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.
New Criteria for New Media
An argument for redefining promotion and tenure criteria for faculty in new media departments of today's universities.
Timo Kahlen
Ephemeral Media
left : "Media Dirt", 2004. Sound installation based on ephemeral, interfering radio waves at KIASMA National Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland // right : "UR", 2006. Net art / interactive sound piece. Courtesy Ruine der Kuenste Berlin.
Sound and media artist Timo Kahlen (*1966, living and working in Berlin) has been nominated for the German national "Sound Art Prize 2006". He has been working with immaterial and ephemeral media (light, sound, wind, radiation) for more than twenty years. As part of his nomination, he has been invited to present selected sound installations at the Ruine der Kuenste Berlin, at the Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl and at the "SoundART 2006" special exhibition of the ART COLOGNE fair. For a detailed documentation of his experimental work see http://www.staubrauschen.de/soundsc.htm
From April 27 - April 29, 2007, a new selection of web-based, generative sound works by Timo Kahlen will now be presented at "The Sonic Image": 2007 Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference in Perth (AUS). These include "Sound Drift" (2005 in collaboration with Ian Andrews) and "ping tschae tschae" (2005) and, for example, "UR" (2006).
For 2007, Timo Kahlen is currently preparing exhibitions in Berlin, Chemnitz and Milano.
Amy Franceschini's Victory in Gardening at SFMOMA
by Worldchanging San Francisco local blogger, Rose Miller This past Saturday marked the opening of the SECA art award exhibition, which runs through April 22, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). SECA, Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art, an auxiliary of SFMOMA, awards talented local artists biennially. Amy Franceschini, one of the six most recent award recipients, is an artist and graphic designer who works with the boundaries between art, activism, community organizing, and in the case of the work currently on display at SFMOMA, gardening. Her project featured in the SECA exhibition re-imagines the Victory Gardens of World Wars I and II for the present political and ecological situation. Design can be used as an activist tool, and Franceschini uses it adeptly. In the project, she uses good design to organize, and mobilize community activity. The exhibition of her pilot Victory Garden program features, among other works, historical documents, Franceschini's own Victory Garden kits, posters advertising planting parties, a video of the pilot project in action, and related sculptural elements. The pilot gardens were realized in under-utilized front- and back yards in San Francisco using Franceschini's vision. She supplied each garden with a carefully designed... (more)
(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Arts at 1:09 PM)
Doug Henderson @ Gigantic Art Space
The one and only Doug Henderson is a part of [silence] group show in Gigantic Art Space
(59 Franklin St. downtown). If you have never seen his "untitled 2004" speakers filled with water this may be the last chance before they fly away to Europe! The sound going through the speakers generates amazing patterns on the water surface, no actual sound is audible...
Great piece, which premiered at vertexList two years ago.
[silence] is an intriguing show of conceptual sound art, revolving around silence and capacity of sound to be experienced via other senses. The exhibition was curated by Galen Joseph-Hunter and Dylan J. Gauthier. I will be back to check it out, the opening reception was super-packed!
Douglas Henderson (untitled 2004) Water, speakers, low frequency sine waves, 79:00
Remix Theory Launch
Eduardo Navas:
http://remixtheory.net http://remixtheory.org http://remixtheory.com
Remix Theory is an online resource by Eduardo Navas that offers some of his research on Remix.
Navas focuses on Remix itself as opposed to Remix Culture. In this site you will find a brief definition of Remix, which is examined more extensively in essays that will be added to this website as they become available.
Remix Theory is not meant to function on a daily basis. It is a resource updated periodically, according to the flow of research. It does not focus on the latest information, but on relevant material to the history of Remix, some which may have been published years ago. The site contains material that is obtained from other online sources, with the proper reference to the original source. The content of the site consists of reviews, articles, projects and images relevant to Remix. The site also features reviews, criticisms and preliminary theories by Eduardo Navas.
Remix Theory is designed to move towards a remix of itself, by recombining much of the material that is archived to put to test the possibilities of Remix. This will become transparent as the database grows, and specific projects are developed. The site is designed to host, archive and promote projects which explore the current possibilities of Remix online and offline; it is prepared to become a repository of collaborations with different people and institutions.
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.