N95 mobile phone in 2007 (before the release of the iPhone), Immobilité was filmed on location in the Cornwall region of England and received support from the University of Falmouth iRES research group, Tate Media, and the University of Colorado Innovative Seed Grant. Solo exhibitions of Immobilité have taken place at the Denver Art Museum, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, and the Chelsea Art Museum.

You can register for tickets at Eventbrite.

For those who are unable to attend, you can always (re)read my e-book, The Postproduction of Presence: A Director's Notebook.

Glitch Ontology (A Limited Edition Artist Book)

It gives me great pleasure to announce the launch of Glitch Ontology, a custom-made, limited edition artist book co-produced with the Upfor Gallery and fabricated in collaboration with Publication Studio.

[If you want to skip right to the book site, click here]

Lucky for me, both Theo Downes-Le Guin, Director of Upfor, and Antonia Pinter at Publication Studio, operate in my neighborhood in Portland, a wonderful city where I have spent the last seven summers. Co-producing the book with Upfor has been a pleasure. I have always been impressed with the exhibition schedule that Theo curates in the gallery, particularly the adventurous new media, net art, and video work produced by the artists they feature. I've seen groundbreaking videos, net art and gorgeous (even when conceptual) print work exhibited by Frances Stark, Ryan Trecartin, Katie Torn, Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper, Jack Featherly,and a fantastic group show curated by Roddy Schrock of Eyebeam.

My time in Portland is always super-productive: I've created a lot of new art including Museum of Glitch Aesthetics, Crapshoot and the series of short glitch videos I premiered at the Denver International Airport. Portland has also been the perfect environment for my writing to evolve in. I spent a lot of time in Portland's world-class coffee shops working on both remixthebook and Locus Solus: An Inappropriate Translation Composed in a 21st Century Manner...and have also started and/or finished four more books too.

For those who follow my work, you know that I've published over ten books of fiction or new media theory, all of which are still in print. A few of these books are available for free as e-books too. My early online publishing network, Alt-X, founded in 1993, was one of the first serious literary websites to launch both an e-book and print-on-demand book series. Publications like the New York Times, Wired and Spin - to just name a few - wrote about our various product launches.

Anyone who knows how I roll knows that I have always been open to the idea of experimenting with both the form of the book (think Mallarmé) as well as its distribution potential. The same holds true with Glitch Ontology. You can read it for free via a link at the Upfor website, but given this particular artwork's focus on glitch images and the book as art object, why not own a rare Mark Amerika artist book?

Keywords: Mark Amerika, Upfor, Publication Studio, artist book, Glitch Ontology

A New PhD Program in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance

Here's another new thing that I am involved with:

The Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance (IAWP) unit is an interdisciplinary digital arts and humanities research unit with a practice-based PhD. Core faculty collaboratively investigate past and present forms of digital art, writing, and performance and offer graduate students a hands-on, experiential-based learning environment in which to explore emerging forms of creativity triggered by practice-based research methodologies.

The research conducted in the program reflects the rapidly transforming knowledge systems and digital media economies emerging from the substantial technological shifts currently taking place in our society. Digital creative work and critical media literacy play a defining role in our information society and are transforming all aspects of contemporary life, including the way many professional visual artists, multimedia performers, writers, publishers, digital humanists and archivists pursue their practice.

More here [...]

Most Popular Post

It's been almost nine years since I started this blog and yes, like most bloggers from the Naughties, I have slowed down my posting considerably (though I did manage to to turn the blogs into two books).

Checking out my stats for the first time in years, I see that this post, titled Snapshot of New York (Still-Life or Time-Trip?), was my most viewed post of all time. It refers to something that I now call Internet photography (or, when I'm feeling especially wordy, digital thoughtography). I'll let you see for yourself...

ICYMI Part Two

1. Micro-Cinematic Essays on the Life and Times of Marcel Duchamp dba Conceptual Parts, Ink (a concept album on conceptual art, specifically an attempt to remix the notes found inside Duchamp's Green Box as sound art - co-created with Chad Mossholder)

2. an excerpt from 29 Inches: A Long Narrative Poem (thank you Ed Dorn, William Carlos Williams and Madeline Gins)

3. Play all the Remixes (tastes from my remixthebook project as performed by over 25 artists, musicians, theorists, poets, net artists et al)

4. The remixthebook course seems to be attracting a lot of external links from various syllabi too

5. Oh, the book, you can remix too!

ICYMI: A Sampling

1. My interview with Creators Project about glitch art, net art, and the Spy State Economy

2. Lake Como Remix (yes, you should wear headphones and view at full screen)

3. Crapshoot (you can't do e-lit without at least attempting to remix this classic work by Mallarmé...so why not a web app?)

4. Locus Solus (the centenary translation from the original French - and I don't even speak the language, so imagine how it reads!)

5. My new day job

Keywords: Mark Amerika, glitch, web apps, Locus Solus, Roussel, CMCI, IAWP

Wasted (for Charles Baudelaire)

Wasted
(for Charles Baudelaire)

One must be forever stoned: that is the sole reason for living. If you wish to move beyond the inevitable feelings you generally associate with the horrible burden of Time as it bruises your body and bends you toward the soil beneath the earth, you must be stoned without cease. But how? With weed, with prose poems, with irreparable desire, with what you please. But be high. And if sometimes, on the steps of a recreational dispensary, or on the perfectly manicured green grass in a popular city park that's easy to score the bud you desire, or even in the dull loneliness of your studio where you lack the necessary inspiration to trigger your ineluctable new work of art, you wonder why it has all come to this, an attempt to alter the faux representation of what has been handed to you as real, you should confidently approach the fragmented chip of potent wax that awaits your vapor torch and, without a moment's hesitation, wake up to your vibrant surroundings and inhale the centuries. If, after a time, your total wastedness should already be waning or gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the cloud, of the star, of the kiteboard, of the iWatch; ask of all that scurries, all that sighs, all that floats, all that spins, all that screams, all that articulates, ask of these the hour; and wind and wave and cloud and star and kiteboard and watch will answer you: "It is the hour to be baked! Lest you be the martyred slave of Time, you must totally cook yourself, so be stoned without cease! With weed, with prose poems, with irreparable desires, or with whatever cannabis-laced edible is easiest to ingest."

The short work above is an excerpt from a forthcoming collection of short fictions written in parallel to the legalization of marijuana in states such as Colorado (where I live most of the year) and Oregon (where I maintain an active studio practice during the summer). More excerpts forthcoming in other venues and media ...

Keywords: Colorado, marijuana, fiction, art, culture, literature

The Hawaii Effect: An Abecedary

The Hawaii Effect: An Abecedary

or

The Art of Being An Artist*

A loha
B ody
C reativity
D ynamism
E nergy
F ood
G iven
H allucination
I ntuition
J uggler (of Gravity)
K ailua
L aughter
M indfulness
N othingness
O cean
P ath
Q uery
R emix
S pirit
T echne
U ltraviolet
V ision
W alking
X M L (eXperiential mark-up language)
Y outhfulness
Z entropic

* anartist