Projects

DATA Co-Director Mark Amerika has two new practice-based research projects scheduled for release at the end of 2014. The first is an auto-translation and remix of proto-surrealist Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus that will be published by Counterpath Press. Using online translation programs in conjunction with his skills as a novelist, filmmaker, and performance artist, Amerika takes Roussel's original French version and creates a contemporary work of conceptual art to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the book's initial publication. The second project is Crapshoot, a transmedia artwork that remixes and expands upon Stéphane Mallarmé's seminal Un coup de dés. The artwork will initially be released as a newly commissioned web app in conjunction with the Art on Your Screen series of solo exhibitions at the ZKM / Museum of Contemporary Media Art in Germany.

During the Summer/Fall of 2014, graduate researchers Zak Loyd and Melanie Clemmons will create new net artworks for and curate preexisting works into an exhibition of early net art, circa 1994-1999. This "atemporal" exhibition will be featured on computer hardware and software from the historical time period the works were first appeared on the Internet. The exhibition, made possible by the Media Archaeology Lab, will take place in Fall 2014.

This two-part book project moves through both technical and user-based accounts of networks preceding and outside of the Internet, asking both "how it works" and "to whom does it work for?" (in this case the "whom" will mostly be writers and artists). The project then looks at how the shift from liberationism via telecommunications networks in the 70s and 80s to libertarianism via the Internet starting in the early to mid-90s may have actually been a kind of release of a repression.