Biography
(Photo for press purposes. May be reproduced without written permission, as long as user includes the following line: "Copyright Mark Dery; all rights reserved. Photo: Jorge Madrigal.)
I'm a cultural critic. I've written about new media, visual culture, art and design, science and technology, emerging trends, subcultural style, gender, and gastronomy, but am best known for my writings on the politics of popular culture in books such as The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. I'm widely associated with the concept of "culture jamming," the guerrilla media criticism movement I popularized through my 1993 essay "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs," and "Afrofuturism," a term I coined and theorized in my 1994 essay "Black to the Future" (included in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, which I edited).
I've written for publications ranging from The New York Times Magazine to Rolling Stone to Salon to Cabinet; I've lectured everywhere from Australia to Austria, Belgium to Brazil, Macedonia to Mexico. I've been a professor in the Department of Journalism at New York University, a Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome, and, most proudly, a guest blogger at Boing Boing. I write a column of drive-by cultural commentary, "Doom Patrol," for the website True/Slant.
CONTACT INFO: Inquiries from publishers, editors, lecture agents and hosts, the media, and fervent fans are welcome, at markdery at verizon dot net.
Personal
Dery moonlights as a spoken-word musician and mash-up writer. In the '80s and '90s, he collaborated with the composer/multi-instrumentalist Darren Smith as one half of the music/spoken word duo Bite the Wax Tadpole. Long, long ago, in a universe far, far away, he pulled off a passable impersonation of Patti Smith during his brief-lived career as a performance poet.)
Selected Interviews
A curious little summer 2009 interview with the editors of the mail-art publication Abe's Penny. The scattershot fusillade of questions is part of its charm, a magpie mindset that animates the best of that little-noted and sometimes justifiably maligned microgenre, mail art.
"The Culture Jammer," an Austin Chronicle interview on the occasion of my keynote lecture at the 2003 "Games Without Borders" videogame and videogame theory conference at UT Austin.
"PostFuture Shock," a wide-ranging, off-the-beaten-path interview with Roy Christopher, editor of the brutally cool Front Wheel Drive.
"Vive la presse," a spirited (if somewhat linguistically fractured) Q&A with me, conducted for a rough-around-the-edges but intellectually combative little Parisian start-up called Verity. I'm in Al Gore/Inconvenient Truth-Mike Davis/Ecology of Fear eco-pocalyptic Jeremiah mode, in the last half of this.
"The Road Ahead," a Time magazine roundtable consisting of me, Malcolm Gladwell, David Brooks, Clay Shirky, Esther Dyson, Tim O'Reilly, and...Moby. The number of column inches each of us got correlated, unsurprisingly, with the number of weeks we'd been on the bestseller list...or not. Worth a glance.
"Loving the Alien," San Diego CityBeat editor Kelly Davis's short, drily funny interview-cum-introduction to an excerpt from my book-in-progress.
My Dinner with Dery," an almost unbearably hilarious Orange County Weekly column by Rebecca Schoenkopf, inspired by one of my lectures at UC Irvine during my time there as the Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow, in January 2000.
"Building a Progressive, Pragmatic Futurism: An E-mail Interview with Mark Dery" a provocative, in-depth interview from 1996, with the always insightful cultural critic and Net theorist Geert Lovink. Later included in Lovink's Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia.
"Mind to Mind with Mark Dery," a 1996 interview about Escape Velocity with the estimable Howard Rheingold, futurist, technoculture critic, and the Charlie Rose of online interviews.
"Peering into the Global Meta-Mind," an interview with The Boston Phoenix.
