IMMOBILITÉ

IMMOBILITÉ 
a film by Mark Amerika
8-10 February 2010

Discussion session with Mark Amerika 
2pm Thursday 10 February 2010

Immobilité, shot in Cornwall in 2007, is the world's first feature-length mobile phone art film. It is a story about a future world where the dream of living in utopia can only be sustained by a nomadic tribe of artists and intellectuals, Mark Amerika's Immobilité mashes up the language of "foreign films" with landscape painting and literary metafiction. The work was composed using an unscripted, improvisational method of acting, and the mobile phone images are intentionally shot in an amateurish or DIY style, similar to the evolving forms of video distributed in social media environments such as YouTube. By interfacing this low-tech version of video making with more sophisticated forms of European art-house movies, Amerika both asks and answers the question "What is the future of cinema?"

Mark Amerika is visiting the Northwest of England as part of a research trip to develop a new work co-commissioned by Storey Gallery and AND that will be manifest in the region in 2012.

Artist’s Biography 
Born in Miami in 1960, Mark Amerika is one of the leading pioneers of Internet art, his art and writing has influenced a new generation of artists using digital processes to create emerging forms of art that intersect at the boundary of visual art, live performance, and experimental literature. He is the producer, director, and writer of an ongoing series of limited edition feature-length films that are part of his Foreign Film Series. His artwork has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Denver Art Museum, and the American Museum of the Moving Image. He has had four early career retrospectives including the first two Internet art retrospectives ever produced, one at the ACA Media Arts Plaza in Tokyo, Japan, and the other at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. He is the author of many books including his recently published collection of artist writings entitled META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007). In 1993, he started the Alt-X Network (www.altx.co), one of the premiere digital art and literature sites on the web; author of two avant-pop novels, "The Kafka Chronicles" and "Sexual Blood"; creates multidisciplinary work of Internet Art, «GRAMMATRON» (www.grammatron.com) and exhibits internationally; contributor to the German. Amerika is a Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His Internet art can found at his website, www.markamerika.com

AND - Abandon Normal Devices Festival www.andfestival.org.uk