remixthecontext is a cunning and satirical collection of "theoretical fictions" composed by artist, novelist and media theorist Mark Amerika. A compelling riff on the classic Platonic dialogue, Amerika's remixthecontext features Walt Whitman Benjamin, a Professor of Creative Urgency who intellectually jams with an assemblage of characters that resemble the actual artists, poets, and scholars who populate the university café culture depicted in the book. Each chapter is enlivened by Amerika's provocative mash-up of literary metafiction, new media rhetoric and witty repartee setting the stage for a series of freewheeling exchanges that playfully investigate a multitude of themes including remix culture, psychic automatism, gender fluidity, social media dystopia, MOOCs as performance art, and the challenges presented by cutting-edge digital arts and humanities curricula within a sclerotic academic environment.
Chapter 2 - remixthemind
Chapter 3 - remixtherhetoric
Chapter 4 - remixthecontext
Chapter 5 - remixthebrand
Chapter 6 - remixtheseminar
Biography
Mark Amerika is the author of many books including remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011 — remixthebook.com), META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007) and the novels The Kafka Chronicles and Sexual Blood (both with FC2/University of Alabama). His intermedia artwork has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Whitney Biennial of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the Walker Art Center. In 2009, Amerika released Immobilité, generally considered the first feature-length art film ever shot on a mobile phone. He is a Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado where he is the Founding Director of the Doctoral Program in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance and a Professor of Art and Art History.
"Mark Amerika remixed the book! Remix your ideas. Remix your brain. Remix your eyes. Reload, refresh and open your mind. Now you can read it. The source is on the table." -Giselle Beiguelman, University of Sao Paulo
"Plato created written dialogue as interface to introduce oral people to literate reasoning. Mark Amerika shows that dialogue functions equally well to introduce literate students to electrate creativity, the update being that remixology is to dialogue what bitcoin is to money. Imagine overhearing shoptalk from the Cabaret Voltaire, extended in a virtual appropriated café into a poetics of digital textuality." – Gregory Ulmer, University of Florida
"Every bit of the source material Mark Amerika provides in this vanguard literary artwork is worth stealing! Given the branded intellectual and artistic contexts he describes, we could pay him no greater compliment than to resample and reuse his remix-writing." – Gary Hall, Coventry University
