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.
Flip Frogs
Flip Frogs is a curious project from 2004 by Meridith Pingree:
rainbow ribbon-wire, green LEDs, MDF, conductive nickel paint, backflipping plastic frogs, aluminum foi.
of water in conductive paint covers the surface of the shelf. Every painted line feeds into one of the strands of rainbow ribbon-wire, either positive or negative, which intersect on the wall with an LED. When people play with the foil-footed frogs, they are crossing wires and activating various locations on the wall with limited control.
Why do I blog this? an intriguing example of location activation of toy-like artifact. A model for a weird wires-apparent board game?
The Music Machine Is Cookin’
Word came to me on ifMUD of la Pate a Son, a fascinating tile-based contraption for music-making by LaCielEstBlue. If you’re interested in the aesthetics of elaborate machinery in the digital age, or just would like to play with a fun music-producing toy, check it out. There's a longer write-up of the piece on Jay is Games.
New Media Book Published: The Body and the Screen
M White:
Hello, my book on Internet and computer spectatorship--The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship--was just published by MIT Press. I thought that it would be of interest to other Rhizome readers because it has chapters on such things as the interface, net art, digital imaging, and how avatar production is conceptualized as painting. It also has a brief consideration of the debates that occurred around Rhizome membership. I am including full publication details and the table of contents below. I would be happy to answer any questions.
All my best, Michele
White, Michele. The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. ISBN 0-262-23249-9
The Body, the Screen, and Representations: An Introduction to Theories of Internet Spectatorship
1. Making Internet and Computer Spectators Introduction Rendering Liveness, Materiality, and Space Notions of the Empowered User Addressing the Spectator Stabilizing Identity Erasing the Interface Conclusion: Active Users by Design
2. Visual Pleasure through Textual Passages: Gazing in Multi-user Object-oriented Settings (MOOs) Introduction MOOs The Look and the Gaze Character Creation and Attributes in MOOs The Look and the Gaze in MOOs Gendered Gazing in MOOs Graphical MOOs Conclusion: Between Multiple and Coherent Identity
- Too Close to See, Too Intimate a Screen: Men,
Women, and Webcams
Introduction
Feminism and Spectatorship
Critical and Journalistic Considerations of Webcams
Webcams
Women and Webcams
Regulating the Spectator
Women Webcam Operators and Authority
Visibility and Webcams
Making Texts Real
Some Problems with Webcam Viewing
Just a Guy
Conclusion: The Politics of Being Seen
4. The Aesthetic of Failure: Confusing Spectators with Net Art Gone Wrong Introduction Aesthetics and Net Art Net Art An Aesthetic of Failure Jodi Peter Luining Michaël Samyn Conclusion: The Limits of Failure and Repetition
5. Can You Read Me? Setting-specific Meaning in Virtual Places ...
Sonic siestas
Sonic Bed_Shanghai plays new music which moves and vibrates for and through the bodies of an audience.
This sonic and social experiment takes the form of an oversized king-size bed. Due to their frequency and intensity, the sounds are perceived not only with the ears but also with the entire body in what is a surprising experience. The sound affects the body: ribcage-rattling rumbles, lung-fluttering twitters, colon-wobbling throbs, cranial-massaging noise comes and goes in waves, moving up and down, wrote a tester.
Sonic Bed_Shanghai is part of a series of sonic beds designed and composed for by Kaffe Matthews. The project is to build 12 localized beds in 12 different countries around the world. Each of these worldwide beds will use the same design but be built locally with a new sound work being made by Matthews using site specific sound material of that country.
To create this music, a specially developed software interface is being developed through the Music for Bodies research, through which the maker can draw and record sounds through the space of the speakers built into the bed's frame and beneath the mattress. Sonic Bed contains a 12 channel sound system. 12 independant sources of sound can thus be playing and moving independantly at any one time.
More sonic siestas:
Staalplaat Soundsytem's The ultrasound of therapy.
Lynn Pook and Julien Clauss' reactions epidermiques (previously called PAUSE) is made of 5 hammocks connected to each other at the center by strings. Any movement caused by the presence of a visitor is transmitted to the other hammocks.
When a visitor sits in a hammock or leaves it, the rocking movements of the hammock are detected by sensors. This information influences in real time the audio-tactile events transmitted by 9 loudspeakers distributed in the hammocks. The sounds ...
Troy

Troy is an augmented reality web-based game created in a week as part of the Experimental Gameplay Project.
Based on the theme of violation, the game explores invasion of privacy on the internet. Inquisitiveness from players is rewarded, but the game questions the lengths players go to to satisfy their own curiosity.
To avoid spoilers, don't read the comments or the post mortem.
Rhizome Today: A critic, with opinions about postinternet art
My own effort in talking about Postinternet, at least in those early instances, as on the panel, was to (a) expand Rhizome's mission--I was then Editor & Curator--to cover and support a wider variety of practices; and (b) just to describe my own work and how a project like my Monitor Tracings (totally "offline" drawings) could be contextualized as internet art, or art 'after' the internet (i.e. In the style of & made after I log-off.) I think Michael puts it *perfectly* when he says, "we should understand all our gestures, 'online' and 'offline,' as actions in a network that is mediated and administered by computers." Perhaps this is obvious, but I'd say this applies to all of waking life, not just art production+reception.
I've personally moved from discussing Postinternet Art as "art after the internet" toward discussing Postinternet as "the symptoms of network culture." I am less interested in discussing PI Art specifically/exclusively, now that people have brow-beaten and/or branded the term into something far different than what I originally meant, and much more interested in discussing the social affects around the production of postinternet conditions and their manifestations. And, meanwhile, I have said (particularly in the Ullens catalogue & also in an interview in the Art and the Internet book put out by Black Dog) that, to me, Postinternet is just a 'placeholder' term around which to convene in having conversations around the latter symptoms. (I've started working on spelling these out more explicitly in recent & forthcoming writing-- including the keynote lecture I just gave at Pratt's UPLOAD conference, entitled "Postinternet is Dead. Long Live Postinternet.")
Likes/Dislikes around the word, aside, I hope this very long-running conversation around art and the internet can continue to incorporate careful consideration of the affects of network culture, as networks themselves evolve.
Breaking the Ice
Like most of the folks above, I too am a "forever member," from the days of the Rhizome Communications ascii RAW listserv and, later, fancy Dreamweaver/Flash "Splash Pages," to the present. Reena Jana and I were the first two paid writers (poached from Wired!), when Alex Galloway was running "content," which at that time meant programming and editorial--though Rhizome was declaratively non-editorial, so they just commissioned book & exhibition reviews, and some interviews from us that were fed into the RAW stream and included in the Digest as Features. Oy vey, I can still remember the cross-eyed weekly ritual of trying to untangle parallel conversations to reassemble them into a coherent thread for the Digest, when I was editing it--and the race to get it out by noon one day each week!!
I've seen Rhizome go through so many changes, and I've been a part of the back channel conversations on years of them, including huge ones that we decided not to go through with. I have to say that it's always hard to serve a membership-based organization, which is what Rhizome has always thought of itself as. But I can say that every change in content or form has been discussed critically, at length, and typically not without a degree of passion.
I am also biting my tongue because I *really* do not want to put words in any staff member's mouth (past or present), but I can say that I believe everyone who's ever worked there has taken their position as a labor of love, with users/reader/members/community (everyone has their favorite self-identification; semantics trolls please don't hate today!) in mind, and everyone has collaborated with the staff to bring a unique take on how best to serve you in the current creative and technological climate. For instance, I remember that my big objective coming in the door was wanting to change the mission statement to reflect not only net art and not only highly technological art, but also art that "reflects" on technology in a meaningful way. In fact, I think contemplating this change was very much a part of my conceptualizing Postinternet.
There is so much to say here, but I think I'd best sign off. This is not my soap box, and in some way, it feels weird to comment so much. I used to be a Superusing Megaposter, but as soon as I became Editor & Curator, I stepped back to focus on trying to facilitate and amplify other voices, which I do believe every Rhizome Editor has done in their own way.
I'll end with this, then. I'd be surprised if every reader, writer, or editor loved everything that ever appeared (structurally or content-wise) in their newspaper of choice. I'd be surprised if every curator or museumgoer loved every artwork shown (or every exhibition design decision) in their favorite museum. But it's the day we stop reading, stop going to look at art that disappoints me. It's the day Rhizome stops experimenting that scares me. And I wish them well on this new experiment.
Conference Report: NET.ART (SECOND EPOCH)
Thank you for these points of clarification. I actually tried to convey (and forgive me if I failed) that your presentation was unique in identifying multiple generations of networked artists, and I particularly liked the way you talked about artists working before the internet in ways that anticipated network culture.
You also made that great point (via Hal Foster) about the ways in which critics' work is influenced by what is/ was happening at the moment they entered the art world. I admire how you helped pioneer new media criticism and yet have continued to stay on the pulse of new work. This is what I had in mind when recalling your point about your relationship to a previous generation of net-dot-artists, versus the artists of the era Inclusiva was calling the "second epoch." I just really liked the way you fleshed out more than two epochs and I wanted to highlight your catalyzing role in the net-dot-art scene, in particular.
In my own presentation, my intent absolutely was not to dismiss any previous artists, movements, practices, etc. It was simply to flesh-out one niche of new media art practice. In fact, I really liked the pointed questions that the audience asked afterwards, because it helped us have a really meaningful discussion about the problematic relationship of pro surfer work to art historical discourse, and my calls to action revolved around getting those artists to participate in learning about their own pre-histories and writing historiographies that situate their own trajectories on their own terms.
So I don't think we're in disagreement. But I appreciate your call to fine-tune my articulation of these scenarios.
Go Ahead, Touch Her
Go Ahead, Touch Her
I'm sorry that you found my article objectionable. I didn't intend to make the implications you suggest, but I believe your response cuts to the most interesting aspect of Laric's piece, which is the effect of remixing.
For those who care to review the lyrics to this song, they are here:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/mariahcarey/touchmybody.html
They include the refrain:
Touch my body
Put me on the floor
Wrestle me around
Play with me some more
Touch my body
Throw me on the bed
So, in fact, I do think that Carey's lyrics (and video) invite sexual fantasy, but my article doesn't say that she is asking to be violated, it says that she's asking to be remixed. Of course, the slippage between the two that you identify is what's so interesting.
In an interview with Laric, he told me that he noticed that the video takes-on an increased sexual tone when all but Carey is masked out. He was interested in how this first-person invitation to "touch my body" could be construed as an invitation to remix the visage of her body (and/or the voice emitted from it), particularly given (a) the implicit link to digital culture embodied by both the lyrics and video, and (b) the fact that the remix is now such an important part of the media ecology of pop culture.
In the last 25+ years of pop music, lining-up celebrity remixes and making singles remix-ready has been an important part of the production cycle, often preceding the release of the original recording. Almost all historical accounts of Madonna's rise to fame cite her relationship with DJs and openness to remixing as a key factor in her success. So while you may see the remix as a violent act, clearly those participating in this industry see it as an imperative.
Discussions of why a remix is or isn't violent are interesting, as they get to questions of the status of the digital reproduction. Are we remixing a person or "just" her image, and what's the difference when thinking about how a person's identity--particularly a famous person's identity--hinges upon their image? Carey's image was already manipulated before it came to us. In the interview with Laric, he pointed to a segment in the original video in which the shape of a cup becomes distorted as a result of distorting the footage to make the singer standing behind the cup appear slimmer. So this is already not her. If you listen closely, I believe there is also a question as to whether all of the voiced parts of the song are her, so the audio issue adds another layer to the phenomenological question of the brute force of the remix.
These issues of the import of the remix, the relationship to broader pop culture (rather than an insular art world), collective authorship, and the nature of Carey's invitation are what I hoped to address in this article.