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.
[One Minute Communication]
'One Minute Communication - 3D' (2004) by Daniel Jackson. The sculpture consists of two aluminium spheres suspended in a glass and white enamelled steel cabinet. The spheres are in conversation. An artificial-life program controls the conversation which is relayed through the movement of the 2 spheres. The AI nature of the software dictates that the conversation will never be repeated - the gesture speed, the positioning and the length of movement are all determined by a combination of randomness and probability.
Featuring the ReTag Participant’s “Retroactive Logo Distribution”
Again and again and again, capitalism consumes every possible alternative to itself that emerges. This represents a phenomenon that will continue to occur as long as such supposed 'alternatives' continue to be invented. What needs to be made clear to those who seek to challenge capitalism is that capitalism relies on otherness to itself to exist. Because of this, as long a forms representing difference toward capitalism continue to be invented, the voracious drive of what is essentially a consumptive machine will run into infinity.
Retroactive Logo Distribution (ReTag) here goes to the heart of the issue at stake with regard to this matter. It engages from an angle that bypasses the essential and basic assumption provoking the move to invent alternatives in the first place; that capitalism as a problem doesn’t inherently contain a redemptive quality (its own solution). Retroactive Logo Distribution represents just that: nothing less than a disease's answer to itself as a disease. Not to be confused with being 'negative' in the sense of offering no solution, this project functions according to a logic of a negation of negation. The resulting remainder should not be written off as representing 'nothing' but instead this 'nothing' should be understood as a embodiment of the end of capitalism in an action.
The adoption of capitalism's imperial drive to be omnipresent in the world presents the only real alternative to capitalism. If capitalism is to be challenged, the logic made clear in this project, essentially more capitalist than is good for capitalism, will in some form or another have to be adopted and spread like the disease that inspires it.
While federal agencies and the potentially infinite number of other secret and invisible services, that spy on the population of the countries they claim to protect, would ...
Tom Igoe
Tom Igoe is a lecturer at New York Universities Interactive Telecommunications Program mentioned in two posts over the last few weeks (RoPaSci and MoBeeLine). He has taught courses including; Introduction to Physical Computing, Sculpting with Data, Networked Objects, Sensor Workshop, Physical Computing Studio and his research focuses on physical computing techniques, applications and embedded networking applications.
There are several interesting works on his website projects page, two which are of particular interest to me. Email Clock (version 1) (above left), which has a version 2 (above right), is a clock which gets sped up depending on the number of new emails in an email account:
This clock would run at a normal pace when there is no email waiting for me, but every new kilobyte of email would drive it hyperactively forward. The clock would worry over the volume of my email so I wouldn’t have to.
The Networked Piano, a work which is currently in progress, is:
an internet-aware player piano…The idea was to find ways to physically represent the activity of the network [at ITP], to give visitors a feeling that something’s happening, and of the general pattern of activity…there are about 90 computers [in the department] in use for various purposes, I decided I’d start by mapping those computers one-to-one to the keys of a piano. Any network-related activity coming from or going to that computer would play a given key on the piano.
I look forward to seeing the latter of these complete, hopefully with some video / audio documentation.
Note: More information on his website about physical computing in his collection of resources, examples, and lecture notes for the physical computing courses at ITP. This is a usful resource for anyone looking to investigate physical computing and it’s some of ...
Mobile Flash Art: cell phone as artistic platform
Picture left of Kawai! Little jumping penguins from artist Taka designed for your mobile screen -- thanks to FlashLite art.
"Cell phones have become a creative playground for designers, illustrators or animators: a platform for visual expression, though somehow small in size, writes Verena in an article for PingMag, The Tokyo based magazine about "design and making things".
The article is illustrated and links to the works of many Japanese artists. It's a rare treat and explains what an important market this is in Japan where the average high-school girl spends around $127 per month for mobile content.
"Up until now most people are used to take pictures with their mobile camera and use that as wallpaper. Thanks Adobe's Flashlite -- an application that does all sorts of animated magic and is now so common on Japanese gadgets -- artists take over this tiny screen and create their version of an animated wallpaper, screensaver or calendar. Or they even create designs for the menu trying to find new ways of customizing the mobile user interface."
-- PingMag talked to Tokyo-based Mao Sakaguchi about his mobile art project called Gendai Geijutu Hakurankai.
-- This April Mao's newly founded project Gendai Geijutu Hakurankai started collecting Japanese illustrators, graphic designers, street artists or character designers to make cute little animated interfaces. You can browse through his Modern Art Expo Mobile Website and through the works of 20 currently linked artists via the mobile.
Continue reading PingMag for more on other mobile artists and their projects.
Alerting Infrastructure! Now Active!
My Alerting Infrastructure! project is now online at the Connected! show in Breda, The Netherlands! Watch the live stream here. Or open this link in VLC media player and watch it destroy the gallery in real-time. Above is a picture of the “giant” jackhammer/drill.
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.