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Source Material Everywhere [[G.]Lit/Ch Remix] Preprint from Transgression 2.0: Media, Culture and the Politics of a Digital Age. Edited by Ted Gournelos and David J. Gunkel. New York: Continuum, 2011. 3 Source Material Everywhere [[G.]Lit/ch RemiX] A Conversation with Mark Amerika Editors' Note: Mark Amerika is a leading digital media artist, author, and educator. Named a "Time Magazine 100 Innovator," Amerika employs new media technology to create emerging forms of art that actively challenge and deliberately transgress established boundaries. He is the author of numerous books, including two avant-pop novels The Kafka Chronicles (Fiction Collective, 1993) and Sexual Blood (University of Alabama Press, 1995) and two monographs investigating the theory and practice of digital media art, META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007) and Remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). He has written, produced, and exhibited a trilogy of award winning Internet art installations made up of the hypertext fiction Grammatron (1998), an mp3 concept album called PHON:E:ME (1999) and FILMTEXT (2002), which incorporated a Flash art website, an mp3 concept album, an experimental artist ebook, and a series of live audio-visual performances. Most recently he produced and created the film Immobilite (2010), an art-house feature shot entirely on a mobile phone camera. Amerika's digital artwork has been shown at museums around the world, including five major retrospectives, one each at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Media Arts Plaza in Tokyo, Ciberart Bilbao, FILE in São Paulo, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens. He has received art commissions from venues such as the Walker Art Center, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, IBM, Sony PlayStation, and the Machida City 1 Museum of Graphic Arts in Tokyo. Amerika studied and completed his MFA at Brown University and is currently Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The following conversation began in São Paulo, Brazil in November of 2010 and developed after that initial meeting, quite appropriately, by way of the Internet. David Gunkel [DG]: I'd like to begin our dialogue by referencing another dialogue, specifically Plato's Timaeus, which begins with Socrates counting: "One, two, three—but where, my dear Timaeus, is the fourth of our guests of yesterday, our host of today?" (Plato 1981, 17a). Here, at the beginning of this ancient dialogue, Socrates begins by asking about someone who is absent. In doing so, he makes what is absent present by explicitly marking a lack of presence. Something that was supposed to have been there is not, and this lack of presence is only able to be made present as such by remarking on the trace of its withdrawal. So let me begin by also acknowledging and asking about an absence about something that was to have been here but is not. What is absent is an essay that you had intended to contribute to this volume, something called "From Remixology." And it is absent because of some stipulations regarding republication and competing works— issues emanating from our current intellectual property laws and put into question by the very work that is now absent. It seems then that we are at a crucial cultural moment when the creative opportunities of digital media (remixing, mashup, collage, cut-and-paste, etc.) directly oppose and challenge the legal structures of copyright and intellectual property that prohibit and even demonize things like republication, derivation, and plagiarism. What is an artist to do? Mark Amerika [MA]: Here's the thing: I am not "I" and so there can be no definitive or proper version of me or my thoughts that can, in the end, be owned. If there is no definitive or proper version of me then I think it's safe to assume that there cannot be a definitive or proper version of what it is I am writing becoming remixing at any given moment. The writing "I" is always pseudo- autobiographical: a remix-in-process continually cohering into what Whitehead (1978, 279) would call "an aesthetic fact," although he was referring quite explicitly to "an intense experience" as an aesthetic fact. This resonates with my theory of remix because it's only by becoming an aesthetic fact that I can experience concrescence although it's not as if this concrescence can be captured as a still image owned by the vectoralist class [to borrow a term from Ken Wark's The Hacker Manifesto], rather, it's a simultaneous and continuous fusion of the actual sensory data I am 2 sampling from and manipulating as part of my remix practice [and here I am mashing up Piet Mondrian and Allen Ginsberg though it just as easily could have been Stan Brakhage and Robert Creeley or Kathy Acker and Count Lautréamont]. The aesthetic fact of the matter is that you [not you in particular, David, but the quantifiable other i.e. the all-consuming Singularity trying to lock down a version of "me" as myself, even though I too, like Whitman, am multitudes] cannot own my thoughts. No one can own my thoughts. They are just part of what, in my latest performance writing and publication project, remixthebook (2011), I refer to as the Source Material Everywhere (SME). Sure, there are going to be those who try to nail down a version of whatever traces I happen to be leaving behind and call it their property. But what they are really "owning" is a malleable version of an excerpt from my ongoing formation. Ron Sukenick (2000, 19) once wrote that "form is your footprints in the sand when you look back." With my own approach to self-appropriation, what Ray Federman terms pla(y)giarism, and the unconscious remixing of the actual sensory data I am sampling from and manipulating as part of my research practice, I feel comfortable doing whatever I want with the Source Material Everywhere. This SME (SaME old SaME old, but forever cohering into new configurations, live performance or COMPOSITION BY FIELD that virtually "make it new" while perpetually perishing) is what the artist-medium continually samples from when spontaneously remixing and distributing their personae into the networked space of flows. Lately, I have been marking my presence in the form of what is sometimes called glitch aesthetics, or more specifically for this version we're composing here, [G.]Lit/ch aesthetics. As a remixologist who trades in a multitude of media forms, everything from experimental novels to large-scale hypertexts to net.art to live VJ performance to directing feature-length "foreign films" as well as writing long, improvised tracts detailing my love affair with theory [starting with Derrida, yes?, and does that not put everything I do within a certain circa and back again?], I am happy to use whatever feels w-r-i-t-e—whether it be Plato or Playdough. The important thing is to annihilate the important thing [stole that one too - no need to cite - just Google it - and do with it what you will]. This is what it means to be avant- garde [title of excellent book of transcribed, extemporaneous talk performances by David Antin] as we move-remix [i.e. proprioceptively perform in auto-affect mode] through these in and out states of presence that facilitate the discovery of our formal tendencies. I think of these formal tendencies as revealing our aesthetic residuals. These residuals are exemplary fictions, form 3 formally forming itself out of the Source Material Everywhere. In digital cultures, becoming this form is a processual body-brain-apparatus achievement. This SME is intuitively sampled and manipulated by the artist, the artist that Duchamp gave the attributes of a medium, a medium that would turn away from self-analysis while embodying the Next Version of Creativity Coming. Of course, I have already written most of what we are doing in this dialogue already, in "From Remixology," although there is no longer a "Remixology" for this to come from since it has since been altered into something new again, something now titled remixthebook. The other essay, the one that we will not publish because it can't be owned, is just another version of it. And that's actually fine with me because it means we get to do our own cover version here in the [G.]Lit/ch RemiX [and by going [G.]Lit/ch we can situate in a history of errors or, even better, accidental discoveries, and leave it open to further revision which means this version can never really be owned either although it may look like that on paper]. What's funny is that by turning to remix, some might actually call into question whether I am being derivative. Derivative of myself. But "myself" who? As I was saying earlier, I am not "I" and so there can be no definitive or proper version of me. If there is no definitive or proper version of me then I think it's safe to assume that there cannot be a definitive or proper version of what it is I am writing becoming remixing at any given moment. Which brings us back to you. Persona as shareware? DG: I'm glad you bring up the question of pronouns (as I deploy in my reply to you the very pronouns that are in question). Because it is always a matter of identifying the source and destination…the "I" who originates what is said/written/expressed and the "you" who is to receive what is sent. This remains remarkably the same (perhaps it is more of the SaME old thing) from the ancient formulations of Aristotelian rhetoric to Shannon and Weaver's The Mathematical Theory of Communication.
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