META/DATA: A Digital Poetics 

(2007) 

by Mark Amerika is a rich collection of writings that mixes (and remixes) personal memoir, net art theory, fictional narrative, satirical reportage, scholarly history, and network-infused language art.

META/DATA: A Digital Poetics, vvvv, processing, max-msp, super collider, real time, software

META/DATA is a playful, improvisatory, multitrack digital sampling of Amerika's writing from 1993 to 2005 that tells the early history of a net art world gone wild while simultaneously constructing a parallel poetics of net art that complements Amerika's own artistic practice.

 

Unlike other new media artists who may create art to justify their theories, Amerika documents the emergence of new media art forms while he creates them. Presenting a multifaceted view of the digital art scene on subjects ranging from interactive storytelling to net art, live VJing, online curating, and Web publishing, Amerika gives us "Spontaneous Theories," "Distributed Fictions" (including his groundbreaking GRAMMATRON, the helpful "Insider's Guide to Avant-Garde Capitalism," and others), the more scholarly "Academic Remixes," "Net Dialogues" (peer-to-peer theoretical explorations with other artists and writers), and the digital salvos of "Amerika Online" (among them, "Surf-Sample-Manipulate: Playgiarism on the Net," "The Private Life of a Network Publisher," and satirical thoughts on "Writing as Hactivism"). META/DATA also features a section of full-color images, including some of Amerika's most well-known and influential works.

 

Mark Amerika, named a Time Magazine 100 Innovator in 2001, is an interdisciplinary artist and Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His works include the epic online narrative GRAMMATRON, selected for the 2000 Whitney Biennial; the sound art work PHON:E:ME, commissioned by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art in Western Australia; and FILMTEXT 2.0, initially commissioned by Sony PlayStation 2 as part of a major retrospective at the ICA in London. He is the author of two novels, The Kafka Chronicles and Sexual Blood. In 1993 he became founder and publisher of Alt-X. 

 

Source: The MIT Press

 

 

ISBN-10: 0262012332

ISBN-13: 978-0262012331

 

 

META/DATA: A Digital Poetics, vvvv, processing, max-msp, super collider, real time, softwareMETA/DATA: A Digital Poetics, vvvv, processing, max-msp, super collider, real time, software

Reading

Computer Music Journal: Visual Music (2005) - The articles in this issue are all devoted to the topic of Visual Music: audiovisual creations in which the artist strives to endow the video component with formal and abstract qualities that mimic those of musical composition. (Computer Music Journal)

‘vE-”jA: Art + Technology of Live Audio-Video (2006) by Xarene Eskander is a global snapshot of an exploding genre of tech-art performance: VJing and live audio-video. The book covers 40 international artists with 400+ colour images and 50+ movies and clips on an accompanying DVD and web downloads. (VJ Book)

 

SEE ALSO

Simple Harmonic Motion study #3a (2011) by Mehmet Akten is another study in simple harmonic motion and the nature of complex patterns created from the interaction of multilayered rhythms. Here 180 balls are bouncing attached to (invisible) springs, each with a steady speed, but slightly different to its neighbour. Visuals made with Cinema4D + COFFEE (a C-like scripting language for C4D), audio with SuperCollider. (Mehmet Akten)

Revolving Realities (2010) by Interpalazzo (Martin Hesselmeier, Andreas Muxel and Carsten Goertz) together with composer Marcus Schmickler is an autoreactive installation, one that plays with our sense of reality by continually causing us to perceive and experience a place and an object in new ways. Its surfaces projected with different images, textures and animations, the object becomes a mirror of changing realities. (Meiré und Meiré)

VJ: Audio-Visual Art + VJ Culture (2006) edited by D-Fuse. A major change has taken place at dance clubs worldwide: the advent of the VJ. Once the term denoted the presenter who introduced music videos on MTV, but now it defines an artist who creates and mixes video, live and in sync to music, whether at dance clubs and raves or art galleries and festivals. This book is an in-depth look at the artists at the forefront of this dynamic audio-visual experience. (Laurence King Publishing)

RedUniverse (2007) by Mark d'Inverno and Fredrik Olofsson. This is basically a set of tools for sonification and visualisation of dynamic systems. It lets us build and experiment with systems as they are running. With the help of these tools we can quickly try out ideas around simple audiovisual mappings, as well as code very complex agents with strange behaviours. (Fredrik Olofsson)

Audiovisuology: See this sound (2010) - An Interdisciplinary Compendium of Audiovisual Culture. This all-embracing compendium brings together texts on various art forms in which the relationship between sound and image plays a significant role and the techniques used in linking the two. The entire spectrum of audiovisual art and phenomena is presented in 35 dictionary entries. (Cornerhouse)