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Before “born digital” became a library-science category, In Memoriam to Postmodernism was already behaving like one. Mark Amerika and Lance Olsen assembled this 1995 collection around Avant-Pop: a deliberately unruly response to a culture saturated by television, advertising, cyberpunk, popular music, cinema, commodity spectacle, and the rapidly expanding World Wide Web. The project first appeared through Amerika’s Alt-X network and was then reconfigured as a 212-page SDSU Press paperback.
The result is both argument and time capsule: fiction writers, critics, theorists, hypertext pioneers, filmmakers, and border-cultural provocateurs testing what literary practice might become when “high” and “low” culture could no longer be kept in separate rooms. Three decades later, its preoccupations—remix, media overload, networked identity, unstable authorship, art made from the debris of mass culture—look considerably less like a period curiosity than a rough draft of the present.
A book with two lives. Lance Olsen’s bibliography records that In Memoriam to Postmodernism was published electronically by Alt-X in 1995 and in a slightly different print version by San Diego State University Press the same year. Alt-X itself still describes its “Virtual Imprints” as an archive of its earliest web files and specifically names In Memoriam to Postmodernism among them.
Born on the Early Web
The original electronic edition belongs to the first generation of serious literary publishing on the Web. Alt-X began operations in 1993, and its surviving site describes the network as a meeting point for experimental writing, electronic literature, net art, sound, theory, and new-media culture. Contemporary scholarship still cites the old direct address for this project as altx.com/memoriam/pomo.html.
That history matters. This was not simply a print anthology later uploaded for convenience; the traffic went the other way. The online environment was part of the intellectual argument from the start, with the print book becoming a material afterlife for a work that had already circulated as networked culture.
- Explore the surviving Alt-X / Virtual Imprints network
- Historical direct address for In Memoriam to Postmodernism (an early-web path; availability may vary)
- SDSU Press archive: 2010 revisit of the book
- SDSU Press archive: 2012 “Is It All Over Now?” retrospective
The Editors
Mark Amerika is a pioneering net artist, novelist, media theorist, and professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Founder of Alt-X in 1993, he went on to create works including GRAMMATRON, selected for the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and has continued exploring remix, digital poetics, artificial creativity, mobile cinema, and networked art.
Lance Olsen is the author of more than thirty books of and about innovative writing and is Professor Emeritus at the University of Utah. His fiction, criticism, and experimental prose have been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Berlin Prize, NEA fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, and other honors. His career has remained insistently devoted to forms that resist closure and conventional narrative architecture.
Contributors: A 1995 Avant-Pop Constellation
University of Iowa scholar and longtime teacher of science fiction, popular culture, and contemporary narrative.
Electronic-literature pioneer whose afternoon, a story became a foundational work of literary hypertext.
Experimental novelist and poet, author of f/32 and Satyricon USA, associated with the period’s boundary-breaking feminist fiction.
Experimental fiction writer and essayist whose work moves between literary invention, cultural criticism, and attacks on institutional conformity.
Filmmaker and digital artist behind Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees and its landmark hypermedia incarnation, Waxweb.
SDSU critic, editor, and professor who helped map postmodern, cyberpunk, and Avant-Pop writing for several generations of readers.
Novelist, theorist, and major force in American experimental fiction; a key figure in Fiction Collective and later FC2.
Japanese scholar of American literature and science fiction, especially cyberpunk and the cross-Pacific traffic of postmodern culture.
Avant-Pop writer whose “Writing as Incorrectness” appeared in American Book Review’s 1994 “Avant-Pop Rant & Rave” focus.
Net artist, novelist, theorist, Alt-X founder, and co-editor of this volume.
Experimental novelist, critic, and co-editor whose work has continually tested the limits of narrative form.
Cultural critic and philosopher known for writing on film, science fiction, music, affect, technology, and post-cinematic culture.
Professor Emeritus at SDSU and former director of San Diego State University Press, with extensive work in literature, cultural theory, translation, and border studies.
Bilingual novelist, Beckett scholar, Distinguished Professor at SUNY Buffalo, and theorist of “surfiction,” fiction that flaunts its own constructedness.
Writer of science fiction, horror, weird fiction, criticism, and other forms of deliberately off-center literary experiment.
From the Original CODE[X] Page
![Avant-Pop image preserved from the original CODE[X] catalog page](avant.GIF)
a surviving artifact from the original catalog page