Wednesday Blog Watch: Mark Amerika: How to be an Internet Artist

Our first featured author on Wednesday Blog Watch is, appropriately enough, Mark Amerika.  If you examine his homepage, you'll see that Amerika is a pioneering experimental artist who has focused on using the internet as a medium for his work. 

The Alt-X Online Network, founded by Mark in 1993, is one of the oldest online art and literary communities.  The site now features net art, e-books, online concept albums, audio feeds, new media reviews, and more. 

Mark Amerika's "net art trilogy", consisting of GRAMMATRON (one of the first works of Internet art to ever be exhibited in the Whitney Biennial of American Art), PHON:E:ME (an mp3 concept album), and FILMTEXT (a WWW soundtrack that utilizes "a small cluster of PC Laptops, mixing board, portable MiniDisc recorders, portable cd players, scanners, various delay and Midi-verb units, a Sherman FilterBank, and microphones"), can be experienced by following the links.

Named a "Time Magazine 100 Innovator" in 2001, Mark is a professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado.  His blog, "Professor VJ" ("art / politics / cinema / fiction / theory / performance / writing") can be found here. 

An MIT Press collection of Mark Amerika's writings (META/DATA: A Digital Poetics) will be released by the MIT Press in May 2007.