Re:Mix

What is transmedia narrative and what value does it have for contemporary remix artists? The traditional art and entertainment industries would have us believe that transmedia is a powerful marketing concept that uses new media technologies to aggregate fragmented audiences by delivering story information across multiple media platforms. But what about the fragmented stories being told by amateur-auteurs whose online personae remix their personal mythologies? These alternative transmedia narratives resist convergence yet also circulate in the networked space of flows. New media artists, many of whom identify with the historical avant-garde, can now expand the forms of transmedia narrative to foreground an anti-disciplinary [anti-authoritarian and interdisciplinary] approach to both contemporary practice and theory. As a remix artist who is investigating "ways of filtering" and who experiments with his conceptual language art practice in the fields of digital distribution as well as in relation to social media performance, Amerika's artist presentation will attempt to reclaim the term "transmedia narrative" for his own uses as he attempts to create an antidisciplinary set of practice-based art theories that resist what the commercially-minded academics call "convergence." In fact, the idea of convergence doesn't really match up well when discussed in relation to audience or even story fragmentation. It's part of a very old-fashioned modernist agenda where everything magically comes together in this technologically sophisticated utopia. For Amerika, this seems unnecessarily anachronistic given how distributed and personalized social media art practices operate – especially in these unpredictable times of faux prosperity and realworld, dystopian financial ruin. In this context, Amerika will discuss his experimental art, theory, and pedagogy, including his recent projects Immobilité, remixthebook and The Museum of Glitch Aesthetics, his newly commissioned work of art created for the Abandon Normal Devices festival in conjunction with the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad.