Marisa Olson
Since the beginning
Works in Brooklyn, New York United States of America

ARTBASE (7)
PORTFOLIO (3)
BIO
Marisa Olson is an artist, writer, and media theorist. Her interdisciplinary work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, Tate(s) Modern + Liverpool, the Nam June Paik Art Center, British Film Institute, Sundance Film Festival, PERFORMA Biennial; commissioned and collected by the Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Houston Center for Photography, Experimental Television Center, and PS122; and reviewed in Artforum, Art21, the NY Times, Liberation, Folha de Sao Paolo, the Village Voice, and elsewhere.

Olson has served as Editor & Curator at Rhizome, the inaugural curator at Zero1, and Associate Director at SF Camerawork. She's contributed to many major journals & books and this year Cocom Press published Arte Postinternet, a Spanish translation of her texts on Postinternet Art, a movement she framed in 2006. In 2015 LINK Editions will publish a retrospective anthology of over a decade of her writings on contemporary art which have helped establish a vocabulary for the criticism of new media. Meanwhile, she has also curated programs at the Guggenheim, New Museum, SFMOMA, White Columns, Artists Space, and Bitforms Gallery. She has served on Advisory Boards for Ars Electronica, Transmediale, ISEA, the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, Creative Capital, the Getty Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kennedy Center, and the Tribeca Film Festival.

Olson studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, and Rhetoric & Film Studies at UC Berkeley. She has recently been a visiting artist at Yale, SAIC, Oberlin, and VCU; a Visiting Critic at Brown; and Visiting Faculty at Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and Ox-Bow. She previously taught at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts' new media graduate program (ITP) and was Assistant Professor of New Media at SUNY-Purchase's School of Film & Media Studies. She was recently an Artist-in-Residence at Eyebeam & is currently Visiting Critic at RISD.

Collectible After All: Christiane Paul on net art at the Whitney Museum


The Whitney Museum artport has been an important institutional presence in net art and new media since its launch in 2002. Created and curated by Christiane Paul, artport features online commissions as well as documentation of new media artworks from the museum's exhibitions and collections. This year, artport as a whole was made an official part of the Whitney Museum collection; to mark this occasion, participating artist Marisa Olson interviewed Paul about the program's history and evolution over thirteen years.

 Douglas Davis, image from The World's First Collaborative Sentence (1994).

Collections like artport are a rare and valuable window onto a field of practice that, in some senses, was borne out of not being taken seriously. From mid-80s Eastern European game crackers to late-90s net artists, the first people working online were often isolated, by default or design, and were certainly marginalized by the art world, where few curators knew of their existence and fewer took them seriously, advocated for them, or worked to theorize and articulate the art historical precedents and currents flowing through the work. Help me fast-forward to the beginning of this century at one of the most important international art museums. Many of the US museums that funded new media projects did so with dot-com infusions that dried-up after 2000. Artport officially launched in 2001; the same year, you curated a section devoted to net art in the Whitney Biennial. What was the behind-the-scenes sequence of events that led to artport's founding?

I think artport's inception was emblematic of a wave of interest in net art in the US around the turn of the century and in the early 2000s. This more committed involvement with the art form interestingly coincided with or came shortly after the dot com bubble, which inflated from 1997–2000, had its climax on March 10, 2000 when NASDAQ peaked, and burst pretty much the next day. Net art, however, remained a very active practice and started appearing on the radar of more US art institutions. To some extent, their interest may have been sparked by European exhibitions that had begun to respond to the effects of the web on artistic practice earlier on. In 1997, Documenta X had already included web projects (that year the Documenta website was also famously "stolen"—that is, copied and archived—by Vuk Cosic in the project Documenta: done) and Net Condition, which took place at ZKM in 1999/2000, further acknowledged the importance of art on the web.

US museums increasingly began to take notice. Steve Dietz, who had started the Walker Art Center's New Media Initiatives early on, in 1996, was curating the online art Gallery 9 and digital art study collection. Jon Ippolito, in his role as Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim, was commissioning net art in the early 2000s and in 2002, Benjamin Weil, with Joseph Rosa, unveiled a new version of SFMOMA's E-space, which had been created in 2000. This was the institutional netscape in which I created artport in 2001, since I felt that the Whitney, which had for the first time included net art in its 2000 Biennial, also needed a portal to online art. The original artport was much more of a satellite site and less integrated into whitney.org than it is now. Artist Yael Kanarek redesigned the site not too long after its initial launch and created version 1.1. Artport in its early days was sponsored by a backend storage company in New Jersey, which was then bought by HP, so HP appeared as the official sponsor. I think it is notable that sponsorship at that point did not come from a new tech company but a brand name that presumably wanted to appear more cutting edge.


booomerrranganggboobooomerranrang: Nancy Holt's networked video


Nancy Holt, Boomerang (1974), still from video.

In her time on this planet, Nancy Holt came to be known as a great American Land Artist, and certainly her brilliant installations, like Utah's Sun Tunnels and collaborations with her partner Robert Smithson and their peers, are profoundly significant, but it was her work in film & video that has had the greatest personal impact on me.

I somehow didn't see Boomerang, her 1974 video performance usually credited to her collaborator Richard Serra, until I was a Ph.D. student in Linda Williams's Phenomenology of Film seminar at UC Berkeley's Rhetoric program, but the time delay was more than made up for by the work's formative resonance. In the video, made during Serra's residency at a Texas television station, a young Holt is seen sitting in an anchor's chair before a staid blue background. Despite brief station ID graphic overlays and one minute of silence in the midst of the ten-minute piece (announced as audio trouble and reminding viewers of the work's live TV origin), the work is in many ways sound-centric.


Sound and Image in Electronic Harmony


semiconductor_nanowebbers.jpg
Image: Semiconductor: Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt, 200 Nanowebbers, 2005

On Saturday, April 11th, New York's School of Visual Arts will co-present the 2009 Visual Music Marathon with the New York Digital Salon and Northeastern University. Promising genre-bending work from fifteen countries, the lineup crams 120 works by new media artists and digital composers into 12 hours. If it's true, as is often said, that MTV killed the attention spans of Generations X and Y, this six-minute-per-piece average ought to suit most festivalgoers' minds, and the resultant shuffling on and off stage will surely be a spectacle in its own rite. In all seriousness, this annual event is a highlight of New York's already thriving electronic music scene and promises many a treat for your eyes and ears. The illustrious organizers behind the marathon know their visual music history and want to remind readers that, "The roots of the genre date back more than two hundred years to the ocular harpsichords and color-music scales of the 18th century," and "the current art form came to fruition following the emergence of film and video in the 20th century." The remarkable ten dozen artists participating in this one-day event will bring us work incorporating such diverse materials as hand-processed film, algorithmically-generated video, visual interpretations of music, and some good old fashioned music-music. From luminaries like Oskar Fischinger, Hans Richter, and Steina Vasulka to emerging artists Joe Tekippe and Chiaki Watanabe, the program will be another star on the map that claims NYC as fertile territory for sonic exploration. - Marisa Olson

READ ON »


Tagalicious


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The National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens, Greece, has committed itself to curating a number of recent exhibitions of internet art. Their current show, "Tag Ties and Affective Spies," features contributions from both net vets and emerging surfers, including Christophe Bruno, Gregory Chatonsky, Paolo Cirio, JODI, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, Les Liens Invisibles, Personal Cinema and The Erasers, Ramsay Stirling, and Wayne Clements. The online exhibition takes an antagonistic approach to Web 2.0, citing a constant balance "between order and chaos, democracy and adhocracy." Curator Daphne Dragona raises the question of whether the social web is a preexisting platform on which people connect, or whether it is indeed constructed in the act of uploading, tagging, and disclosing previously private information about ourselves on sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook. Dragona asks whether we are truly connecting and interacting, or merely broadcasting. While her curatorial statement doesn't address the issue directly, the show's title hints at the level of self-surveillance in play on these sites. Accordingly, many of the selected works take a critical, if not DIY, approach to the internet. The collective Les Liens Invisibles tends to create works that make an ironic mash-up of the often divergent mantras of tactical media, culture jamming, surrealism, and situationism. In their Subvertr, they encourage Flickr users to "subverTag" their posted images, creating an intentional disassociation between an image's content and its interpretion, with the aim of "breaking the strict rules of significance that characterize the mainstream collective imaginary..." JODI's work, Del.icio.us/ winning information (2008) exploits the limited stylistic parameters of the social bookmarking site. Using ASCII and Unicode page titles to form visual marks, a cryptic tag vocabulary, and a recursive taxonomy, their fun-to-follow site critiques the broader content of the web ...

READ ON »


Reappearance of the Undead


agatha_appears_lialina.gif

In 1997, internet art hall-of-famer Olia Lialina made a "net drama" called Agatha Appears that was written for Netscape 3 and 4 in HTML 3.2. One of the main features of the interactive narrative was the travel of the eponymous avatar across the internet. Let's just say the girl got around. But the magical illusion of the piece was that she appeared to stay still, even when links in the narrative were clicked and the viewer's address bar indicated movement to another server. But in time, both the browser and code in which the story was written became defunct and the piece unraveled as the sites previously hosting the links and files upon which Agatha was dependent disappeared or cleaned house. Such a scenario is common to early internet art (and will no doubt continue to plague the field), as ours is an upgrade culture constantly driving towards new tools, platforms, and codes. Many have debated whether to let older works whither or how it might be possible to update these works, making them compatible with new systems. For those who are interested, some of the best research on the subject has been performed by the folks affiliated with the Variable Media Initiative. Meanwhile, luddites and neophiles alike are now in luck because Agatha Appears has just undergone rejuvenation. Ela Wysocka, a restorer working at Budapest's Center for Culture & Communication Foundation has worked to overcome the sound problems, code incompatibilities, and file corruption and disappearance issues, and she's written a fascinating report about the process, here. And new collaborating hosts have jumped in line to bring the piece back to life, so that like a black and white boyfriend coming home from war, Agatha now offers us a shiny new webring as a token of ...

READ ON »



Discussions (281) Opportunities (10) Events (4) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

From EAI: Lawrence Weiner: Screening & Conversation


Looks interesting, for those of you in the NY area...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: news@eai.org <news@eai.org>
Date: Nov 10, 2005 7:05 AM
Subject: Lawrence Weiner: Screening & Conversation
To: marisa@marisaolson.com

Lawrence Weiner: Screening and Conversation

Thursday, November 17, 2005
6:30 pm

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10011
(212) 337-0680

Please join EAI for a special event with artist Lawrence Weiner.

The evening will feature the premiere of a new digital work and newly
restored film, audio, and video works by Lawrence Weiner.

Following the screening, Weiner will have a conversation with Dia Art
Foundation curator Lynne Cooke and filmmaker Brigitte Cornand.

The program will include the following:

- The premiere of a new digital work, Inherent in the Rhumb Line (2005)
- A newly restored 16mm film, Passage to the North (1981)
- Newly restored audio work
- Early video works

This special event launches EAI's representation and preservation of
film, video, audio and digital works by Lawrence Weiner.

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

Lawrence Weiner

A key figure in Conceptual Art, Lawrence Weiner has long pursued
inquiries into language and the art-making process. From his pioneering
installation works of the 1960s and '70s through his new digital
projects, Weiner posits a radical redefinition of the artist/viewer
relationship and the very nature of the artwork. Translating his
investigations into linguistic structures and visual systems across
varied formats and manifestations, Weiner has also produced books, films,
videos, performances and audio works.

Weiner was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1942. His works have been
widely exhibited internationally. Lawrence Weiner lives and works in New
York City.

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

About EAI

Founded in 1971, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is one of the world's
leading nonprofit resources for video art and interactive media. EAI's
core program is the international distribution of a major collection of
new and historical media works by artists. EAI's activities include a
preservation program, viewing access, educational services, online
resources, and public programs such as exhibitions and lectures. The
Online Catalogue provides a comprehensive resource on the 175 artists and
3,000 works in the EAI collection, including artists' biographies,
descriptions of works, QuickTime excerpts, research materials, Web
projects, and online ordering.

Electronic Arts Intermix
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10011
(212) 337-0680 tel
(212) 337-0679 fax
info@eai.org
www.eai.org

For more information about this event and about the works of Lawrence
Weiner, please visit www.eai.org

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

This event is funded, in part, by the Experimental Television Center. The
Experimental Television Center's Presentation Funds program is supported
by the New York State Council on the Arts.

DISCUSSION

Digital Cultures Lab


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Johannes Birringer <orpheus@rice.edu>
Date: Nov 4, 2005 1:40 PM
Subject: Digital Cultures Lab
To: marisa@rhizome.org

a n n o u n c e m e n t

Digital Cultures Lab

Commencing 28th November and running until 4th December, Nottingham will
play host to a remarkable array of digital artists who will bring their
most recent works to the city. Curated by Johannes Birringer, a
choreographer and Research Fellow at Nottingham Trent University's
School of Art and Design, the festival will showcase innovations in
dance, interactive media and new technology.

The Digital Cultures Lab festival launches with a conference attended by
over forty of the world's leading practitioners of technology-based
dance forms. They have been invited to Nottingham Trent University to
examine how interactive performance and other systems of
technology-based creativity - ranging from engineering, robotics,
architecture, games, music, fashion and textiles - impact on dance
cultures fostering a new performance 'transculture'.

Following the Lab, members of the public will be able to attend some of
the most innovative performances and screenings that lie at the
crossroads of dance, movement, and technology. These events include
music, video installations, DJ's, streaming media performances and the
newest digital dance theatre work.

Thursday 1 December
Opening Night, 8.30pm
Powerhouse and Basement, Victoria Studios
o Bodydataspace (G Boddington / A Terruli)
o Machinima (Ricard Gras)
o Pizzurno Revisited (Margarita Bali)
o DJ Tipuk and Venya Krutikov
o Image-controlled sound nanospheres (DS-X.org.Germany), featured as
part of a UK / Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen exchange of
artists groups
o Ballettikka Internettikka (Igor Stromajer)
o tedr:telematic performance between Nottingham, Sydney and Phoenix

Friday 2 December
8pm
Sandfield Centre
o Purushartha (Jayachandran Palazhy with Kunihiko Matsuo)
o 16 (R)evolutions (Troika Ranch)
o Dying on my Feet (Miranda Rights)
Additional Videodance programme curated by Nuria Font
Tickets:

DISCUSSION

Fwd: [thingist] (Re)Locating Contemporary African Art Practice


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Stacy Hardy <homeless@mweb.co.za>
Date: Nov 3, 2005 3:01 AM
Subject: [thingist] (Re)Locating Contemporary African Art Practice
To: thingist@bbs.thing.net

Artists, writers, theorists, digital networkers, DJs and urban planners
from the think tanks, media networks and streets of Cape Town,
Johannesburg, Enugu, Cairo, Luanda, Vienna, Oslo and San Diego: a
multiplicity of nations and disciplines converge at SESSIONS eKAPA 2005,
an international art meeting held at the Cape Town International
Convention Centre, Cape Town, South Africa on 4-6 December 2005.

The theme of the meeting is "Mzantsi: (Re)Locating Contemporary African
Art Practice" and the conversations question the location and production
of contemporary cultural practices in Africa, exploring specifically the
interface between local art practice and global art circuits.

Speakers already confirmed include artist, curator and writer Gavin
Jantjes, theorist Achille Mbembe, writer and curator Olu Oguibe, cultural
provocateur Kendell Geers, Triennal de Luanda's Fernando Alvim & Cardoso
Albano, Documenta 12's Ruth Noack and word bomber Lesego Rampolokeng.

African forums for emerging voices get a platform when Ntone Edjabe
(chimurenga), Thomas Gesthuizen (africanhiphop.com), Krydz Ikwuemesi (Pan
African Circle of Artists), Koyo Kouoh (African Association for
Contemporary Culture) and Marcus Neustetter (UNESCO DigiArts) discuss new
circuits for networking the continent.

The programme also features site specific minialaboratories that explore
the interface between urban space, local art practice and global circuits:
there are coffeebeans routes Mustafa Maluka's virtual Pan Africa, Mimi
Cherono Ng'ok's street art tour, Claire Tancons' experiments with
carnival. Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi explores centre and periphery, from Enugu
to Langa, Gabi Ngcobo and Khwezi Gule re-map the city, and the minilabs
converge in a Lookout Hill Lawaai.

Seats for SESSIONS eKAPA 2005 are limited. For programme and further
details, visit www.capeafrica.org. Travel packages including accommodation
are available. For more information on travelling to SESSIONS eKAPA and to
register, contact the conference secretariat, Kashief Gamieldien, at
kashief@tribalco.co.za or +27 (0) 21 697 0180. Early registration is
discounted, but closes on 4 November.

OPPORTUNITY

Fwd: Call for Works: The ELO Electronic Literature Collection


Deadline:
Thu Nov 03, 2005 14:52

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Carol Ann Wald
Date: Nov 3, 2005 1:00 PM
Subject: Call for Works: The ELO Electronic Literature Collection
To: marisa@rhizome.org

THE ELECTRONIC LITERATURE COLLECTION -- A CALL FOR WORKS

The Electronic Literature Organization seeks
submissions for the first Electronic Literature Collection. We invite the
submission of literary works that take advantage of the capabilities and
contexts provided by the computer. Works will be accepted until January
31, 2006. Up to three works per author will be considered.

The Electronic Literature Collection will be an annual publication of
current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual,
public library, and classroom use. The publication will
be made available both online, where it will be available for download for
free, and as a packaged, cross-platform CD-ROM, in a case appropriate for
library processing, marking, and distribution.
The contents of the Collection will be offered under a Creative Commons
license so that libraries and educational institutions will be allowed to
duplicate and install works and individuals will be
free to share the disc with others.

The editorial collective for the first volume of the Electronic Literature
Collection, to be published in 2006, is:

N. Katherine Hayles
Nick Montfort
Scott Rettberg
Stephanie Strickland

This collective will review the submitted work and select pieces for the
Collection.

The editorial collectives for each volume will be chosen by the Electronic
Literature Organization's board of directors. The tentative editorial
collective for the second Collection, to be published in 2007, includes
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Marjorie C. Luesebrink, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin.

Literary quality will be the chief criterion for selection of works. Other
aspects considered will include innovative use of electronic techniques,
quality and navigability of interface, and adequate representation of the
diverse forms of electronic literature in the collection as a whole.

For the first Collection, the collective will consider works up to 50 MB
in size, uncompressed. Works submitted should function on both Macintosh
OS X (10.4) and Windows XP. Works should function without requiring users
to purchase or install additional software. Submissions may require
software that is typically pre-installed on contemporary computers, such
as a web browser, and are allowed to use the current versions of the most
common plugins.

To have a work considered, all the authors of the work must agree that if
their work is published in the Collection, they will license it under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License
, which will permit
others to copy and freely redistribute the work, provided the work is
attributed to its authors, that it is redistributed non- commercially, and
that it is not used in the creation of derivative works. No other
limitation is made regarding the author's use of any work submitted or
accepted.

To submit a work:

1) Prepare a plain text file with the following information:
a) The title of the work.
b) The names and email addresses of all authors and contributors of
the work.
c) The URL where you are going to make your .zip file available for us
to download. The editorial collective will not publish the address of
this file.
d) A short description of the work -- less than 200 words in length.
f) Any instructions required to operate the work.
g) The date the work was first distributed or published, or
"unpublished" if it has not yet been made available to the public.

2) Prepare a .zip archive including the work in its entirety. Include the
text file from step (1) at the top level of this archive, and name it
"submisson.txt".

3) Upload the .zip file to a web server so that it is available at the
specified location.

4) Place all of the text in the "submisson.txt" file in the body of an
email and send it to collection@eliterature.org with the name of the piece
being submitted included in the subject line.

The Electronic Literature Collection is supported by institutional
partners including the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW)
at the University of Pennsylvania, ELINOR: Electronic Literature in the
Nordic Countries, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
(MITH) at the University of Maryland, The Richard Stockton College of New
Jersey, and The School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the
University of Minnesota.

Please forward this call to appropriate mailing lists and to individuals
who might be interested in submitting their work.


DISCUSSION

Tenure Track Position - Middle East Computer Graphics Exchange Program


From:"doreen maloney" <dmalone@uky.edu>

Middle East Fine Arts Computer Graphics Exchange Program has immediate
positions available for Full-time instructors to teach diverse range of
courses including Art & Design Foundations, Computer Graphics and Art
History for New York Institute of Technology Middle East exchange campuses
at Bahrain and Abu Dhabi.

1 year renewable contract. Negotiable salary range $55K -$75K + depending
on level of qualifications. Housing, Travel and Fringe Benefits package
included.

Minimum qualifications: MFA degree in Fine Arts preferably with
concentration in Computer Graphics, Graphic Design, Animation, or Web
Design. At least 3 years prior teaching experience at university level
preferred with demonstrated professional experience in any of the above
fields.

Applicants must send CV with significant portfolio of art, design and
computer graphics (Website Portfolio acceptable) to Robert Michael Smith
<rmsmith@nyit.edu>

Short listed candidates will be invited for personal interview at New York
home campus.