All you wanted to know about the Net is in knowing a single person. His
name is Mark Amerika, but could well be Loch Nettie–because he is the
monster of net creativity that assumes various shapes and incarnations:
he's been Kafka's chronicles, he's been Grammatron, he's been the info-
shaman of Avant-Pop, chicklit, grrl power, FC2 and Black Ice and many
other high-voltage creativity projects. And above all, he's been my
personal thirteen ways of looking at the Net. As a poor darling from a
Sanctionland that was peeping into the shiny world of Internet hungry
for free samples, I stumbled across the Alt-X: there I found all the
gurus of Po-Mo I was teaching about in Serbia@Balkans. Folk tales claim
that the monster is invincible unless you eat it up and make it a part
of yourself. That is what I did with Mark Amerika–I had my share of
him by having the unrecommended daily intakes of Avant-Pop, Alt-X, and
Grammatron. Here are some millennial snacks of the one and only
reverendissimo….
+ + +
Vladislava Gordic: As a pioneer of the electrospheres, are you satisfied
with the ways of the hypertext literature in the nineties, with its
twists and turns? Could it be better, different or wildly popular in the
future perhaps?
Mark Amerika: I am mostly confused by it all. I approach hypertext as
one element, an important one, in a greater writing practice that is now
becoming something like an Internet Art practice. I feel like I am
entering a place–space of mind–where the author is reconfigured into a
network practitioner.
Meanwhile, the act of reading elaborate fictions on the net vis-a-vis
ecommerce-driven click-thru reality–hypertext–is not my idea of
"better" or even "different"–although it's propagandized as wildly
different–. Rather, it is part of a Doubleclick mentality that tries to
cash in on the human need to feel connected. So partly what I am saying
here is that hypertext is already "wildly popular" just like the new
Flatirons Shopping Mall–here on Colorado's Front Range–is wildly
popular, although most of the e-shoppers don't even know it's hypertext
that facilitates their dreamworld of buying–or, not buying–but
"getting," because on the net, we want everything for free, to "get it
for free," don't we?
Of course, in the mall, we have to pay for everything–so maybe there
is a difference?
I am happy to say I answered your question without once using the word
"literature"–ooops, I just did–.
VG: Larry McCaffery spoke of two waves of the Po-Mo lit; metafiction
and minimalism. Can we call Avant-Pop the third?
MA: These waves exist simultaneously, not sequentially. Minimalism still
exists, oftentimes camouflaging itself as "quality lit"–barf–.
Metafiction is alive and well too, and is actually making a huge
comeback here in States with many young writers publishing literary
bestsellers that are basically putting into use–employing–the same
tricks of the old Po-mo Grand-Daddies. See, for example, David Foster
Wallace, Mark Danielewski, Mark Leyner, Dave Eggers and the like. Which
is not a bad thing, really. Quite the opposite. I like reading this kind
of fiction "as a form of entertainment" and having just reread Sterne's
"Tristam Shandy," I am immediately reminded just how old this "rival
trdaition" in literature really is. The fact that I experience this
work as "entertainment" points to the coming of the Avant-Pop. But the
real Avant-Pop has yet to materialize because all of the writers
mentioned above still depend on the big publishing houses and their book
production/distribution model for legitimacy. A sincere Avant-Pop
writing practice would say "Fuck You" to these mainstream hustlers and
figure out ways to turn the writing practice into a mode of cultural
production that essentially changes the curve of consciousness. We need
more writers whose work reflects The New Conditions brought on by the
Net economy, writers that use newer technologies like the Web, on-demand
books, Palm Pilots, mp3, etc., as part of an overall hactivist strategy
ready to intervene in the design of our everyday life experience.
In this regard, Stephen King is more Avant-Pop than anybody, but maybe
that's because he can afford to be.
VG: Are Avant-Pop and hypertext overlapping terms/poetics?
MA: This is what I was getting at in my two previous answers. First,
they're just terms – buzzwords that, when properly contextualized, can
enable the Other–the Reader, the Interactive-Participant–to
reconfigure their role in network culture. The idea is to evolve an
indie poetics that resonates within both the art work and the mainstream
media culture–what else would an Avant-Pop net artist do, if not
this? Now that "hypertext" has been successfully interwoven into
mainstream consumption practices, it's time for artists–who else?–to
de-familiarize the click-thru experience, to make it strange–not "new,"
as Pound suggested, as Madison Avenue requires–. In my position as a
professor of Internet Art here at the University of Colorado in Boulder,
we–the students and I–make a point of using the languages and visual
metaphors that the commercial captains of ecommerce have made common,
against themselves, very much like RTMARK does, but with more of a
narrative-theoretical spin.
VG: Where do your artistic selves feel more at home; in Kafka
chronicles, or Grammatron and phon:e:me?
MA: To be honest, I don't feel more @home in either. The truth is, I
feel most at home in the trails outside my front door, with their
government-protected beauty and resourcefulness. This is where all of my
work begins, whether it's my novels–I have a new one, 400 pages+,
called My Oblivion–, my Internet Art–I have a new one, FILMTEXT–or my
direction of Alt-X–lots of new things coming there very soon!–. Right
now I'm very interested in how my networking practice is infiltrating
all of my work, whether it be my forthcoming on-demand books, the
downloadable games I'm just now developing for PDAs, the digital
FILMTEXT now in pre-production, the new mp3 concept album, my critical
essays at Telepolis, or even my new media art workshops at the
university. All of this cultural work is made possible by the kindness
of co-networkers operating in The Big Remix. It's like my brain were
programmed by the kids at Napster; a clearinghouse for peer-to-peer
networking and cultural production.
VG: If pressed to choose at the cost of your life, what would you take;
print or screen? And for what reasons?
MA: Sorry, but I can't answer these hypotheticals. Besides, I'm an
American, and therefore I expect to have it ALL, immediately, just
charge it to my credit card and the rest will take care of itself thank
you.
VG: Can you describe what it was like being in the Whitney Biennial?
Were you there as a writer, a net artist, a promotion vehicle?
MA: I wish I could say, but I signed a non-disclosure agreement with
them and now that we are about to become partners in an even bigger co-
marketing project, we have entered what in the IPO market they call a
"quiet period."
VG: Is the rumor that you have some Balkan genes true?
MA: Very true. Can't you tell?
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[Vladislava Gordic is Assistant Professor of British and American
Literature in the English Department of the Novi Sad University in
Yugoslavia.]
