Mark Amerika
Digital Personas
Katzen Arts Center @ American University

It is not often that I attend an event and leave it feeling as if my brain had completely failed me. I'm not sure I even understood why I was there in the first place. Mark Amerika is either a person's whose intellect completely surpassed mine or a good magician. I don't think I could comprehend everything that went on in the lecture but despite my inability to feel as if I completely grasped everything he said, I was captivated none the less. It was like reading poetic philosophy, so many meanings coming from the same sentences, from the same words. I cared less about his work I only wanted him to keep talking so that I could continue to feel as if I was being inundated with pearls of intellectual ideas, and nuggets of creative motives. His work as a side note was very interesting, you could feel from not only the artist, but also his work, was that his pieces were not just applications or just installations or just novels; they were exercises, or a way of testing the boundaries of social truths. In society we hold things to be universal and understood. We have set definitions and we generally accept them and continue on with our daily lives. Every now and then a person comes along in the guise of an artist, or a philosopher, or doctor, or an idiot savant . . . but their work, or words, or actions causes us to wake up and actually think about those social truths. Listening to Mark Amerika was like getting a personal wake up call. There is much more to ponder and to think about. The purpose of art is not to mimic the masters, or to mock or to rebel against them, but like the masters to create a new movement not only of art but of social truths.