Interview with Mark Amerika by Mark Hancock in DIGIMAG 68 October 2011

http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=2181

Mark Amerika has been a prolific and creative force exploring the worlds of net art and writing (both offline and online), while developing a theoretical and creative response to the changing media and potential opportunities that those create.

He loves to call himself a “digital jack-of-all-trades”, and it is true that his online networking has always been focused on the collection and the remix of images, texts, codes, sounds, multimedia, in terms of literary, theatrical and pedagogical and psychogeography theories.

The following interview took place via email, while Mark Amerika was in the middle of promoting another project “Remixthebook”, somewhat representative of his entire oeuvre. A book, published by University of Minnesota Press, which relies on a website (remixthebook.com) as a hub with the aim to digitally remix some of the theories expressed (by authors such as Janneke Adema, Beiguelman Giselle, Julie Carr, David Gunkel, Gary Hall, Frieder nake, Craig Saper Darren Tofts, Gregory
Ulmer, Chad Mossholder, Michael Theodore, Michelle Ellsworth, Rick Silva, Will Luers, Yoshi Sodeoka, Mark McCoin, Curt Cloninger, Kate Armstrong, Maria Miranda) in the book.

Images from the ‘Bold Tendencies’ exhibition – Peckham, London

Bold Tendencies – 15 large-scale new works by international artists exhibited on the top four floors of a disused multi-storey car park in Peckham.

http://www.boldtendencies.com

Friction Research, an indepent survey on New Media Art

Friction Research:

A (quasi) annual themed-special edition on independent New Media Art practises. Collected from responses received by periodically posted open Call for Works.

Edited and curated by Andreas Maria Jacobs.

Published by Nictoglobe Online Magazine

Current issue:

http://nictoglobe.com/new/query2.html?d=home&f=rtm

Reclaim the Mind, 2011
Previous issues:

http://nictoglobe.com/new/ainac2010/index.html

Art is not about Communication, 2010

http://nictoglobe.com/new/query4.html?d=submissions&f=text

Investigating Ruptures in the Art-Political Grid, 2009

http://nictoglobe.com/new/query4.html?d=creative-resistance&f=text

Creative Resistance, New Media as Soft Arms, 2007

The Fibreculture Journal 17 – Unnatural Ecologies, edited by Michael Goddard and Jussi Parikka

Unnatural Ecologies

http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/

http://fibreculturejournal.org/

many thanks to Mat Wall-Smith, the Journal Manager, who has now enabled pdf and epub downloads of all articles and of the whole issue in file.

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We are pleased to launch issue 17 of the Fibreculture Journal—Unnatural Ecologies, edited by Michael Goddard and Jussi Parikka

FCJ-114 Towards an Archaeology of Media Ecologies: ‘Media Ecology’, Political Subjectivation and Free Radios
Michael Goddard

FCJ-115 Autocreativity and Organisational Aesthetics in Art Platforms
Olga Goriunova

FCJ-116 Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Transversal Expansions, Contractions, and Foldings
Jussi Parikka

FCJ-117 Four Regimes of Entropy: For an Ecology of Genetics and Biomorphic Media Theory
Matteo Pasquinelli

FCJ-118 Faulty Theory
Matthew Fuller

FCJ-119 Subjectivity in the Ecologies of P2P Production
Phoebe Moore

This issue is an exercise in media ecology that is paradoxically unnatural. Instead of assuming a natural connection to the established tradition of Media Ecology in the Toronto-school fashion of Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, and the work of scholars involved in the Media Ecology Association (http://www.media-ecology.org/media_ecology/), our issue stems from another direction; its theoretical orientation is more inspired by the work of Felix Guattari and engages with several overlapping ecologies that are aesthetico-political in their nature. It stems from a more politically oriented way of understanding the various scales and layers through which media are articulated together with politics, capitalism and nature, in which processes of media and technology cannot be detached from subjectivation. In this context, media ecology is itself a vibrant sphere of dynamics and turbulences including on its technical level. Technology is not only a passive surface for the inscription of meanings and signification, but a material assemblage that partakes in machinic ecologies. And, instead of assuming that ‘ecologies’ are by their nature natural (even if naturalizing perhaps in terms of their impact on capacities of sensation and thought) we assume them as radically contingent and dynamic, in other words as prone to change.

The concept of media ecology was revived in 2005 by Matthew Fuller’s theoretically novel take on the idea. His Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture set out to map the ‘dynamic interrelation[s] of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter’ (Fuller 2005: 2) in a culture where the relation between materiality and information has been redefined. Steering clear of earlier celebrations of media as informational environments which dismiss any connection with the physical as for example with the cyberculture of the 1980s and 1990s – Fuller is keen to map out how we can develop a material vocabulary for media ecological processes. The roots of such a vocabulary—that bends itself to the intensive connections of pirate radios and voice, the photographic medium and the Internet as well as such informational entities as memes—come from Whitehead, Simondon, Nietzsche as well as Guattari and contemporary writers such as Katherine N. Hayles. What emerges is a different genealogy for theories of media ecology.

What was demonstrated already in Fuller’s take on the concept was a special appreciation of material practices involved in establishing the regimes of media ecologies. Media ecologies are quite often understood by Fuller through artistic/activist practices rather than pre-formed theories, which precisely work through the complex media layers in which on the one hand subjectivation and agency are articulated and, on the other hand, the materiality of informational objects gets distributed, dispersed and takes effect. Media ecological platforms can be seen to range from network environments for philosophy and media activism as in Rekombinant (http://www.rekombinant.org) to art platforms on the net such as Runme.org (http://runme.org/). Related themes can be detected in the various negotiations of nature being remixed, resurfaced, revisualized or sonified through media environments. Examples include Natalie Jeremijenko’s work, the Harwood-Yokokoji-Wright Eco Media collaboration (featured in Parikka -this Issue), biological art projects such as Amy Youngs’s The Digestive Table (2006, http://hypernatural.com/digestive.html), the work of activist/artistic groupings like Critical Art Ensemble, the Yes Men or the Wu Ming foundation and various bioart projects of recent years. In all these cases a dynamic media ecology is generated, incorporating natural, technical and informational components and giving rise to singular processes of subjectivation that are equally an essential part of the media ecology. (more…)

http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/

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The Fibreculture Journal is a peer reviewed international journal, first published in 2003 to explore the issues and ideas of concern to both the Fibreculture network.

The Fibreculture Journal now serves wider social formations across the international community of those thinking critically about, and working with, contemporary digital and networked media.

The Fibreculture Journal has an international Editorial Board and Committee.

In 2008, the Fibreculture Journal became a part of the Open Humanities Press , a key initiative in the development of the Open Access journal community.
The journal encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning a wide range of topics of interest. These include the social and cultural contexts, philosophy and politics of contemporary media technologies and events, with a special emphasis on the ongoing social, technical and conceptual transitions involved.