As the Internet continues to mature, it has changed the way businesses operate, stocks are traded and news is dispersed. It also is changing the face of the art world.
At the forefront of this change is Mark Amerika, a pioneer in the digital arts field and an assistant professor in the University of Colorado at Boulder fine arts department.
Amerika, who in 2001 was named one of Time magazine's top 100 innovators for the new century, creates his online artwork with digital video, interactive animation, computer graphics, music and hypertexts in an ever-changing medium.
"Instead of using clay, paint, paper or print, digital artists use 1s and 0s," Amerika said of his online artwork.
A successful author, Amerika got his start on the Web earlier than most, sliding in before the wave. In 1993 he began experimenting with Web publishing and created Alt-X, an online literary publishing site.
"Alt-X was one of the first content-rich sites on the Web at the time, so it gained popularity quickly," Amerika said of his early Web work. It now is exhibited at major art festivals around the world and has more than 500 contributing artists. The site also marked his transition from print publishing to the online publishing world and sparked his interest in digital art.
"What is unique about that project was that I went from looking at the Web as a publishing house to looking at it as a unique art medium," Amerika said.
The project also put Amerika on the map as a pioneer in the digital art field and has helped him become an internationally known digital artist and expert.
"Mark is one of a very few artists who are shaping the nature of Internet art for the present and for the future," said Deborah Haynes, chair of the fine arts department.
After conducting a national search in 2000, the fine arts department hired Amerika as its first professor of digital arts, said Haynes.
She said Amerika is helping the fine arts department engage the digital art medium by developing a new curriculum at a time when interest is high.
He already is developing a new program that will help students experiment in creating both Internet-specific works of art and more collaborative projects.
"We're not talking about commercial Web design, but rather about the practice, history and theory of digital art, as well as experimenting with it," Amerika said.
In 2000, he was one of nine Internet artists selected to show his work at the Biennial arranged by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. It marked the first time Web art has been shown at the Biennial, which takes the pulse of American art every two years.
Grammatron, a four-year net art project Amerika finished in 1997, was the piece chosen for the Biennial. Grammatron is a narrative that takes place in cyberspace, using a mix of images, words, music and customized computer codes that allows readers to follow their own story line by choosing from multiple hypertexts - very different from reading a book.
Artists of all types -- including William Burroughs, Stanley Kubrick and Robert Rauschenberg -- have influenced Amerika and he passes that message on to his students by encouraging them to experiment in creating both Internet art and more collaborative projects using different mediums.
Amerika's second major web art project was PHON:E:ME, an mp3 concept album that has sound, words, digital animation and customized code work. It was commissioned by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and exhibited internationally at venues like the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and Videobrasil in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In 2000, PHON:E:ME was nominated for an International Digital Arts and Sciences Webby Award.
Amerika's latest project is FILMTEXT, a digital narrative for cross-media formats. Originally commissioned by Playstation 2 for Amerika's major net art retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the work investigates the interface of digital cinema, online games and visual arts.
Being a pioneer in the field, Amerika is in high demand. He is frequently invited to perform and show his work in Japan, Europe and Australia and was recently awarded Visiting Artist Fellowships at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and the National University of Singapore. This fall he will present his first solo show in South America and is currently working on a series of DVD art works made in surround sound.
For more information about Mark Amerika visit his Web site at .