Mark Amerika   13.12.2000 Making History Up: A Serial Question Mark Mark Amerika closes down his column in Telepolis with a fictitional interview between himself and his ideal reader.  What was  net art?   Mark Amerika: That's not an easy question to answer. When I first started writing my Amerika Online columns both at Telepolis and my own  Alt-X site, I was hoping to at least locate the beginnings of a vocabulary that one could use to articulate the very possibility of an emergent form of I-art. The scene was very vibrant in the mid to late Nineties and a communal rhetoric featuring ideas from literature, architecture, visual art, conceptual art and even graffiti art, challenged us to rethink what it means to live the life of an artist in network culture. There were globetrotting  concept-characters,  nomadic brand-name identities,  interventionist networking strategies, etc. There was instantaneously distributed mindshare. For example, you could pick up all sorts of wild energies and ideas at international art and writing festivals,  email lists, web sites, etc. It was an era.  But a much short-lived era?   Mark Amerika: Well, yes, but things move fast nowadays and one must be willing to change course and restrategize at any given moment. I'm particularly interested in how net artists were ahead of the curve when it came to making their footprint in the electrosphere and how the dot.coms came into the scene afterwards. And then,  net art died before the dot.com market crash. Will there be a net art revival? Will it lead to a sustained dot.com-driven market rally? Probably not.  Why?   Mark Amerika: Because there is no way this market can generate the revenues one needs to justify the outrageous P/E ratios. Net art P/E ratios were more outlandish than dot.com P/E ratios. Although with net art and some  avant-en trepre neurial dot.com enterprises, it's probably more like an A/E ratio?  A/E ratio?  Art/Entertainment?   Mark Amerika: No, Attention/Earnings ratio. Basically, you had artists who were clever at using the Internet to generate disproportionate amounts of attention to their brand-name net art sites, becoming international "art-stars" even though they were not earning anything. In the end, their balance sheet looked horrific. Who was buying into their way of life?  So how did they survive?   Mark Amerika: Well, it depended on where you were headquartered. If you were based in the U.S., chances are you were working in the new media economy making big bucks transferring your net art skills into the  "design and strategy" divisions of major start-ups. In Europe, there was some of that too, although there was also adequate public funding to keep a targeted network alive and well -- and to a certain extent, that  publicly-funded network still exists. Of course, there are a lot of so-called artists nowadays who simply come from money, you know, Daddy and Mommy helping smooth things out along the edges. And now, as net art becomes a thing of the past, you see some of us becoming  Professors of Internet Art.  So now comes the historicization process?   Mark Amerika: Yes, historicizing and mythologizing, that's where the most exciting new work will be produced. Not so much in the context of "net art will now become canonized into the annals of art history," but via new forms of network collaboration that take into account the idea that net art can be reconfigured into a life-practice that essentially *makes history* or, in the case of the role-playing performances embodied by the artists themselves, can actually *make history up*. In fact, this is something that I will be bringing into the new digital art curriculum I am developing at the University of Colorado.  How so?   Mark Amerika: Next semester, I will teach a new seminar called "Histories of Internet Art: Fictions and Factions," and in it, we will create an online-only exhibition/investigation that essentially asks the question "What was Internet art?" The exhibition will include a unique web interface that showcases the online art work of internationally-renowned and emerging Internet artists, interviews with these artists, significant keynote essays that address the early history of Internet art written by prominent new media theorists and commentators, a cluster of artist statements reflecting on the last six years of practice, an automated "People's History of Internet Art" in which visitors to the site will be able to give their own version of I-Art history (100 words or less) and, ideally, a few new works of I-art commissioned by the Alt-X Network created around the exhibition's theme.  Can you tell us more about the "Histories of Internet Art" exhibition/seminar?   Mark Amerika: The exhibition's theme will focus on the pluralistic approaches to inventing art history and will attempt to create an alternative perspective on how emergent art work generated specifically for the Internet medium is essentially, as I just suggested, "making history" and/or "making history up". Here is where the fluidity of historical processing in digitally-networked cultures allows for the development of both historical factions and historical fictions. Who decides what artists and art work is historically significant? Oftentimes institutions and their curators take on this role. But in the Internet art world, all that has changed, and it is the artist's themselves who have essentially created their own internetworked histories, both by aligning themselves with distributed network communities (factions) and via guerrilla marketing activities that call into question the entire notion of "art history" (fictions). An excellent example of this is Natalie Bookchin's  "introduction to net.art 1994-1999" which, for our research purposes at Colorado, we would call an historical "fiction" -- perhaps metafiction is a better term -- whereas her  "power of the line" open source net-art story reads more like an historical "faction." We want to investigate how these multiple methods and re-interpretations of net art history play with themselves and each other.  I guess I have one chief concern with your position here and that is that there seems to be a cluster of contradictory signals being transmitted in much of what you are presenting. In one sense, you are saying that net art is a thing of the past -- I don't think you'll get much argument from those of your colleagues around the world who, for the past year or two, have seen its exuberant era of cultural production and intervention quickly disappear. But you also seem to be saying, out of the other corner of your mouth, that there is still much more work to be done, that history itself is in the process of *being made* and that this is what net art essentially is -- i.e. a history-in-the-making and, as such, a process-oriented work-in-progress that can be applied to a more purposeful life-practice. How can you ask the question "What *was* net art?" when you are still giving it so much potential to effect our present-day lives?   Mark Amerika: Yes, it is somewhat contradictory. But I can live with these contradictions, can, in fact, live with them in a way that nurtures my own life practice in ways that lead to more network-oriented cultural production. By asking the question "What *was* net art?" we are also, in a whisper, asking: "Is there life after net art?" and if yes, what is it?  Do you want me to answer that question?   Mark Amerika: Yes, if you would. I like asking questions too.  Well, I think it's a non-question.   Mark Amerika: Why?  Because it's a really a question for you and your net art colleagues to answer. For the rest of us, there was always life, a parallel life, in concert with our daily rituals. We have no need to ponder the question "Is there life after net art?" because there was never any question about there being life before, during or after net art. What are you really trying to say?   Mark Amerika: I'm not trying to say anything. I'm trying *to do*. Most of my life is dictated by my To Do list. Would you like to see my current To Do list?  Okay.   Mark Amerika: Here it is, 1) invent new theory 2) turn new theory into a conceptual art "character" and give this character a diacritical name 3) create pseudo-autobiographical fiction around the concept-character 3) create other theoretically-charged concept-characters and give them diacritical names too 4) have these concept-characters participate in the pseudo-autobiographical fiction thus forming a network discourse wherein they invent their own behaviors consequently saying what they mean and meaning what they say 5) while conducting this "theory-play" take notes on the developing forms of hyperrhetoric that emerge from the ensuing discourse and feed them back into later "scenes of writing" 6) turn these "scenes of writing" into post(e)-pedagogical performance 7) reconfigure this post(e)-pedagogical performance into new forms of Internet Art  It sounds like your seminar To-Do list.   Mark Amerika: It's a start.  It also sounds like you'll be very busy reconfiguring your practice yet again.   Mark Amerika: Yes, that's true.  Does that mean there will be no more Telepolis columns?   Mark Amerika: Unfortunately, the time has come to change my rhetoric, my design strategy.  Design strategy?   Mark Amerika: As Flusser says in his "The Shape of Things," "as a verb (to design), meanings include 'to concoct something,' 'to simulate,' to draft,' 'to sketch,' to fashion,' 'to have designs on something'." In  my last column, I referred to this new strategy called Designwriting. I am leaving the column-essay form behind for now, and looking into more animated ways to express my ideas. Some of them may even be displayed here at Telepolis, thanks to the support of my open-minded editor here, Armin Medosch. Also, like some of my colleagues, I am in the process of further hybridizing my practice so that it involves more offline/online interaction. In the immediate future there will be a CD, an mp3 conceptual art narrative, a performance series (premiering at  the Easter Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland), an attempt to explode the new media industry's recent attempts to quantify the "ebook."  Anything else before you end your last AOL column here at Telepolis?   Mark Amerika: Yes, just to elaborate: my editor Armin Medosch has been a fellow traveler in this exploration. Although he did not always agree with my thinking or my rhetoric, he was, as is the case with most great editors, willing to let me have my say -- even as I said it over and over again, sometimes to the point of fruitless repetition (something I was consciously exploring while conceiving this new concept of surf-sample-manipulate).  Ah yes, surf-sample-manipulate -- what's up with that?   Mark Amerika: Well, that's the theme of the Easter Festival in Lucerne this April. It's called "Surf-Sample-Manipulate" -- and as stated above, I will be there with my new sound collaborators, Twine, premiering a semi-improvisational performance piece, which will also be a kind of seminar. I want my seminars to be more like multi-media performances and to occasionally take them out of the university environment and remix them on the road, into clubs, festivals, etc.  Oh, so there *is* life after net art?   Mark Amerika: We'll see. Mark Amerika is the Founder of  Alt-X, one of the oldest surviving net art sites.