Video in the House of the Word: How e-Lit Intersects With Cinema

Q&A with Mark Amerika, author of REMIXTHEBOOK.

Amerika_remixthebook[excerpt]

I asked Mark Amerika about his transition from text to multimedia work.

IS: You started out writing text-based fiction (The Kafka Chronicles, Sexual Blood), how/why did you transition to other media?

MA: I have always loved experimental forms of writing. There is a rival tradition in literature that I embrace as my lineage. For me it starts with Sterne and Lautréamont, moves to Joyce and Beckett -- and then the nouveau roman, especially Alain Robbe-Grillet with whom I studied as an undergraduate at the University of Florida. But it goes deeper than that. As a young writer who studied and worked with postmodernist impresarios like Ron Sukenick, Robert Coover and Raymond Federman, I was encouraged to expand the concept of writing to include multimedia forms. In 1993, I had a major revelation that instead of writing my third novel, GRAMMATRON, about a future cyberspace where artists became networked avatars performing in a kind of social media network, I would actually port the entire narrative on to this very new thing -- the Internet.

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Published in: Huffington Post
By: Illya Szilak