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.
tank.tv / DVD - CALL FOR SUBMISSION
prouvost:
To: Artists based in the UK For: Moving Images of max 3mins long & made after 2000
tank.tv’s new project is the release of a unique DVD, featuring an exceptional selection of 25 short moving image works from UK-based artists. Each work should be no longer than three minutes and must have been made in the last six years (created after December 31, 1999).
Entry is open to all artists living/working in the UK.
The final selection for the disc will be made by an appointed panel of curators and arts executives including: Hans-Ulrich Obrist / Ben Cook & Mike Sperlinger (The Lux) / Stuart Comer (Tate Modern) / Michelle Cotton (Salon S1 Sheffield) / Rose Cupit (Film London) / Christine Van Assche (Centre Pompidou New Media) / Kathrin Becker (NBK Berlin)
The DVD will be widely distributed for sale by Thames & Hudson, in the UK and abroad. The short-listed artists will receive £250 each and have their work promoted internationally. A quarter of the produced DVDs will be given out to educational institutions, public libraries and local cultural centres, reaching more people with the best in moving images from the UK.
This project is funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Submission forms can be downloaded from: http://www.tank.tv/dvd.asp
Deadline for submissions: 31st July 2006
Please complete the form, and send it together with your work to: tank.tv 5th floor 49-50, Great Marlborough Street London W1F 7JR
Tank.tv is an inspirational showcase of contemporary moving images / dedicated to exhibiting and promoting moving images in a free and accessible way, www.tank.tv acts as a platform for the new, innovative work in film and video
Post-Periphery Power Plays
The 21st century has ushered in new social structures that call for a re-envisioning of activist models. This is the premise behind the online exhibition, Extrapolations, curated by Humberto Ramirez and hosted by Wigged.net. Ramirez's curatorial statement very eloquently lays out the postmodern constructs and real conditions that prompted 20th century protesters to base their actions on a model that pitted peripheries against centers. His argument is that alternative forms of behavior and mobility were made possible within the 'fringes' of society. After political and economic decentralization, and the now constantly-shifting nature of power, those wishing to challenge authority might do well to relinquish their embrace of marginality. This new approach is embodied in Extrapolation's eight internet-based projects, by artists Eteam, Deva Eveland, Peiyun Lee, Lana Lin, Jason Nelson, Arzu Ozkal Telhan, The Yes Men & Patrick Lichty, and Jody Zellen. Many of their works deal with the kind of multiplicity of interpretations afforded by abandonment of either/or, inside/outside perspectives. You might want to watch them multiple times. - Angela Moreno
http://www.wiggedproductions.com/html/extrap/curatorial.html
Open Biometrics

Open Biometrics is a project by Marc Bohlen that began in 2002, but I'm just now finding out about it... from the website: "The Open Biometrics Initiative challenges hard and fast classification of biometric data. Numerous government and private agencies are working towards large-scale biometric identification systems. Visitors to the United States are now routinely finger-scanned at border crossings. In the near future, no official government document will be issued without a fingerprint or an eye-scan. But are you really who they think you are? The Open Biometrics Initiative cracks open the clean fabrication of automated biometric identification at its root. The machine calculates and prints characteristic points together with their coordinates, type code (ridge ending or bifurcation) and color-coded likelihood as a probabilistic IDcard for your reference."
Transparent City
Inspired by the fact that mobile phone users are to be tracked to within 50 meters, as a result of the Federal Communications Commission's E911 mandate (allowing authorities to locate the position of mobile phones that make emergency calls), Derek Lomas plans to develop Transparent City, a city modeled in 3D using only the positions of small orbs, representing individual mobile phones.
The functional forms of a city modeled entirely by human motion will emerge from the overall behavior of the data-points. Streets and highways will be identified through the collective action of orbs flying by at 50 miles an hour. Organic skyscrapers will be built by the thousands of stacked orbs, mostly motionless at their desks-- while some orbs show the subtle motions of humans walking through an office, or traveling up and down elevators. By speeding up the rate of time, one will observe these human towers rise and fall with the beginning and end of the work day.
I found that the concept was already extremely compelling. But it gets better (or worse): Transparent City will seek to create an interface that allows for the integration of multiple databases of information. As an example, users of the "Transparent City" may be able to set the brightness of the orbs to be proportionate to personal income (darkening Harlem and illuminating the financial district). More disturbingly, users will be able to tap any on-going phone call in real-time. Furthermore, using tracked call-logs, users will be able to display the interconnected networks of callers, which represent the de-facto social network of a city.
With this project Lomas seeks to show the future of surveillance and raise public consciousness at a time when we can still determine our own fate as a society.
Another surveillance-related project by Lomas was the ...
[Joao Paulo Feliciano]
"Flow Motion"is like a continuously changing painting, generated from a collection of 110 digital still images.
"Newtron" consists of a single modular unit from a large outdoor LED video display, like those normally seen in big sport and entertainment venues. It shows only the corresponding fragment of the image that would be displaying on the whole screen. Both projects by Joao Paulo Feliciano.
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.