Mark Amerika, Immobilité | First UK screening (and discussion: Amerika with Chris Meigh-Andrews)

About

Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster is delighted to announce a UK premiere of Mark Amerika’s work of early mobile phone video art, Immobilité.

Released in 2009, Mark Amerika's Immobilité appropriates the stylistic tendencies of the "feature-length foreign film." The artwork introduces the creative use of subtitles that double as a literary text depicting a future world where the dream of living in utopia can only be sustained by a nomadic tribe of artists and intellectuals living on the edge of apocalypse.

According to Amerika, "Immobilité mashes up the language of auteur-driven 'foreign films' with a more amateur video vernacular we now associate with social media platforms like YouTube and Vine." By experimenting with a low-tech glitch aesthetic associated with pre-HD mobile phone video recording technology as well as more sophisticated forms of motion picture narrative found in European art-house movies, Amerika makes an attempt at interrogating the question: "What is the future of cinema?"

Shot entirely on a Nokia N95 mobile phone in 2007 (before the release of the iPhone), Immobilité was filmed on location in the Cornwall region of England and received support from the University of Falmouth iRES research group, Tate Media, and the University of Colorado Innovative Seed Grant. Solo exhibitions of Immobilité have taken place at the Denver Art Museum, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, and the Chelsea Art Museum.

For more information on Immobilité, visit immobilite.com

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The film will be introduced by Mark Amerika, in conversation with Chris Meigh-Andrews.

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Mark Amerika has exhibited his interdisciplinary artwork in many venues, including the Whitney Biennial, the Walker Art Center, the Denver Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Biennale de Montréal, ZKM, Harris Museum, and the American Museum of the Moving Image. In 2009-2010, The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, featured Amerika’s comprehensive retrospective exhibition entitled UNREALTIME including his feature-length work of mobile cinema, Immobilité. Amerika’s transmedia narrative, Museum of Glitch Aesthetics, was commissioned by the Abandon Normal Devices festival in conjunction with the 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

Amerika has delivered keynote addresses at many events, including the “Disrupting Narratives” symposium at the Tate Modern, the Electronic Literature Organization conference in Vancouver, the “Misunderstanding” festival for the International Network of Performance Artists in Zurich, the Digital Interconnections festival in Tokyo, transmediale in Berlin, the ciber@rt Bilbao festival in Spain, and the Seminário Internacional de Cinema e Audiovisual in Salvador, Brazil. He has given visiting artist presentations in scores of museums, universities, and contemporary arts centers including the visiting artist series at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in Tokyo, the Australia Center for the Moving Image in Melbourne, and the Microwave Festival and Videotage in Hong Kong.

Amerika is the author of many books including remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007). His novels include The Kafka Chronicles (University of Alabama Press / FC2, 1993), Sexual Blood (University of Alabama Press / FC2, 1993), and 29 Inches (Chiasmus Press, 2007). His most recent book is Locus Solus (Counterpath Press, 2014), an auto-translation and remix of Raymond Roussel’s classic work of surrealist writing.

Mark Amerika is currently a Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he was recently appointed the Founding Director of the new Doctoral Program in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance. His Internet art can found at his website, markamerika.com. He lives and works in Boulder, CO and Kailua, HI.

Chris Meigh-Andrews is a pioneering video artist, writer and curator who has been making and exhibiting screen-based video and sculptural moving image installations since the mid 1970’s.  He studied fine art at Goldsmiths and completed his PhD at the Royal College of Art in 2001.  He has held a number of artist’s residencies in the UK and abroad and his site-specific and commissioned installations often incorporate renewable energy systems and establish direct relationships with the natural and constructed environment. Curatorial projects include Yes, Snow Show (British Film Institute, 2009), Analogue: Artists’ Video from the UK, Canada and Poland:  1968-88 (Tate Britain and Modern, London, and at venues in Liverpool, Norwich, Warsaw, New York, Toronto, Ottawa, Valletta and Berlin: 2006-2009) and The Digital Aesthetic, in collaboration with the Harris Museum (2001, 2007 & 2012).

During the 1980’s Meigh-Andrews taught at a number of art schools and institutions including The London College of Printing, The London International Film School, Maidstone School of Art and Leicester Polytechnic. However, his main teaching role was at the University of Central Lancashire (1984- 2012). Whilst working at Uclan he initiated and was head of Time-Based Media (1986-2000), co-founded the MA Fine Art course and established the Electronic & Digital Art Unit (EDAU), a centre for post-graduate research. He was made Reader in 2000, Professor in 2007 and Professor Emeritus on his retirement from teaching in 2012.

Meigh-Andrews has written extensively on the history and context of artists’ video. His book, A History of Video Art: the Development of Form and Function (Berg, Oxford and New York, 2006 and Sangensha, Tokyo, 2013), provides an overview of the development of artists’ video since its inception. The second expanded edition of the book was published by Bloomsbury in Dec 2013. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Centre for Moving Image Research in the Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries and Education at the University of the West of England (UWE).