filmtext

filmtext

2002, Mark Amerika

source: http://www.altx.com/who.is.Mark.Amerika.html

Mark Amerika was named one of the top 100 innovators by Time magazine as part of their series on artists, scientists, entertainers, and philosophers. He got a Master's degree from Brown University and works as both a writer and artist.

Filmtext, part three of a series, was originally commissioned by Playstation 2 and was conceived as a highly ambitious multimedia event. I say event because in order to get the full effect, not only did one need to visit the website, but there is also an mp3 soundtrack, there were museum installations, an ebook, and live performances. The first two parts of the series were Grammatron and PHON:E:ME

source: http://www.altx.com/mp3/filmtext.html

The live performances of Filmtext consisted of the artist himself acting as narrator while the sound artist he collaborated, Twine, would remix his voice and add the distorted version back into the performance.Amerika says "I'm just wondering how to take some of these ideas (techniques) and use them to amplify these writerly effects in live performance. I found that using the net, the WWW, was very helpful. So that in Lucerne, while we were doing the live, improvisational sound-writing remix, I was also projecting my laptop's wireless connection to the WWW and grabbing data off the network in real-time and sampling what I needed from it right into the new story, remixing as I wrote it, and then using the sounds to further distort the narrative's generative meaning (or meaning-potential)."

Filmtext attracted me because the site is designed along a very science fiction inspired template complete with futuristic text, alien landscapes in the background, an unusual and alien sounding soundtrack, and interactive displays all of which create an ambience of mystery.