Thursday, October 20, 2011

The Art of the Literary Mashup

My guest blog post at the University of Minnesota Press begins:
Media theorist, artist, and novelist Mark Amerika explores the book as a live, "liquid" object and uncovers its potential beyond the printed word. Today, he discusses his own research-and-perform methodology as well as a sampling of remix projects that utilize the works of Jack Kerouac, Jacques Derrida, and Sol Lewitt, among others.

One of my collaborators on the new remixthebook.com website, Gary Hall, also a University of Minnesota Press author, recently published a blog post entitled "What do we have the right not to call a 'book'?". In the post, Hall writes:
What seems much more interesting is the way certain developments in electronic publishing contain at least the potential for us to perceive the book as something that is not completely fixed, stable and unified, with definite limits and clear material edges, but as liquid and living, open to being continually and collaboratively written, edited, annotated, critiqued, updated, shared, supplemented, revised, re-ordered, reiterated and remained.
This description of the emerging forms of what we might refer to as a book per se, directly applies to the recent appearance of remixthebook, my new hybridized print / web / publication / digital / performance of contemporary art theory [...]
Keywords: Mark Amerika, remixthebook, University of Minnesota Press, new forms of publishing, blog