Digital Afterlife by MALK (Mark Amerika and Laura Kim)
Floating in the Ether, the artist’s imagination occasionally has no choice: it must ground itself in reality. But what is reality in a world where an individual’s perception, consciousness, awareness and overall sensibility is constantly being challenged by the “datafication” of experience? Once upon a time, artists may have had the luxury of intentionally isolating themselves from the revolution of everyday life. This is no longer possible. In fact, as aspirational and critical media artists, MALK (featuring Mark Amerika and Laura Hyunjhee Kim) aims to create artworks that embrace 21st century media as transformational composition and distribution tools for their digital art work while simultaneously intervening in the technical environment of global capitalism and its analytically-driven, market-manipulated big data environment.
LOCATION: Governors Island, Nolan Park Building 8a
DATES AND TIMES: May 25 – October 21, 2018
TIMES: Fri. Sat. Sun and Holiday Mondays noon – 5 pm
Governors Island New York Ferry Schedule
The artists hail from two generations and two cultural backgrounds: Amerika is an internationally renown intermedia artist whose work has been exhibited in the Whitney Biennial of American Art, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the Norwegian Embassy in Havana, Cuba. Kim is a next-generation Korean-American multimedia artist who was the inaugural recipient of the ArtSlant Award in New Media and has exhibited at the Internet Archive, Centro Cultural São Paulo
(The Wrong-New Digital Art Biennale) and New York Anthology Film Archives. Together, they have produced Digital Afterlife, a maximalist remix of classic imagery from historic science fiction cinema and contemporary art. Foregrounding audio-visual spectacle as a network distributed form of aesthetic currency, the artists question what it means to live in the post-digital universe.
BIOS
Mark Amerika ’s artwork has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Whitney Biennial of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the Walker Art Center. In 2009-2010, The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, hosted Amerika’s comprehensive retrospective exhibition entitled UNREALTIME. In 2009, Amerika released Immobilité, generally considered the first feature-length art film ever shot on a mobile phone. He is the author of many books including remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011 — remixthebook.com), META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007) and remixthecontext (Routledge, 2018). His artwork Museum of Glitch Aesthetics [glitchmuseum.com] was commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices in conjunction with the London 2012 Olympics. In March 2017, he was the first American artist to have a survey exhibition of digital artwork in Havana. Amerika was recently appointed Professor of Distinction at the and is the Founding Director of the Doctoral Program in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance and a Professor of Art and Art History.
Laura Hyunjhee Kim is a multimedia artist who renders familiar physical experiences into fabricated (non)existent spaces that reimagine digital culture and virtual living. Kim has shown works in on/offline exhibition spaces and screenings around the world including the Internet Archive, São Paulo Cultural Center, Ever Gold Projects, Kadist Art Foundation, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, New York Anthology Film Archives, Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Dresden Artists’ Exposition in Germany, quARTel – Galeria Municipal de Arte, Fei Contemporary Art Center-Shanghai, Super Art Modern Museum (SPAMM), The Wrong-New Digital Art Biennale and she was an artist in residence at the Internet Archive, Black & White Projects and Korea National University of the Arts. Kim was the recipient of the inaugural ArtSlant Award in New Media and her work has appeared in Hyperallergic, KQED, Daily Serving, San Francisco Chronicle, The Creators Project, and the Living Room Light Exchange. She is currently a PhD student in CU-Boulder’s Doctoral Program in Intermedia Art, Writing, and Performance.
PRESS QUOTES
“META/DATA perfectly captures the essence and style of pioneering net artist and online fiction writer Mark Amerika. Featuring a mix of scholarly theory, personal narrative, and conversations with peers, the book provides both meta data on the artist’s multifaceted body of work and insightful commentary on digital poetics and culture. The personae Amerika has created for himself–from ‘digital thoughtographer’ to VJ as artist-researcher–are reflected as different viewpoints in the book’s stories, theoretical essays, and dialogues, and make it a multilinear read that mirrors the diversity of digital culture.” –Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art
“Mark Amerika not only plays music — the rhythm, the sound of his words and sentences — he plays verbal meanings as if they’re music. I’m not just talking about music. Amerika is showing us that William Burroughs came out of jazz knowledge and that now everything’s political — and everything’s coming out through the lens of sexuality”. — Kathy Acker
“Mark Amerika is a hacker. He hacks language, image, sound, identities, cultures. He plays space, time, and tech like a saxophone. He plays out, way out sometimes, but he will always beckon you to join him. His writings are like invitations to a happening party you don’t know you are already at. It’s dense, it’s hard, but it flows, and it’s fun. What more could you want?” –McKenzie Wark, author of Gamer Theory.
markamerika.com
lauraonsale.com
art.colorado.edu
Twitter: @markamerika Instagram: @lauraonsale
COLLABORATORS – Mark Amerika and Laura Kim
INTERVIEWS AND PRESS COVERAGE
https://creators.vice.com/en_us/article/ez5gwe/mark-amerika-discusses-corrupting-lake-como-museum-of-glitch-art
http://www2.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/mark_amerika.shtm
http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue80/8647