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.
Openlab 3 - Exhibition and 2 Events (Free)
OPENLAB 3
Group Show, 4/11-11/11/2006 1-7pm
Auto-Italia South London Gallery 82-86 Queens Road
SE152QX Peckham, London
Opening Event and Private View, 4/11/2006 4 -12 pm
Closing Event, 11/11/2006 4-12 pm
OpenLab is delighted to present OpenLab3, an group exhibition with an opening and closing event featuring musical performances by more than 20 artists and musicians of the OpenLab collective. OpenLab engages in the aesthetics and politics of Free Open Source Software Culture. Free Software Culture seeks to emphasise transparency of the creative process by making all stages of development available to others, enabling them to learn how the creation works and alter it for their own purposes. When this idea is applied to artistic practices, the boundaries between the artistic usage of software tools and their collaborative development become blurred. The workings of the artist's tools are exposed, and the artists are actively engaged in developing media technologies. They can modify them to suit their goals, rather than creating works by using existing tools that impose "their way of doing things" on the artwork.
This group exhibition brings together interactive installations, sonic interventions, video works and animations which explore the audio-visual code of this network culture: computers start to paint pictures on their own, expose their internal circuits and "commit suicide"; birds will sing and fly around in multiple realities, the skylines of two cosmopolitan cities merge, language, meaning and time burst into fragments and recombine. The range of the combined works points to the strength of Open Source Culture – its increasing versatility as artistic playground essential to contemporary debates and its continued importance not just in the invention of new media realities but also in tackling themes of “real” time and space.
The two music events feature sound and multimedia performances ...
HABITATS
A 4 Day Cultural Festival
HABITATS: a 4 day Cultural Festival :: Artists, scientists, and cultural commentators are joining together to create a collective vision of a sustainable habitat. The Habitats conference and festival is a 4 day event organized to promote an exchange between art, technology, and environment. With public and private cooperative efforts leading to cleaner water, the Gowanus Canal area has experienced an increase in wildlife and improved prospects for commercial and cultural revitalization. Habitats celebrates this process. Instigated by Eidolon Culture, The Habitats conferences will include speakers such as best-selling author Steven Johnson ('Emergence' and 'Mind Wide Open'); long-standing community organizers such as the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation (GCCDC) ; electronic artists such as Pauline Oliveros (Deep Listening Foundation) ; site specific sound and video recordings, live music performances, site specific installations, collaborative projects, recycled art, workshops and active audience participation.
The placement of the artworks in their site-specific rendition, the sharing of thought provoking ideas of contemporary cultural relevance, and the active role of audience interaction all create a 'Habitat' -- a place defined by the indispensable nature of everyone and everything within it. Habitats is being Presented by Eidolon Culture and Sponsored by the Brooklyn Arts Council, Polytechnic University: Integrated Digital Media Institute (IDMI), CEC Arts Link, New York State Council on the Arts, and Material for the Arts.
Date: November 9th-12th , 2006
Time: Programs begin daily at 12:00pm until 11pm
Location: The Brooklyn Lyceum 227 4th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11215
N Train to Union Street, Corner of President Street
Contact: mwarren[at]eidolon.org
Admission: $5 for environmental + cultural conferences, $15 for live performance program
www.global-habitat.net
ArT. ENVirONMENT. CULTUrE. COMMUNiTY. gOWANUS
CONfirMED CULTUrAL SPEAKErS
Steven Johnson author of 'Emergence, the connected lives of ants, brains and cities'
Douglas Rushkoff author of 'Media Virus ...
[Damon Zucconi]
Attributing Value (Refractions) is an ongoing video series documenting various artist's works. The works are environmentalized and refracted through the structural data of artist Damon Zucconi himself. Sofar completed are Bruce Nauman: 100 Live, 100 Die; Carsten Nicolai: Syn_Chron; Pierre Huyghe: L'Expedition scintillante; Richard Serra: Torqued Ellipse VI; 0100101110101101.org: jodi.org'%20Transfer'.
Zenith Alignments. Using star tracking software, minor zenith alignments with celestial bodies were found to occur at multiple intervals throughout the course of the day over various locations. These precise locations were located via GPS. 3-point areas were located at sites of the zenith alignments. These areas were highlighted and clearings were made to coincide with the alignments. So at the moment of the alignment Damon Zucconi would be exposing the ground and aligning himself with the line that extends to the star. These specific alignments were unique to these specific locations, occurring once an annual cycle. This could largely be seen as the process of integrating himself with 90 degree angles, in turn, demarcating larger phenomenological alignments and relations 'the body mapped onto the land onto the heavens above';
'At' Asserting its Object Status. Found sculpture.
2d Orthogonal Line Drawing. Drawing with laser and mirrors. All projects by Damon Zucconi.
Tenure-Track Faculty Position in Visual Media and Gaming
Tenure-Track Faculty Position in Visual Media and Gaming
The Arts, Media and Engineering Program (AME) (http://ame.asu.edu) at Arizona State University is announcing an opening for a tenure-track assistant professor in Visual Media and Gaming.
The goal of AME is transdisciplinary research and education in the integrated development of experiential media systems. The program has established its own graduate interdisciplinary curriculum which includes AME concentrations in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Informatics, Dance, Music, Theater and Visual Arts, Design, Psychology, Bioengineering, Education, and a soon to be launched PhD in Media Arts and Sciences. Ten AME faculty and 30 affiliated faculty from the participating departments work collaboratively with graduate students supported by research assistantships for the creation of innovative media systems and applications. AME has state of the art media facilities.
The successful candidate will take a leadership role in the design and development of the visual aspects of multimodal interactive systems and gaming technologies at AME and will also lead student training in this area. The individual hired will spearhead research in cutting-edge areas: interactive graphics and animation, interactive visual narrative, visual displays for everyday systems, gaming systems. The appointee¹s efforts will merge with efforts of other AME faculty for the achievement of significant advancements in interactive media. Teaching assignments are reasonable and will relate to the appointee¹s interests, research and creation.
Required Qualifications: Doctoral degree in Media or Visual Art or closely related field OR master¹s degree in Media or Visual Art and a minimum of four years industry experience in media and/or gaming AND a creative and/or scholarly record with emphasis on visuals for digital media appropriate to rank.
Desired Qualifications: Interdisciplinary experience in research and creation spanning Media, Arts and Engineering; industry experience, development of commercial or widely used ...
Rhizome 05-06 Commissions Event, THIS TUESDAY, 10/24
Hello. If you plan to be in New York on Tuesday, October 24, please come celebrate Rhizome's 2005-2006 Commissions. Ten works will be on view, MTAA will have a live, performance installation, and drinks will be served.
For more information on the 05-06 Commissions, and the artists go to: http://rhizome.org/commissions/2005.rhiz
The reception starts at 6:30, at the New Museum store:
New Museum Store (Inside Chelsea Art Museum) 556 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 Tel: (212) 219-1222
We hope to see you there!
Marisa
+ + +
Marisa Olson
Editor & Curator
Rhizome.org at the
New Museum of Contemporary Art
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.