Remixing Persona: An Imaginary Digital Media Object from the Onto-Tales of the Digital Afterlife is comprised of two components: a visual manifesto that doubles as a theoretical e-reader and a work of music video art. In building this project, the artists collaboratively investigate persona-making, performance-thinking, and applied remixology. Playfully presenting their research as an intergenerational and intercultural ‘research band’ named MALK (Mark Amerika / Laura Kim), both artists, individually and as a performance duo, bring their own unique experiences and ontologically filtered ‘ways of remixing’ to their intermedia art, writing and performance practice.
The research questions the artists initially presented to themselves were unconventional: ‘Who am I this time?’ ‘What does it mean to share a sense of humor?’ ‘What is an otherworldly aesthetic sensibility?’ The artists were not interested in coming up with answers per se, but in using their artist skills to deploy both intuitive and improvisational performances that would generate a set of primary source material to remix into their creative project. This was when they decided to form MALK and began creating the Digital Afterlife music video artwork as a conceptual tool to investigate persona-making as a meta-practice. The culminating field of recombinatory expression that informs the production of this imaginary digital media object is an inversion of their practice-based research conducted in the TECHNE Lab at the University of Colorado.
