Marisa Olson
Since the beginning
Works in Brooklyn, New York United States of America

ARTBASE (7)
PORTFOLIO (3)
BIO
Marisa Olson is an artist, writer, and media theorist. Her interdisciplinary work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, Tate(s) Modern + Liverpool, the Nam June Paik Art Center, British Film Institute, Sundance Film Festival, PERFORMA Biennial; commissioned and collected by the Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Houston Center for Photography, Experimental Television Center, and PS122; and reviewed in Artforum, Art21, the NY Times, Liberation, Folha de Sao Paolo, the Village Voice, and elsewhere.

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.

Collectible After All: Christiane Paul on net art at the Whitney Museum


The Whitney Museum artport has been an important institutional presence in net art and new media since its launch in 2002. Created and curated by Christiane Paul, artport features online commissions as well as documentation of new media artworks from the museum's exhibitions and collections. This year, artport as a whole was made an official part of the Whitney Museum collection; to mark this occasion, participating artist Marisa Olson interviewed Paul about the program's history and evolution over thirteen years.

 Douglas Davis, image from The World's First Collaborative Sentence (1994).

Collections like artport are a rare and valuable window onto a field of practice that, in some senses, was borne out of not being taken seriously. From mid-80s Eastern European game crackers to late-90s net artists, the first people working online were often isolated, by default or design, and were certainly marginalized by the art world, where few curators knew of their existence and fewer took them seriously, advocated for them, or worked to theorize and articulate the art historical precedents and currents flowing through the work. Help me fast-forward to the beginning of this century at one of the most important international art museums. Many of the US museums that funded new media projects did so with dot-com infusions that dried-up after 2000. Artport officially launched in 2001; the same year, you curated a section devoted to net art in the Whitney Biennial. What was the behind-the-scenes sequence of events that led to artport's founding?

I think artport's inception was emblematic of a wave of interest in net art in the US around the turn of the century and in the early 2000s. This more committed involvement with the art form interestingly coincided with or came shortly after the dot com bubble, which inflated from 1997–2000, had its climax on March 10, 2000 when NASDAQ peaked, and burst pretty much the next day. Net art, however, remained a very active practice and started appearing on the radar of more US art institutions. To some extent, their interest may have been sparked by European exhibitions that had begun to respond to the effects of the web on artistic practice earlier on. In 1997, Documenta X had already included web projects (that year the Documenta website was also famously "stolen"—that is, copied and archived—by Vuk Cosic in the project Documenta: done) and Net Condition, which took place at ZKM in 1999/2000, further acknowledged the importance of art on the web.

US museums increasingly began to take notice. Steve Dietz, who had started the Walker Art Center's New Media Initiatives early on, in 1996, was curating the online art Gallery 9 and digital art study collection. Jon Ippolito, in his role as Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim, was commissioning net art in the early 2000s and in 2002, Benjamin Weil, with Joseph Rosa, unveiled a new version of SFMOMA's E-space, which had been created in 2000. This was the institutional netscape in which I created artport in 2001, since I felt that the Whitney, which had for the first time included net art in its 2000 Biennial, also needed a portal to online art. The original artport was much more of a satellite site and less integrated into whitney.org than it is now. Artist Yael Kanarek redesigned the site not too long after its initial launch and created version 1.1. Artport in its early days was sponsored by a backend storage company in New Jersey, which was then bought by HP, so HP appeared as the official sponsor. I think it is notable that sponsorship at that point did not come from a new tech company but a brand name that presumably wanted to appear more cutting edge.


booomerrranganggboobooomerranrang: Nancy Holt's networked video


Nancy Holt, Boomerang (1974), still from video.

In her time on this planet, Nancy Holt came to be known as a great American Land Artist, and certainly her brilliant installations, like Utah's Sun Tunnels and collaborations with her partner Robert Smithson and their peers, are profoundly significant, but it was her work in film & video that has had the greatest personal impact on me.

I somehow didn't see Boomerang, her 1974 video performance usually credited to her collaborator Richard Serra, until I was a Ph.D. student in Linda Williams's Phenomenology of Film seminar at UC Berkeley's Rhetoric program, but the time delay was more than made up for by the work's formative resonance. In the video, made during Serra's residency at a Texas television station, a young Holt is seen sitting in an anchor's chair before a staid blue background. Despite brief station ID graphic overlays and one minute of silence in the midst of the ten-minute piece (announced as audio trouble and reminding viewers of the work's live TV origin), the work is in many ways sound-centric.


Sound and Image in Electronic Harmony


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Image: Semiconductor: Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt, 200 Nanowebbers, 2005

On Saturday, April 11th, New York's School of Visual Arts will co-present the 2009 Visual Music Marathon with the New York Digital Salon and Northeastern University. Promising genre-bending work from fifteen countries, the lineup crams 120 works by new media artists and digital composers into 12 hours. If it's true, as is often said, that MTV killed the attention spans of Generations X and Y, this six-minute-per-piece average ought to suit most festivalgoers' minds, and the resultant shuffling on and off stage will surely be a spectacle in its own rite. In all seriousness, this annual event is a highlight of New York's already thriving electronic music scene and promises many a treat for your eyes and ears. The illustrious organizers behind the marathon know their visual music history and want to remind readers that, "The roots of the genre date back more than two hundred years to the ocular harpsichords and color-music scales of the 18th century," and "the current art form came to fruition following the emergence of film and video in the 20th century." The remarkable ten dozen artists participating in this one-day event will bring us work incorporating such diverse materials as hand-processed film, algorithmically-generated video, visual interpretations of music, and some good old fashioned music-music. From luminaries like Oskar Fischinger, Hans Richter, and Steina Vasulka to emerging artists Joe Tekippe and Chiaki Watanabe, the program will be another star on the map that claims NYC as fertile territory for sonic exploration. - Marisa Olson

READ ON »


Tagalicious


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The National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens, Greece, has committed itself to curating a number of recent exhibitions of internet art. Their current show, "Tag Ties and Affective Spies," features contributions from both net vets and emerging surfers, including Christophe Bruno, Gregory Chatonsky, Paolo Cirio, JODI, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, Les Liens Invisibles, Personal Cinema and The Erasers, Ramsay Stirling, and Wayne Clements. The online exhibition takes an antagonistic approach to Web 2.0, citing a constant balance "between order and chaos, democracy and adhocracy." Curator Daphne Dragona raises the question of whether the social web is a preexisting platform on which people connect, or whether it is indeed constructed in the act of uploading, tagging, and disclosing previously private information about ourselves on sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook. Dragona asks whether we are truly connecting and interacting, or merely broadcasting. While her curatorial statement doesn't address the issue directly, the show's title hints at the level of self-surveillance in play on these sites. Accordingly, many of the selected works take a critical, if not DIY, approach to the internet. The collective Les Liens Invisibles tends to create works that make an ironic mash-up of the often divergent mantras of tactical media, culture jamming, surrealism, and situationism. In their Subvertr, they encourage Flickr users to "subverTag" their posted images, creating an intentional disassociation between an image's content and its interpretion, with the aim of "breaking the strict rules of significance that characterize the mainstream collective imaginary..." JODI's work, Del.icio.us/ winning information (2008) exploits the limited stylistic parameters of the social bookmarking site. Using ASCII and Unicode page titles to form visual marks, a cryptic tag vocabulary, and a recursive taxonomy, their fun-to-follow site critiques the broader content of the web ...

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Reappearance of the Undead


agatha_appears_lialina.gif

In 1997, internet art hall-of-famer Olia Lialina made a "net drama" called Agatha Appears that was written for Netscape 3 and 4 in HTML 3.2. One of the main features of the interactive narrative was the travel of the eponymous avatar across the internet. Let's just say the girl got around. But the magical illusion of the piece was that she appeared to stay still, even when links in the narrative were clicked and the viewer's address bar indicated movement to another server. But in time, both the browser and code in which the story was written became defunct and the piece unraveled as the sites previously hosting the links and files upon which Agatha was dependent disappeared or cleaned house. Such a scenario is common to early internet art (and will no doubt continue to plague the field), as ours is an upgrade culture constantly driving towards new tools, platforms, and codes. Many have debated whether to let older works whither or how it might be possible to update these works, making them compatible with new systems. For those who are interested, some of the best research on the subject has been performed by the folks affiliated with the Variable Media Initiative. Meanwhile, luddites and neophiles alike are now in luck because Agatha Appears has just undergone rejuvenation. Ela Wysocka, a restorer working at Budapest's Center for Culture & Communication Foundation has worked to overcome the sound problems, code incompatibilities, and file corruption and disappearance issues, and she's written a fascinating report about the process, here. And new collaborating hosts have jumped in line to bring the piece back to life, so that like a black and white boyfriend coming home from war, Agatha now offers us a shiny new webring as a token of ...

READ ON »



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DISCUSSION

FW: [Reader-list] CAE - open letter of protest - request for signatories


Original Message:
-----------------
From: Amanda McDonald Crowley amc@autonomous.org
Date: Fri, 04 Jun 2004 20:55:44 +0300
To: reader-list@sarai.net
Subject: [Reader-list] CAE - open letter of protest - request for
signatories

Helsinki / Amsterdam, June 4, 2004

Dear friends and colleagues on the Sarai reader list,

We are sure that many of you have been following the deeply worrying events
around the subpoenas that have been served to members of the US-based arts
collective Critical Art Ensemble and have read Shuddhabrata Sengupta's
recent posting on this issue. We, Eric Kluitenberg and Amanda McDonald
Crowley (with support from a range of colleagues), have taken the initiative
to write an open letter of protest asking for an immediate cessation of
legal proceedings against our esteemed and distinguished colleagues. We
think that this case signals a most worrisome trend in public political life
in the United States and cannot be left unaddressed.

We ask all of you who have worked with the Critical Art Ensemble in recent
years, and others who feel offended by this unacceptable infringement on
artistic freedom, to contact us to sign this letter of protest as members of
a deeply concerned professional community.

Please find the letter below. if you wish to sign send either one of us an
email stating your name, your profession, your institutional affiliation (if
you have one) and possibly a url that best represents your work or
professional activity.

Thank you.

Amanda McDonald Crowley
amc@va.com.au

Eric Kluitenberg
erick@balie.nl

----------------

To whom it may concern,

We, the undersigned artists, curators, critics, cultural producers,
theorists and writers who have worked with or followed the work of the
collective known as Critical Art Ensemble, are writing to express our
serious concern over legal proceedings brought against members of this
highly respected artists group.

Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) is a collective of internationally recognised
artists who work within pedagogic frameworks and art contexts to raise
awareness of a range of social issues. Most recently their work has been
directed towards providing the general public with awareness and
understanding of issues to do with biological research. Their work is not
alarmist but rather provides knowledge.

CAE's work is always undertaken in a safe and considered way, using
materials which are commonly available in scientific education and research
practices. Their main motivation is to provide the public with the tools
needed to make informed choices.

It has come to our attention that there was a recent seizure of a
substantial amount of the artists' work and research material. The
international art scene was shocked and surprised to learn that the US
Federal Bureau of Investigation, following an analysis of the materials by
the Commissioner of Public Health for New York State which returned the
result that the material seized posed no public safety risk, have continued
with their investigation and are now seeking to charge members of the
collective under the US Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act as expanded by
the USA Patriot Act.

Whilst it is perhaps understandable in the current international political
climate that such research might raise alarm bells with American
authorities, it would have also been clear, upon investigation, that the
aims of CAE are not a terrorist act, but an awareness raising action
undertaken with cultural, artistic and educational agendas. Indeed CAE's
work is quite in keeping with mainstream art practices, which have,
throughout history, had pedagogical aims.

Having worked with CAE in various settings throughout the world we have
found CAE's approach has always been to understand and to know the topic
that they are presenting. It comes as no surprise, given the current focus
of their work, that the research tools included biological material.
However, those of us in the art world who have worked with this artists'
group also know that their work is undertaken with thorough research, in
continuous consultation with members of the scientific community, in order
to ensure that the artworks they produce are safe, but also real, in terms
of the investigations they pursue. The work of CAE is internationally
recognised as thorough, investigative, educative and safe.

This matter is one that raises serious concerns internationally that the
actions of the American government undermine the freedom of artistic
expression, a fundamental democratic right, which is one of the cornerstones
of the liberal democracies.

As the materials have been tested and been shown to pose no public health
threat, we demand that the American Government immediately cease legal
action against members of the Critical Art Ensemble collective.

The good reputation of Critical Art Ensemble must be immediately restored.

Yours faithfully,

Amanda McDonald Crowley,
cultural worker/ curator, currently executive producer ISEA2004
(International Symposium of Electronic Art 2004),
Australia/Finland
http://www.isea2004.net

Eric Kluitenberg
Head of the Media Program
De Balie - Centre for Culture and Politics
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
http://www.debalie.nl

Signatories:

name/profession/position/country/url

_________________________________________
reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
Critiques & Collaborations
To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request@sarai.net with subscribe
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DISCUSSION

Ubiquitous Computing, Systems Aesthetics Championship


Hi, Rhizomers. Lee Walton & I are collaborating for this show,
tomorrow, at Flux Factory. A description of our project is below the
invite...
--------

The First Ubiquitous Computing, Systems Aesthetics Championship
Saturday, May 29, 6 p.m. UBISAC 1.0
Flux Factory, 3838 43rd Street, Long Island City, NY 11101

UbiSAC Artists from all over are coming together to face the first
UbiSAC challenge. Each piece addresses a specific challenge put forth
by this year's host organization, The Holders of the Sac `04.
More information about this year's exhibition can be found at
http://www.ubisac.org

Artists Include:

Marisa S. Olson, from SF, CA, and Lee Walton, from NYC: "Tele-Drawings"
Sliv and Dulet from SF,CA: "as of May 29, 2004"
Randy Sarafin from NYC: "The Most Important Statement About the Speed
of Time Ever "
Made by Me
Donnie Bugden from NYC: "Everyone's a Weiner!"
Ubicomp Krew from Berlin, DE: "RIPLfield"
James Rouvelle from NYC: "Robotomy"
Holders of the SAC '04 from NYC: "Haptic Experiment in Transmission
of Volumetric Spheres"
Holders of the SAC'04 from NYC: "Voting Tool"

The hosts: The Flux Factory, James Rouvelle, Nurit Bar-Shai, Michael
Bernstein, Mark Driscoll, Carlos Giffoni, Clay Johnson, Itti Karuson,
Jason Lee, Alison Lewis, Yeonju Shim, Dong Jun Song

Directions to Flux Factory: http://www.fluxfactory.org/how.htm

-------
"Tele-Drawings"
by Marisa S. Olson & Lee Walton

In our collaborative tele-drawings, Lee Walton phones Marisa Olson
from a specific drawing site, is told what to draw (but is given no
instruction for doing so), and completes the tele-circle by faxing
her a copy of the drawing. The project is a spoof on telepresence,
something which we believe can never truly be achieved... We are
interested in how technologies magnify or underscore distance and
alienation, even as they make things "easier." Each drawing is an
experiment and what we discover are the ways in which
telecommunications technologies effect our communication styles and
the model of representation & interpretation to which we are
accustomed. So far, there are always interesting discrepancies
between what the two of us envisioned and what we were able to
communicate, in separate times & spaces. We are both interested in
the models of authorship & problem-solving that arise in such
collaborations.

DISCUSSION

An article from globeandmail.com


Marisa S. Olson (marisa@sfcamerawork.org) thought you would be interested in this article from http://www.globeandmail.com, Canada's leading source for online news.
---------------------------------------------------------

Let's hear it for "FrankenArt"! :)

---------------------------------------------------------
Get today's news delivered to your in-box. Sign up for our daily News Update!
http://www.globeandmail.com/newsletter/

DISCUSSION

Re: Rhizome needs to drop its membership fee and free its content


here here. let's find a way. working for a small nonprofit, i
certainly know about budgetary limitations. has moving in with the NM
changed anything? free on fridays does not mean much to the scholars
and artists relying on rhizome's archives... except that it turns
them away....

it's also slightly unrhizomatic.......

DISCUSSION

Call for Entries: Improbable Monuments


please post/forward...

SF Camerawork
CALL FOR ENTRIES

Receipt Deadline: July 30, 2003

Online and Web proposals for
Improbable Monuments
(Part of our upcoming Fall 2004 show, Monument Recall)

Monument Recall is an exhibition of work by artists who are
challenging ideas of what a 'monument' can be. Through scale,
material, point of view, location, subject, and concepts, work in
this exhibition challenges the conventional expectations of public
monuments in public spaces.

As part of this exhibition, we are looking for work in proposal form
only, to be exhibited online.

Submissions should include:
1. a description of your Improbable Monument
2. a visual rendering of the idea, in images, animation, digital video, etc.
3. a description of its purpose and function within the context of
improbable monument.
4. all current and pertinent contact information.

The ideas should not be restricted by materials, funds, and subject
matter or by any other practical considerations. Instead, we're
looking for grand visions of what monuments can be without regard to
the usual constraints. We are particularly interested in how ideas
can function specifically within the cyber realm,

All submissions should be available online or in Web-ready digital
files on a CD-ROM. If the work is already online, please send the
URL. Otherwise, send the CD-ROM to the address below. Please include
an Artist Statement & Vitae, as well as a self-addressed, stamped
envelope for the return of your materials. Mail the material to:

SF Camerawork
MONUMENT RECALL
1246 Folsom Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

or email material to: Laurie Blavin
<laurie@blavin.com>

For more information, contact any of the exhibition curators:

Paula Levine (plevine@sfsu.edu)
Trena Noval (tnoval@mindspring.com)
Laurie Blavin (laurie@blavin.com)