Mark Amerika, who was just 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, is the author of two novels. 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."

He is the Publisher of Alt-X, which he founded in 1993. Publishers Weekly has called Alt-X "the literary publishing model of the future."

Amerika was 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 an online storyworld that has since been released on the Internet and praised by many media sites including The New York Times, MSNBC's The Site, Time, Reuters International, Die Zeit, Wired, The Village Voice and Salon. GRAMMATRON has been exhibited at over 40 international venues including the Ars Electronica Festival, the International Symposium of Electronic Art, SIGGRAPH 98, the Museums On The Web "Beyond Interface" show, the Adelaide Arts Festival "FOLDBACK" show in South Australia, the Virtual Worlds conference in Paris, and the International Biennial of Film and Architecture in Graz.

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.

A familiar presence on the international festival and conference circuit, Amerika gives performances and demonstrations on web publishing, new media art and theory, hypertext, 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 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 "Crossings: American Authors in Cologne" festival, Northwestern University's Center for Writing Arts lecture series on "Electronic Publishing," The Adelaide Arts Festival, the "Interactive Frictions" conference at the University of Southern California, the "Knowing Mass Culture: Mediating Knowledge" conference at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies, the Digital Arts and Culture 2000 conference in Bergen, Norway, the bi-coastal "mal/CONTENT" conferences sponsored by Screamingmedia, the Transmediale Festival in Berlin, and a 16-city book tour for his novel Sexual Blood.

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 and the Festival International de Linguagem Eletronica at the Museum of Image and Sound in Sao Paolo, Brazil. PHON:E:ME will soon appear as a special exhibition at the 13th Videobrasil festival in Sao Paulo and at the Centres George Pompidou in Paris as part of the traveling "Let's Entertain" show.

To order the PHON:E:ME CD and support the Alt-X site, click here.

Amerika's new cross-media narrative project and the third part of his new media trilogy is entitled FILMTEXT. FILMTEXT is a hybridized online/offline storyworld experience created as a net art site, a museum installation, an mp3 concept album, a multimedia 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. Due to popular demand, the exhibition has been granted an extended run through January 31, 2002.

Amerika was recently appointed to the Fine Arts faculty at the University of Colorado in Boulder where he is developing an innovative curriculum in Digital Art. In 2002, he will be a Visiting Fellow at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and the National University of Singapore. He can be reached at amerika@altx.com or via snail-mail at the following address:

P.O. Box 241
Boulder, CO 80306-0241

You can order his books here.