As the Internet infiltrates people's lives, it has changed the way businesses operate, stocks are traded and news is dispersed. It also is changing the face of the art world.
Standing at the forefront of this change is Mark Amerika, a pioneer in the digital arts field and a University of baby直播app at Boulder assistant professor in the fine arts department.
Amerika, who last spring was named one of Time magazine's top 100 innovators for the new century, creates his online artwork with 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.
Already 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 at CU-Boulder.
After conducting a national search last year, the fine arts department hired Amerika as its first professor of digital arts, according to Haynes.
She said Amerika will help the fine arts department engage the new digital art medium by developing a new curriculum at a time when interest is high.
Amerika already is working on 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 words, music and graphics 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 latest project is PHON:E:ME, an mp3 concept album that has sound, words and music. It presently is on exhibit at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and Videobrasil in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Being a pioneer in the field, Amerika is in high demand. This summer he traveled to Tokyo to present his work in a solo exhibition. Another large-scale solo retrospective of his digital art will take place at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London this November.
Like the pioneers of old, Amerika is blazing the trail as he goes, so the trail isn't set in stone. But that's the whole idea of digital art.
For more information about Mark Amerika visit his Web site at .