Mark Amerika, who has been named a "Time Magazine 100 Innovator" as part of their continuing series of features on the most influential artists, scientists, entertainers and philosophers into the 21st century, has had four retrospectives of his digital art work. The first-ever net art retrospective was held in the summer of 2001 at the ACA Media Arts Plaza in Tokyo, Japan, and was called "Avant-Pop: The Stories of Mark Amerika [an Internet art retrospective]". Amerika's first European net art retrospective enjoyed two exhibition runs at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London and was entitled "How To Be An Internet Artist". Both shows covered the years 1993-2001. In 2004, he had two retrospectives, one at Ciberart Bilbao in Spain, and one at the Festival International de Linguagem Eletronica at the Gallerie do SESI in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

He has two new books, one a collection of artist writings covering the years 1993-2005 entitled META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007), and an experimental "spam collage" work entitled 29 Inches: A Long Narrative Poem (Chaismus Press, 2007). He is also producing and directing a projected series of feature length "foreign films" scheduled to be released as works of art in various formats including high definition video mobile phone video art. The first two works are currently in postproduction.

In the mid-Nineties, Amerika was a Creative Writing Fellow and Lecturer on Network Publishing and Hypertext at Brown University where he developed the GRAMMATRON net art project. 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 an online storyworld that has since received over one million visitors and has been praised by many media sites including The New York Times, MSNBC, Time magazine, Die Zeit, Wired, The Village Voice, and Salon. GRAMMATRON has been exhibited in over 40 international venues including the Ars Electronica Festival, the International Symposium of Electronic Art, SIGGRAPH 1998, the Museums On The Web "Beyond Interface" show, the Adelaide Arts Festival, the International Biennial of Film and Architecture in Graz, transmediale in Berlin, and the "Conquest of Ubiquity" traveling exhibition that took place throughout Spain.

In Spring 2000, GRAMMATRON was selected as one of the first works of Internet art to ever be exhibited in the prestigious Whitney Biennial of American Art.

After GRAMMATRON, the second project in his new media trilogy is PHON:E:ME, an mp3 concept album with hyper:liner:notes commissioned by the Walker Art Center, the Australia Council for the Arts New Media Fund, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Jerome Foundation. The PHONE:ME project, which was nominated for an International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences Webby Award in the Art category, has been exhibited internationally at venues such as SIGGRAPH 2000, the 13th Videobrasil festival in Sao Paulo, the Zeppelin Sound Festival at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, and at the Centre Georges Pompidou as part of the traveling "Let's Entertain" exhibition.

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The third part of Amerika's net art trilogy is entitled FILMTEXT. FILMTEXT is a hybridized online/offline digital narrative created as a net art site, a museum installation, an mp3 concept album, an artist ebook, and a series of live performances. The first version of this work was commissioned by Playstation 2 for Amerika's "How To Be An Internet Artist" retrospective exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the 2.0 version was released in conjunction with his exhibition at SIGGRAPH 2002 in San Antonio. Other exhibitions of FILMTEXT have taken place in many international venues including the Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne), transmediale (Berlin), ISEA (Nagoya), the European Media Art Festival (Osnabruek), SF Camerawork (San Francisco), the American Museum of the Moving Image (New York), the FILMWINTER Festival of Expanded Media (Stuttgart), "prog:me" (Rio de Janeiro), and the "Blur of the Otherworldly" traveling exhibition.

Since 2001, Amerika has toured parts of Japan, Europe, Australia, South America, and the USA as a VJ performance artist and out of these performances has produced a series of DVD with surround sound art installations entitled CODEWORK. The work has been exhibited internationally and a limited edition of the CODEWORK 3 installation was purchased by the Denver Art Museum where it was on exhibit throughout the summer of 2004. Amerika's continued interest in the interface of VJ imagery, experimental electronic sound remixing, and a politically-charged hactivist practice, led to the creation of his CHROMO HACK installation, an elaborate DVD surround sound work made in commemoration of 9-11 while highlighting the collapse of mainstream media foundations. CHROMO HACK was featured in the Techno Sublime exhibition at the CU Art Museum.

Another ongoing collaborative project, DJRABBI, features Amerika as "Kid Hassid" and includes the DVD "Society of the Spectacle (A Digital Remix)" which has been exhibited/screened in over 30 international festivals and exhibitions. Society of the Spectacle, which is available at an affordable price here, has been described as "pulsing, pop-ish and engrossing-the hypertext crowd stoked on Godard [...] [T]he rapid editing and churning information flow reflects the struggle to connect with global politics, the impossibility of slowing down, but at the same time conveys a manic playfulness, a creative resistance against considerable odds" (Realtime).

A familiar presence on the international festival and conference circuit, Amerika gives performances, lectures, and workshops on net art, web publishing, new media art and theory, VJing, hypertext, hactivism, and the future of narrative art in network culture. His recent focus has been on translating his practice-based research methods into live multimedia performances that integrate experimental music, live writing, and video sampling into the narrative mix. A frequent keynoter, some major events he's participated in include the Whitney Museum's "Seminars With Artists" program, the Tate Modern's "Disrupting Narratives" symposium, the Lucerne Easter Festival, Transmediale (Berlin), the trAce incubation conference, the "Digital Interconnection" festival in Tokyo, The Adelaide Arts Festival, the ISEA 2002 "Orai" symposium in Nagoya, the Microwave International Media Festival in Hong Kong, the Digital Arts and Culture conference in Bergen, Norway, the bi-coastal "mal/CONTENT" conferences sponsored by Screamingmedia, the Unified Field Summit at the Aspen Institute in Colorado, the Brown University Freedom To Write Conference, the Duke University "Assault: Radicalism In Aesthetics and Politics" conference, The German Association of Amerikan Studies Conference on Technology & American Culture, the "Knowing Mass Culture: Mediating Knowledge" conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Center for Twentieth Century Studies, Northwestern University's Center for Writing Arts lecture series on "Electronic Publishing," and a 16-city book tour for his novel Sexual Blood.

Amerika is the Publisher of Alt-X, which he founded in 1993. Publishers Weekly has called Alt-X "the literary publishing model of the future." He is also the author of two novels and two artist ebooks. His first novel, The Kafka Chronicles, is now in its third printing and his most recent novel, Sexual Blood, has been translated into Italian as Sangue Sessuale. The Philadelphia Inquirer has 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." His artist ebooks are available for free download and enjoy a readership in the tens of thousands. The How To Be An Internet Artist ebook was part of the initial launch of the new Alt-X Press and the cinescripture.1 ebook was exhibited in conjunction with his retrospective at the ICA in London. His experimental artist essays, poetics, and articles have appeared in many academic, art, and underground journals including Leonardo, New Media and Society, electronic book review, Culture Machine, The European Journal For Higher Arts Education, The Iowa Review, American Book Review, Artbyte, Telepolis, Rhizome, nettime, trAce, Beehive, and Alt-X.

Amerika is a Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder where he is developing the TECHNE practice-based research initiative. He has also been a Visiting Scholar and Artist at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, the National University of Singapore Honors Programme, the University of Bremen's "Art and Algorithm" Group, the University of Technology Sydney, and the iRES program at the University College in Falmouth. He can be reached at amerika at colorado edu or via snail-mail at the following address: