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Description: Inspired by Derrida's "Of Grammatology", Mark Amerika experiments in GRAMMATRON with narrative form in a networked environment. Amerika retells the Jewish Golem myth by adapting it into the culture of programmable media and remixes several genres of text into the story's hybridized style including metafiction, hypertext, cyberpunk, and conceptual works affiliated with the Art+Language group. Narrated from various authorial perspectives, the story introduces readers to Abe Golam, a pioneering Net artist who created Grammatron, a writing machine. Endowed not with the Word (like in the original myth) but with forbidden data -- a specially coded Nanoscript -- the creature becomes a digital being that "contains all of the combinatory potential of all the writings." The Grammatron is the personification of the Golem which is also a personification of Amerika the artist. In a number of literary adaptations and works, various characterizations of the Golem and its environment are depicted. With GRAMMATRON, however, Mark Amerika creates a seemingly infinite, recombinant (text-)space in the electrosphere. Throughout the story, Abe Golam searches for his "second-half," a programmer named Cynthia Kitchen whose playful codes of interactivity lead both Golam and the reader through a multi-linear textscape (the Grammatron writing machine) where they search for "the missing link" that will enable them to port to another dimension of "digital being" the story refers to as Genesis Rising. The project consists of over 1100 (partly randomized) text elements and thousands of links. It comes with animated and still life images, an eerie background soundtrack, and audio-files that sometimes provide a spoken meta-commentary on the work itself. The work consists of different text-layers the user is free to choose from including a theoretical hypertextual essay titled "Hypertextual Consciousness," the animated text "Interfacing," and the main hypertext "Abe Golam." GRAMMATRON (1997) was initially received as one of the first major works of Net art and was selected for the 2000 Whitney Biennial of American Art. It was the first work in Amerika's Net art trilogy and was followed by PHON:E:ME (1999) and FILMTEXT 2.0 (2001-2002). Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext, animated text
Creator: Mark Amerika
Description: With FILMTEXT 2.0 (2001-2002), Mark Amerika presents a remix of philosophical inquiry on time and being, data perception and manipulation, networking culture, and writing, the final complement of his trilogy (GRAMMATRON, 1997 and PHON:E:ME, 1999). As a tourist in a visually changing landscape, the reader explores an interface that simulates a game-like environment. The user's task is to trigger cones of light that shimmer on the screen. Once activated, narrative paths unfold through animated texts, spoken-words, or videos. A central narrative construction in this work is the creation of a "Digital Thoughtographer" (DT), Amerika's personified concept character. The DT is a lens that looks like an image-capture device through which the viewer can access coded text fragments that appear as programmed scripts, images, and flickering video excerpts. Amerika uses the DT as an instrument that takes the perspective of an omniscent narrator who communicates defragmented statements to the reader/viewer: "There is only perception: the experience of seeing what is there in front of our eyes and capturing that thereness in the experiential act of perception." Mark Amerika's composition of texts is built on Raymond Federman's concepts of surfiction, critifiction, and playgiarism. The texts are digital remixes of theoretical views once expressed and assigned to known philosophers which the DT transmits without referencing sources directly. For example, the following statement resembles Barthes' questions about authorship: "Who are the ghosts in the literary machine?" Elsewhere he evokes Baudrillard, observing "Not only can there be no original, the simulacrum has now lost its punch too", "Aura is interface", "There is only perception." In the work at hand, the reader/viewer's perception blurs with facts and fiction in which Amerika's poetics of hacktivism and remixology are set into scene. Mark Amerika's trilogy ends with the continuation of what he envisoned with GRAMMATRON in 1997: "To approach the computer-mediated network environment of the World Wide Web as an experimental writing zone, one where the evolving language of new media would reflect the convergence of image-writing, sound-writing, language writing, and code writing as complementary processes . . ." (181, META/DATA). Subtitled "MetaTourism: Interior Landscapes, Digital Thoughtography", FILMTEXT 2.0 is a collaborative achievement of many artists and comes along with an ambient background soundtrack. Excerpts from the "Digital Thoughtographer" are available on the author's website at http://www.altx.com/ebooks/download.cfm/c1.pdf Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: Flash, video, animation, collaborative, audio, music, philosophical, remix, surfiction
Creator: Mark Amerika
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