The Australian Association of Writing Programs

A Symposium With Mark Amerika and Jason Nelson

22 November 2011 10am-5pm

Hosted by the Writing and Society Research Centre

Convened by Anna Gibbs and Benjamen Judd

NSW Teachers Federation

Meeting Room 2

23-33 Mary Street

Surry Hills 2010

No registration charge. Lunch provided. Guests must register

attendance with Melinda Jewell m.jewell@uws.edu.au

Bring laptops and/or smartphones.

 

Remix is a widespread practice of recombining existing material to make something new

– including covers, sampling, mash-ups, smash-ups and cut-ups. Remix culture has been bedeviled by legal issues around copyright but these have diverted attention from important cultural, artistic, and philosophical questions which Mark Amerika addresses. Amerika brings us back to the

potentials of remix, for writing and for audiovisual work. He looks at how new media artists, many of whom identify with the historical avant?garde, are expanding the forms of remix art to foreground an anti-disciplinary [anti?authoritarian + interdisciplinary] approach to both contemporary practice and theory. Amerika will discuss his experimental art, theory, and pedagogy, including his recent projects Immobilité and remixthebook.

Mark Amerika, remixthebook (2011), University of Minnesota Press. Available to order now www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/remixthebook 

 

Jason Nelson will also be running a media writing workshop that will allow participants to construct digital poems using GoogleMaps on laptops and other hand-held media devices.

Mark Amerika

Mark Amerika is an internationally renowned “remix artist” whose body of work includes published cult novels, pioneering works of Internet art, digital video and surround sound museum installations, large scale video projections in public spaces, live audio-visual/VJ performance, and most recently, a series of feature-length “foreign films” shot with different image capturing devices in various locations throughout the world.

One of the leading pioneers of early Internet art, Mark Amerika’s art and writing has influenced a new generation of artists using digital processes to create emerging forms of art that intersect at the boundary of visual art, live performance, cinema, and experimental literature.

He is the author of many books including remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and META/DATA: A DigitalPoetics (The MIT Press, 2007). His novels include The Kafka Chronicles (University of Alabama Press / FC2, 1993), Sexual Blood (University of Alabama Press / FC2, 1993), and 29 Inches (Chiasmus Press, 2007).

 

Jason Nelson

Jason Nelson is a digital and hypermedia poet and artist. He is a lecturer on Cyberstudies, digital writing and creative practice at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. He is best known for his artistic flash games/essays such as Game, Game, Game And Again Game and I made this. You play this. We are Enemies. Nelson’s style of Web art mergers various genres and technologies, focusing on collages of poetry, image, sound, movement and interaction. His hybrid poetics/net artwork has appeared in over 40 galleries, festivals and journals/magazines over the past three years and his site secrettechnology.com has had over 3 million hits in 2006.

This is How You Will Die won the First Panliterary Award for Web Art from the Drunken Boat Literary Journal; Countries of a Uncomfortable Ocean (which bundles two of his art games) won the Biennale Internationale des poètes en Val de Marne for Media Poetry in 2009, and The Bomar Gene won the 4th International Prize “Ciutat de Vinaròs” on Digital Literature.