Mark Amerika – Mooc

Mark Amerika

Rationale

It is an installation of the digital video artwork MOOC. MOOC is a long-form work of digital video performance art featuring the artist as an unnamed professor whose persona is eerily similar to that of US Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. In the video, the fictional professor the artist portrays lampoons the trendy MOOC online course format. In this particular course, an Introduction to Digital Art, the artist’s fictional persona playfully satirizes the contemporary art scene, digital culture, cult branding, selfie-mythology, and the neoliberal systems of higher education. The unusual recombination of the artist’s Brooklynese vocals with a stream of hilarious visual puns and a custom-designed soundtrack blur the lines of distinction between video performance art and a new mode of 21st century pedagogical practice.

About the Author(s):

Mark Amerika has exhibited his art in many venues including the Whitney Biennial, the Denver Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, ZKM, the Walker Art Center, and the American Museum of the Moving Image. Amerika has had five early and/or mid-career retrospectives including the first two Internet art retrospectives ever produced (Tokyo and London).

In 2009-2010, The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, featured Amerika’s comprehensive retrospective exhibition entitled UNREALTIME including his groundbreaking works of Internet art GRAMMATRON and FILMTEXT as well as his feature-length work of mobile cinema, Immobilité. In 2012, Amerika released his transmedia narrative, Museum of Glitch Aesthetics (MOGA), a multi-platform net artwork commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices in conjunction with the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The MOGA project has since been remixed for Amerika’s 2013 solo exhibition “Glitch. Click. Thunk” at the University of Hawaii Art Galleries and, in 2017, for his survey exhibition of digital art, Glitch Mix: not an error, which took place in Havana, Cuba, at the Estudio Figueroa-Vives and the Norwegian Embassy to Cuba.

He is the author of My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence, the inaugural title in the “Sensing Media” series published in 2022 by Stanford University press. His other books include remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011 and remixthebook.com), META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007) and remixthecontext (Routledge, 2018). His novels include Everyone Has Their Price (An NFT Novel),  The Kafka Chronicles (University of Alabama Press / FC2, 1993), Sexual Blood (University of Alabama Press / FC2, 1995), and 29 Inches (Chiasmus Press, 2007). In 2014, Amerika published his “auto-translation / remix” of Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus. This special centenary translation of Roussel’s prototypical work of surrealist writing was published with Counterpath Press.

A frequent keynote speaker, Amerika has presented and performed his art and contemporary media theory to over 100 audiences throughout the world. Events he has keynoted include the “Disrupting Narratives” symposium at the Tate Modern, the Electronic Literature Organization “Visionary Landscapes” conference in Vancouver, the “Misunderstanding” festival for the International Network of Performance Artists in Zurich, the Digital Interconnections festival in Tokyo, transmediale in Berlin, the “Buddhism and New Media” conference in Seoul, the Ciber@rt Bilbao festival in Spain, and the Seminário Internacional de Cinema e Audiovisual in Salvador, Brazil. He has given visiting artist presentations in scores of museums, universities, and contemporary arts centers including the visiting artist series at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in Tokyo, the Australia Center for the Moving Image in Melbourne, and the Microwave Festival and Videotage in Hong Kong.

Selected as a Time Magazine 100 Innovator, Amerika’s work has been featured on CNN and written about in over 150 mainstream, academic and art publications including The New York Times, Die Zeit, El Pais, The Wall Street Journal, The Observer and The Art Magazine of the Tate Museum.

Amerika is the first artist ever appointed Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he is the Founding Director of the new Doctoral Program in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance in the College of Media, Communication and Information and a Professor of Art and Art History. Prior appointments include the Labex-H2H International Research Chair at the University of Paris 8, Principal Research Fellow at La Trobe University’s Centre for Creative Arts and Visiting Professor and International Artist in Residence at the National University of Singapore, the University of Technology Sydney, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and Falmouth University in the UK.

Amerika is the Founding Publisher of both the Alt-X Online Publishing Network (1993-Present) and the electronic book review. 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 at the British Computer Society titled Beyond GRAMMATRON: 20 years into the Future.

Affiliation

CU Boulder

Website or live experience

https://vimeo.com/382829885

Contact(s)

amerika@colorado.eduUnited

http://markamerika.com

Judy Malloy – people.wellWill Luers, Hazel Smith and Roger Dean – Dolphins in the Reservoir

CONTACT US


Feel free to contact us for the main venue in Como (Italy) or for the other connected activities of the partners.

ELO 2022 ConferenceMain Venue and Call for Papers

Organization Headquarter
Collegio Gallio
Via Tolomeo Gallio, 1
22100 Como (Italy)
Mail: info@elo2022.com

Managing Team
H-Studies Research Group
University of Jyväskylä
Seminaarinkatu 15
FI-40014 Jyväskylä (Finland)
Mail: info@hstudies.com

Connected EventsELO 2022 Partners' initiatives

Finland – University of Jyväskylä
finland@elo2022.com

Japan – Nagoya University
japan@elo2022.com

Arab Academic Inst. of Education/Arab Union for Internet Writers
aaie@elo2022.com

Brazil – Federal University of São Carlos / Santa Catarina
brazil@elo2022.com

© ELO 2022 International Conference ~ All Rights Reserved