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Artist Statement GRAMMATRON is a "public domain narrative environment" made exclusively for web-distribution and consists of over 1200 text spaces, 2000 links, 40+ minutes of original soundtrack delivered via Real Audio 3.0, unique hyperlink structures by way of specially-coded Javascripts, a virtual gallery featuring scores of animated and still life images, and more storyworld development than any other narrative created on the Net. A story about cyberspace, Cabala mysticism, digicash paracurrencies and the evolution of virtual sex in a society afraid to go outside and get in touch with its own nature, GRAMMATRON depicts a near-future world where stories are no longer conceived for book production but are instead developed for a more immersive networked-narrative environment that, taking place on the Net, calls into question how a narrative is composed, published and distributed in the age of digital dissemination. |
Artist Biography Mark Amerika's first novel, The Kafka Chronicles, is now in its third printing and his most recent novel, Sexual Blood, is already being translated into three other langauges. The Philadelphia Inquirer recently said "the real counterculture is not gone and Mark Amerika is proof of that...his work is not so much a book as it is a Dadaist demonstration, once again honoring the dictum that it's the artist's sacred duty to destroy what commerce has made common." Amerika, who is the Publisher of Alt-X, which Publishers Weekly recently referred to as "the literary publishing model of the future," has published two anthologies, Degenerative Prose: Writing Beyond Category [co-edited with Ron Sukenick] (FC2/Black Ice Books) and In Memoriam to Postmodernism: Essays on the Avant-Pop [co-edited with Lance Olsen] (San Diego State University Press). Amerika is a familiar presence on the international lecture circuit and gives performances and demonstrations on web publishing, hypertext fiction and theory, Avant-Pop literature, and the future of narrative art in network culture. Some recent events he's participated in include the Brown University Freedom To Write Conference, The Softmodern(e) Festival (Berlin), the Duke University "Assault: Radicalism In Aesthetics and Politics" conference, The German Association of Amerikan Studies Conference on Technology & American Culture, the American Authors Festival in Cologne, Northwestern University's Center for Writing Arts lecture series on "Electronic Publishing," The Vannevar Bush Symposium at M.I.T. and a 16-city book tour for his novel Sexual Blood. For the last two years he has been a Creative Writing Fellow and Lecturer on Network Publishing and Hypertext at Brown University where he developed the GRAMMATRON project, a multi-media narrative for network-distributed environments. The opening section to what was supposed to be a novel called GRAMMATRON was published in the Penguin USA Avant-Pop anthology entitled After Yesterday's Crash [edited by Larry McCaffery]. By the time this Penguin USA excerpt was published, Amerika was already well on his way to creating a storyworld that has since been praised by many media sites including The New Tork Times, MSNBC's The Site, Reuters International, Wired, The Village Voice and Time-Warner's Pathfinder. Exhibitions of GRAMMATRON have taken place or are forthcoming at the Ars Electronica 1997 Festival, the 1997 International Symposium of Electronic Art, the M.I.T. Media Lab's "Portraits In Cyberspace" show and the International Biennial of Film and Architecture in Graz.
Amerika is also the creator of Hypertextual Consciousness, a breakthrough study in electronic writing and
publishing.
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