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Mark Amerika
interviewed by Harry Goldstein
" You see, now that everyone and their brother/mother are familiar with the term "http," the question becomes "What do you do with it?" It being hypertext."
Mark Amerika is the Publisher of Alt-X, which Publishers Weekly recently referred to as "the literary publishing model of the future." His current project, a multi-media hypertext called GRAMMATRON, is a digital adventure through the cybersexed mind of an enslaved artist-consumer.
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.
Tripod: Is Avant Pop a school, a movement, an aesthetic, a community, all or none of the above? Can the words Avant Pop be used to categorize certain works by different authors in the same way you can say, hey, that's Beat, or Minimalist, or Modernist, or Surrealist, or Dada?
MA: First question first: Avant-Pop is a style of writing or artistic creation that evolves, or co-evolves, as the direct result of two major strands of culture braiding together
to form our experience: one, avant-garde writing/art and two, (digital) pop culture. Which brings us to question two: I think you probably could point to certain works and call them, based off what they're doing, Avant-Pop. It happens in writing with writers like Euridice or Ricardo Cortez Cruz or Darius James, or music with bands like Bongwater or Sonic Youth. But it's not a movement. Most writers today struggle to survive in their own way and seek community wherever they can find it.
Tripod: What do you think of the Internet as a community-building force for writers? And how has your experience with this hypertextual medium informed your own fiction writing?
MA: The Internet has changed my life as a writer. Whereas it's true that my first novel, "The Kafka Chronicles," was a surprise cult-hit without the Internet, now my work is being read and distributed by tens of thousands of people, more then I could have ever imagined, thanks to the incredible popularity of Alt-X, the online publishing network I direct. What's been most gratifying, though, has been my opportunity to take advantage of Alt-X's huge audience and further distrubute the work of other writers whose creative endeavors I admire. The Alt-X network really is a place for community and it's growing to include all manner of novelists, political activists, hypertext authors, poets and web-surfers. This sense of community-building was apparent to me in early 1993, when I first wrote the Avant-Pop manifesto which has since been translated into a half-dozen languages.
Tripod: What influence is writing in a networked environment having on your current work?
MA: It's enabling me to rethink everything I thought I knew about writing stories. You see, now that everyone and their brother/mother are familiar with the term "http," the question becomes "What do you do with it?" It being hypertext. Right now what you tend to get on the web is a bunch of repurposed, scrollable text. Very mundane stuff. So I'm trying to evolve a theory of hypermedia that I hope to apply to my new "narrative environment" which I call GRAMMATRON. GRAMMATRON is my next project. In the old days I'd probably have said it's "my new novel." And it could very well be a book, or a book version may come out in the next year or two (agents are interested). But right now I'm working at Brown University, where a lot of hypertext fiction and theory have been developed, putting together GRAMMATRON, a multi-media narrative that interlinks avant-pop writing, langauge poetry, hypertext theory, original music, collage-art and quicktime movies. It's a monster project and the beta-version is still very much in development.
Tripod: How is Grammatron going to be distributed?
MA: Right now we're looking at distributing it over the web via Alt-X. The problem with the web right now is that it's still kind of funky when it comes to smooth multi-media delivery.
So I'm also considering either doing a stand-alone CD-ROM version or some kind of hybrid whereupon the interactive participant could load up a CD-ROM and have access to nice sounds and graphics, while simultaneously surfing through the textual sphere, which is where the web rules as a distribution system.
Tripod: We hear a lot of hype about how hypertext and the web are going to revolutionize the way we communicate. More fundamentally, however, I think that networked multimedia is changing the way we read and the way we tell stories. My question for you Mark, is how, specifically, does hypertext and the web allow people to read and write in new ways?
MA: Great question. Right now we are suffering from what I call "vaporware-for-itself". It's like a bad drug. Nonetheless, there are changes taking place in narrative composition and reading as a result of the web. First of all you have the alterna-reading choices presented by the advent of links. Links themselves will start taking on more value especially as we become more adept at programming them. Also, there is this motto I've been plugging lately, that is, "surf, sample and manipulate!" It goes back to Duchamp and various modern art/writing gestures whereby you select material already in the culture, appropriate whatever it is you need to tell your own story, and manipulate it so that it resonates with your own signature-effects. Kathy Acker has been especially talented at this sort of activity in the area of novel writing. On the web, though, with everything relegated to ones and zeroes, it becomes even easier to create these pseudo-autobiographical stories based off manipulated found-texts and creative link structures. To my mind, this is what Avant-Pop has come to. I talk about all of this in high (mock) philosophical terms at http://www.altx.com/htc/title.html. I'm performing this in Chicago, Berlin and London over the next couple of weeks.
Visit Alt-X at http://www.altx.com. dYou can order Mark's two novels directly from the publisher by sending seven dollars for one or fourteen bucks for the both of them to FC2, Unit for Contemporary Literature, Illinois State University, Box 4241, Normal, IL, 61790-4241. For information on Mark Amerika or Alt-X, e-mail [email protected].
Mark has three new books, all anthologies, coming out in the next year including "Degenerative Prose: Writing Beyond Category" (FC2/Black Ice Books), "In Memoriam to Postmodernism: Essays on the Avant-Pop" (San Diego State University Press) and the German-language "Avant-Pop Nation" (Kreuzer Verlag).
