Steve Dietz: How do you pronounce the name of your new project?

Mark Amerika: Usually I pronounce it phoneme, like the sound unit it is.
But there are other pronunciations, like phone - e - me with an emphasis
on that middle e.

SD: You refer to PHON:E:ME as the new media version of a "concept
album." If you were presenting the concept to Tim Robbins in "The
Player," what would it be?

MA: It's DJ electronica meets Firesign Theater meets Marcel Duchamp.

SD: You've identified your work-to-date as being "the endless short
story" (Ron Sukenick) or in the vein of Joyce's "exactly one text."
Situate PHON:E:ME in relation to your previous work and what you have in
mind for the future.

MA: I've often thought that all of my work is part of the same text, or
work-in-progress, and that everything I do, in the end, comes down to
writing or a writing-practice. And PHON:E:ME is no different. Looking
back on my recent work, I can see how GRAMMATRON was quite literally the
pivotal project that was both the end of one trilogy and the beginning
of another. That is, GTRON began as my third novel (after The Kafka
Chronicles and Sexual Blood), but the content of the story was so caught
up in the radical changes taking place in network culture that I had no
choice but to make the project a web-based narrative that worked against
the old book production model, i.e. I wanted to practice what the story
was metafictionally preaching.

At the same time, GTRON was the start of a new trilogy of work that
focuses on the interrelationship of text, image and sound in
network-distributed environments. Clearly the emphasis in GTRON was on
text, particularly hypertext and randomly generated text. With PHON:E:ME
the emphasis is on sound-writing, with hypermediated text (in the
Shockwave design) and very little attention placed on imagery per se.

The third project in this electro-trilogy is tentatively entitled
FILMTEXT and will be a (streaming) video installation that explores
writing in a more image-oriented narrative space. A sort of Godardian
language experiment meets Chris Marker "La Jette" cinescripture
experiment meets "Nanook of the North" pseudo-documentary experiment. In
fact, FILMTEXT will also investigate the use of symbolic media in that I
now have access to the same 35mm Victory camera that Flaherty used to
shoot "Nanook" :-) If all goes well, it will "take place" in the
American desert and Australian Outback instead of the freezing north of
Canada.

SD: You collaborated closely with Erik Belgum and Brendan Palmer on the
soundtracks and Anne Burdick and Cam Merton on the design and
programming. Is this collaboration more like a film, where everyone has
his or her skill set or is it something else–a new kind of culture
jamming?

MA: Yes, absolutely, this is a collaborative culture-jam, and more like
a team network experience than a film-making experience, though clearly
there are some similarities. Basically, I think it's necessary for
artists who primarily consider themselves writers to break away from
this "individual author as genius" model. Throughout the creation of
PHON:E:ME I felt more like a Director or project leader, one who knew
where the project needed to go but who also left a tremendous amount of
flexibility in the organic design of the whole so that the various
collaborators could bring their own vision into its development.

All of the artists involved in PHON:E:ME bring a totally different
skills-set to the project. Erik brings in the experimental sound-writing
experience, Anne brings in the state-of-the-art design/writing
experience, Brendan brings in the sonic youth DJ experience and Cam
brings in the artist-as-programmer angle. Meanwhile, everyone's work on
PHON:E:ME is informed by the conceptual design that I brought to the
project and that ultimately manifested itself as writing. Writing as
text, writing as sound, writing as interface design, writing as
experience. By writing as experience I mean to say that I was able to
work closely with each collaborator in their various locales, including
Minneapolis, LA, Sydney and Perth.

SD: With PHON:E:ME, even more than with Grammatron, the relationships
between what a user is reading and hearing is arbitrary–random. At
times, I read you more as a filter or a medium than an author or even
performer. Which character in PHON:E:ME do you identify with most
strongly and which the least?

MA: That's a good read. I've always thought of writing as filtering,
especially in the mediumistic sense. Writer as techno-shaman: filtering
the white noise exploding in his skull and digitally editing it all into
some on-the-fly re:mix.

As far as the interface goes, the random or arbitrary nature of the
various elements at the user's control are intentional so that they too
can "conduct" a "remix" to their own liking. What we offer is the source
material, albeit a very stylized and specific set of source material
where we control most of the parameters.

As you hint toward the end of your question, in the hyper:liner:notes
there are lots of concept-characters and I must admit that I can relate
to them all. In many ways, they really are the same "person" or make up
one concept-character. The Hearing Ear Man is your wise old self,
whatever your age is. The New Media Economist is the ever-adjustable You
figuring out a way to survive in the electrosphere. The Network
Conductor is so in tune with their life that they just need to
organically orchestrate their life-work into being. The Web Jockey and
No Mo Pomo are artist-freaks looking for a way to maintain their
integrity while playing on the fringes of the mainstream culture. The
Spiritual Unconscious, who makes infrequent appearances and who always
seems to be around when the TV is left on, is a kind of silent partner
whose purposeless play plays tricks on your mind. Not to mention all of
the other sonoluminescent concept-characters of non-specific gender
traits….