American media artist, novelist and theorist Mark Amerika (b.1960) has been exploring the nature and possibilities of the internet and how virtual communication and reality interact with - and affect - everyday life since the early 1990s. He is known as a pioneer of virtual concepts, creativity and communication - and the possibilities that all of the latter offer the individual in a postmodern world.
After receiving his MFA from Brown University, Amerika published his first two novels The Kafka Chronicles and Sexual Blood, and soon became a precursor of internet art, also known as netart: in 1993, he published the Avant Pop manifesto Alt-X - the latter being a virtual public venue formed to archive, disseminate and promote internet art.
Amerika could be called a “net native” artist who has crossed over into the established art world dominated by museum and gallery systems, having shown his work at art institutions around the world. He was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Innovators in 2001, a continuing series that features the most influential artists, scientists, entertainers and philosophers of the 21st century, and he continues to be shaped and shape “contemporary networked media art cultures of remix, glitch, social and environmental encounters”.
Amerika’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as Furtherfield Gallery, London, 2013; the Whitney Biennial of American Art, New York; the Denver Art Museum, Denver; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In 2009-2010, The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, hosted a retrospective entitled UNREALTIME. He is the author of many books including remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007). Amerika teaches Digital Arts, IMAP at the faculty of Art & Art History, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA, and is a Principal Research Fellow at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at La Trobe University, Australia.
Mark Amerika lives and works in Boulder, Colorado and Kailua, Hawaii.
