Mark Amerika

Mark Amerika, who has been named a "Time Magazine 100 Innovator" as part of their continuing series of features on the most influential artists, writers, scientists, entertainers and philosophers into the 21st century, is an influential digital artist, novelist, and theorist of Internet and remix culture.

Amerika's newest book is titled My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence (Stanford University Press). Employing an improvisational call-and-response writing performance coauthored with an AI text generator, Amerika interrogates how his own "psychic automatism" is itself a nonhuman function strategically designed to reveal the poetic attributes of programmable worlds still unimagined. Through a series of intellectual provocations that investigate the creative process across the human-nonhuman spectrum, Amerika critically reflects on whether creativity itself is, at root, a nonhuman information behavior that emerges from an onto-operational presence experiencing an otherworldly aesthetic sensibility.

Amerika is author of many other novels and books of digital art and culture. his remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press) is provocative textual performance that is at once a dazzling model of the literary remix and a state-of-the-art reflection on remix culture, remixthebook captures the unique and continually shifting digital moment in which we live and situates the remix as an art form and literary intervention. Prior to publishing remixthebook, Amerika published META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007).

Amerika’s digital artwork has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Whitney Biennial of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the Walker Art Center. The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, hosted Amerika’s comprehensive retrospective exhibition entitled UNREALTIME. In 2009, Amerika released Immobilité, generally considered the first feature-length art film ever shot on a mobile phone. His transmedia art work, Museum of Glitch Aesthetics [glitchmuseum.com], was commissioned by the Abandon Normal Devices Festival in conjunction with the London 2012 Olympics. The project has been remixed for Amerika's solo exhibitions "Glitch. Click. Thunk" at the University of Hawaii Art Galleries and "GlitchMix: not an error" at Estudio Figueroa-Vives and the Norwegian Embassy in Havana, Cuba. In 2017, the 20 year anniversary of Amerika's groundbreaking work of net art and electronic literature, GRAMMATRON, was celebrated in London at a two day international symposium titled Beyond GRAMMATRON: 20 years into the Future.

He is considered a founder of the international Avant-Pop literary movement. His first novel, The Kafka Chronicles, is now in its third printing. His second novel, Sexual Blood, has been translated into Italian as Sangue Sessuale. The Philadelphia Inquirer has said "the real counterculture is not gone and Mark Amerika is proof of that...his work is not so much a book as it is a Dadaist demonstration, once again honoring the dictum that it's the artist's sacred duty to destroy what commerce has made common."

Amerika is a University of Colorado Professor of Distinction where he is the Founding Director of the Doctoral Program in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance in the College of Media, Communication and Information and a Professor of Art and Art History. More information can found at his website, markamerika.com and at his Twitter/Instagram feed @markamerika