perspektive 43/44

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perspektive 43 // avantgarde_under_net_conditions //

mark amerika

break out of the cage of fine culture
interview – english

[question 1 - perspektive] the purpose of an avant garde today is as kluitenberg states to smash the surface of hegemonial structures: to deconstruct or disrupt the "cute" screens of dominant code. from the beginning your writing/working idea and/ or pratice was about "exploding" against the standards, against the big publishers of media in general. do you still work on this explosion of meaning between reader & writer/artist?

[mark amerika]

how can we not still work under this assumption? the mainstream institutions that run the culture business tend to be in it only for the money and if your work doesn't have much commercial potential then forget it, there's no need to read you because there's no way to sell you.

[question 2 - perspektive] today the reader/surfer is no more held hostage by the page-metaphor of old gutenberg booklooker. seeking for this tempting explosive meaning the reader/surfer still could be held hostage by information structures. evenif there is no page border left. how could the reader/surfer survive? :-)

[mark amerika]

by developing an alternative Life / Style / Practice that sets their nomadic narrative in motion. true, the web was commercialized and there has been a concerted attempt to force it to conform to the logic of late capitalism, but look what happened - it failed. it dot-bombed. meanwhile, the net as a kind of premise for the survival of a gift economy operated by a peer-to-peer network of cultural producers building their own niche communities of feedback and support, lives. the main difference is that we have better tools to work with, tools that are best used to de-familiarize the conventional look and feel of The Digital Now.

[question 3 - perspektive] avant garde - again with kluitenberg - produces within this disruption a room of negation: a kind of faradayic cache/cage to protect and experiment with existing code/ing. hakim bey would say this is a TAZ operation and the language "deformation" is something like an descendant of his "chaos linguistics". your a-p-artists (avant-pop artists) are still a well trained team of pop-cultural terrorists (see avant pop manifesto 1993) combining borders with the centre. do your a-p-artist concept have something like a faradayic cage to operate from - a testing environment or is there no break/border between pop and avant garde: is hidding useless?

[mark amerika]

this notion of avant practices being "negative" and operating from a "cage"  is very old - very Modernistic. I am way beyond that now. I prefer to create *positive* alternatives to the mainstream vision being touted by the commercial captains of consciousness - and to do this I have to break out of the cage of Literature, break out of the cage of Art, break out of the cage of Fine Culture. the testing environment is the net itself which, let's be real, is a public domain environment - the exact opposite of a cage. sometimes one can feel imprisoned in the life they lead and this is when it's time to move, to "become motion" or nomadic narrative flow in distributed network culture.

[question 4 - perspektive] for youngblood the last refugium for subversion is to be absent. it seems to me. that the avant pop artist will allways be present in both spheres: in popular culture and avant garde roots. to get this border-binding the a-p-artist has to build and use niche-communities to spread its code/virus, its pirat signals (in the sense of hakim bey). can this inbetween really work? which role does language/code play for subversion?

[mark amerika]

language or codework is a network of articulations - both signal and noise - and out of this mixture there eventually emerges some kind of pattern recognition. the idea for a-p artists is to take what is conventional in pattern recognition - the kind we get from CNN, traditional fiction, boring gallery art, etc. - and subvert it in a way that suggests there are alternative ways of seeing, thinking, becoming-motion. once you break down these repetitive patterns that are constantly being superimposed on your consciousness by the corporate culture, you can begin to create alternative realities that spin you into another mode of operation or Life / Style / Practice - nomadic narrative being one such outcome.

[question 5 - perspektive] bilwets data dandy strolls along the hypermedia highways a few years ago as an descendant of walter benjamins flaneur of the passages. today the data dandy is more alonge and alone in the "real existing electronic loneliness" (bilwet) and is more encapsuled as before. the a-p-artists seems to be one of those floating nomads with the message: "i link therefore i am" (mark amerika). is the a-p-artist more a pirat to distort information or is the concept more like a flaneur attituede for surfing and sampling?

[mark amerika]

the a-p artist is a kind of meta-medium who accesses whatever digital source material they find useful and who manipulates that material to further invent their story, their Life / Style / Practice, their nomadic narrative. whereas it's true that "digital being" - even when in the process of "becoming something else" - can feel lonely, that's mostly a problem for people who identify with the "me" generation - the "me" generations. the a-p artist is much more interested in inventing the "not-me" - and in so doing, challenges loneliness to become something else more productive, like proactive cinescripture - the body in motion capturing cansciousness in real-time.

[question 6 - perspektive] your concept of an artist as "cyborg-narrator" is near gene youngbloods concept of a "metadesigner" who works as a bridge between art and network. even if a metadesigner is more a networker than a content creator. your "cyborg-narrator" seems to be somewhere in between art and network or even handles both. is the "cyborg-narrator" for you still a working metaphor for "artists" nowadays or do your think the splitting in a net  of "workers", "artitsts", "flasher", "programmer" would be a better environment to work ideas/texts out?

[mark amerika]
 yes, the cyborg-narrator is a kind of "network conductor" who orchestrates a distributed community of art/performance/play and in the process of conducting these "energy routines" (Burroughs) composes a Life / Style / Practice in the process. when a group of cyborg-narrators collaborate on a pratice-based research program, anything can happen and oftentimes does.

[question 7 - perspektive] even if mark amerika works as a network and promotes the fall of the "genius"-concept of artists, he is a trademark in "network"-art. how could he avoid to be canonized? :-)

[mark amerika]

but who is he? who is mark amerika? a distributed signature-effect conducting a network of action? a poet-entrepreneur giving the finger to the seasons of hell being fantasized in lived reality by militant economists? a reconfigured "author function" hacking into the commodity culture? an artist-researcher at play? a passionate lover of all things amateur? all of the above? none of the above?

impressum

43/44/2002							ISSN 1021-9242

-	avantgarde_under_net_conditions (43)
-	zentral_einheit_come_together (44)
-	
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konzeption heft 43 “avantgarde_under_net_conditions”:
	sylvia egger

konzeption heft 44 “come_together_zentraleinheit”:
	sylvia egger		ralf b. korte
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