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.
Design for technology addicts
What happens when someone using a new technology finds it to be so enticing that they feel compelled to indulge to an excessive degree, disrupting their lives and fracturing relationships?
Design For the Computer Obsessive, a project by Joe Malia graduating student in Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art in London, centers on the role design can play in guiding these individuals through their turbulent affair with the technology.
For example, Private Public is a series of objects that highlight the privacy we sacrifice when using mobile technological devices in public spaces.
By wearing the mobile phone scarf, you can venture into public spaces confident that if the need to compose a private text message were to arise the object could be pulled over the face to create an isolated environment.
Meanwhile, devoted PSP players can explore their passion in complete privacy (though i can't garantee they'll be unnoticed) by using a similar model specifically designed for the gaming console.
See also: Crispin Jones's Electrophile, Christain Palino's Peripheral Needs.
Sound Visions exhibition
Sound is image is sound
Contemporary experience's conversion to digital is undeniable, the nomadic aspect of (new) technologies has become complete ubiquity and today everything can be thought of as zeros and ones, as information in its most abstract and immaterial version. Having that in mind what happens to the apparently ontological difference between sound and image, audition and vision?
Sound Visions intends to show this crumbling down of the differences between these two distinct modes of acess to reality. Andre Gonsalves and Andre Sier work from that place where it is impossible to define where one strats and the other ends. They use each one of those modes to stimulate the other, causing a generalized undefinition, from which it is no longer possible to tell what is cause and what is effect, if it the sound generating the images or if it is the images that are causing the sounds. The spiral is endless, sound is generating images that generates sound that again generates new images. the system replicates itself, always in interaction with the audience, pulled into the vortex of events taking place.
Sound Visions is a project developed specifically by the Upgrade! Lisbon for the Village Festival
Sound Visions
Andre Goncalves/Andre Sier
Sala do Risco
June 16 - July 15
Tuesdays to Sundays, 10h00-19h00
For more info please go to http://www.lisboa20.pt/upgrade
Long-Distance Media Relationships
For three years, Chicago, Illinois-based artist John Kannenberg and Long Beach, California-based artist Glenn Bach have been collaborating cross-country. The two gather data, photos, sound, and other materials on their daily walks and upload them to the internet, to compare their respective residences. Next Sunday they'll take their collaboration across the pond, participating in a performative round of live file-mixing hosted at London's E:vent and organized by Furthernoise and curator Roger Mills. The curious can visit the space to witness the actions unfolding and see large-scale projections, but those stateside or elsewhere can also go online to watch the remixers work. At the end of the initial session, as Alex Young constructs post-performance soundscapes, audience members can also participate by uploading their own files and mashing-up their own MP3s or maps. The resulting images might resemble something like a 'global village.' - Marisa Olson
Audio-Visual-Disk-Jockey
More turntable research.
Audio-Visual-Disk-Jockey vinyl turntable (AVDJ Deck) from 3eyes (former RCA students) is a device that allows you to scratch video and audio media using a normal turntable and unmodified record.
“The AVDJ deck is in fact a steel deck plate that can be fitted to any Technics 1200 or 1210 turntable in less than 10 seconds, - the 1200 and 1210 being the ubiquitous, industry standard deck found in literally all clubs”.
Looking at the videos, they appear to be using an optical sensor (maybe from a hacked mouse). This is an approach that VScratch also used. Putting the sensor on the end of an arm though is a nice touch. It does appear that using an optical mouse has quite a bit of latency between the scratching and response. Does anyone else have any experience of this?
(thanks Mark)
Image Culrure City Festival - YOKOHAMA EIZONE -
<p><img SRC="http://www.shift.jp.org/blog/img/gbtop.jpg" width="400"><br />
EIZONE@BankART1929, "GLOBAL BEARING" by Norimichi Hirakawa, exhibited at CHIKYUTEN.
"YOKOHAMA EIZONE" will be held from July 22nd. It is a culture event of images linking to the city, and you can experience the latest film art by visiting historic monuments in waterfront areas in Yokohama city.
<p>In Yokohama city, "culture art urban design" is promoted as a measure emphasizing on creation of urban areas with culture and art. The opened culture and the beautiful city landscape are better suited for doing creative works. In order to gather the image culture industry, such as CG which is expected to high rate of growth among a creative industry, game, broadcast, movies and education institutions, with this environment, it has already been started with Graduate School of image, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and business institution. </p>
There are two main sections in this festival; "EIZONE picnic" that everyone can touch and enjoy looking round without constraint during this summer vacation, and "symposiums" with Japan's top-class industrial participants searching for the possibility of new market in the image culture industry. By combining resources and attraction of Yokohama, and sending the most advanced image culture, it promotes Yokohama's original "image culture urban design".
Participated artists include Norimichi Hirakawa and Yushi Ito, who made an animation "Nyakki (caterpillar character) and clay of a music video for Hikaru Utada's "traveling".
Image Culrure City Festival - YOKOHAMA EIZONE -
Date: 22nd - 30th July, 2006
Place: Historic monuments around Nihon Univ. street, Basyamichi, and other waterfront area.
EIZONE picnic: ZA*IM annes, BankART 1929, and more.
Symposium: Hamagin Hall viamare
Contact: Yokohama EIZONE executive
Tel: +81-3-3481-7920
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.