Alt-X Online Network | ALN

« Alt-X was ahead of its time. [...] And in this landscape Mark Amerika decides to plant and grow a new kind of literature online! NoMoPoMo! To understand why Alt-X is what it is, you have to understand the Avant Pop movement. Indeed, the criteria by which writers and artists are featured on Alt-X network is still largely based on principles enshrined in the early manifestos of 93/94, themselves based on ideas of surfiction first articulated in the early 1970s. In Surfiction: Four Propositions in Form of an Introduction, Raymond Federman wrote: The whole traditional, conventional, fixed, and boring method of reading a book must be questioned, challenged, demolished. And it is the writer (and not modern printing technology) who must, through innovations in the writing itself -- in the typography and topology of his writing -- renew our system of reading. Alt-X set out to establish a new school of avant-garde literature that placed itself in direct opposition to the post modernist (PoMo) establishment, basing itself instead on a carefully selected canon of post-war printed works, embracing the emerging wired world of new technology and hitching its star to the theories and practices of disk-based hypertext literature, as developed in and around Brown University, where Mark Amerika worked as a Grad student from 1995-97 - chiefly under the mentorship of Robert Coover and George Landow. Alt-X offered a Utopian vision of what a writer might become in a fully networked digital economy. No longer would we be beholden to a cosmopolitan cabal of agents, publishers and retailers controlling our access to and connection with our readers. No longer too would we be imprisoned by the commoditisation of the book, the fixity of the page, the tyranny of the line. In an online world writing could be free in every sense of the word. It could move, jump around, pogo, dive right into the mosh pit and smash up the place. Strange then that very few of the print-based writers cited as prime movers of the Avant Pop movement ended up creating significant digital works. Rather, the collision of hypertext and the hacktivist network shook out a whole shower (school? movement? clique?) of new bright sparks. Steve Shaviro, Matthew Fuller, Sadie Plant, Hakim Bey, Critical Arts Ensemble, Marcos Novak, Eugene Thacker, Gashgirl, and Gomma are all cited in the archives. By 1996, Alt-X was already having to reconfigure itself to support not so much writers working out of the way of mainstream literary tradition, but rather a broad range of (largely American) digital artists and cultural producers. By 1997 founder, publisher and editor Mark Amerika talks of having: morphed the Alt-X Online Publishing Network from a print-oriented scrollable text-environment (Alt-X started as a gopher site in 1993) to an ongoing hypermedia construction with state-of-the-art hyperfiction, web-art, new media theory and now audio streams. And in the same article he describes what has happened to the small coterie of writers who travelled with him on his rapid and disorientating journey: The once "novel" idea of recording stories so that they can then be bound by the rigid spine of book-media and its enslaving copyright law, is morphing into the Avant-Pop practice of "surf-sample-manipulate," a pro-active practice of collage-generation that reconfigures the author into a virtual artist who navigates cyberspace so as to engage him/herself in the improvisational mix of digital objects being distributed on the World Wide Web. Amerika himself has admirably walked it like he talks it, producing experimental online works to back up his cultural theories. It is, in fact, impossible to write about Alt-X without talking about Mark Amerika. His editorial vision and energy suffuse the site and give it a sense of purpose. His artistic preoccupations still dominate the site. [...] For sure, books and associated e-books are still where the bulk of the traffic is, and indeed Amerika considers the Alt-X e-book series to be one of the most important developments on the site over the last two years, particularly the just-about-to-be-launched new critical e-book series produced in conjunction with Electronic Book Review. But in terms of pure innovation in the digital realm, Amerika and Alt-X are clearly aiming to take the avant garde high ground yet again with more performance-based, improvisatory works, feeding off popular digital trends such as V-jaying, net radio, location-based interaction and generative art. » (http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=100)

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