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.
Cell Phone Disco
Cell Phone Disco is an experimental installation, made of flashing cells, that allows gallery visitors to experience the invisible body of the mobile phone.
The cells consist of one or more LEDs, battery and a sensor that detects electromagnetic radiation transmitted by mobile phones. When the sensor detects EM waves it sets off the LEDs to flash for a couple of seconds.
Cell Phone Disco has two parts:
Mobile Aura: Flashing cells with sensors of higher sensitivity detect EM radiation of active mobile phone in a range of approximately a meter. A sort of aura appears then around the phone, revealing a part of its invisible body.
While the user moves around talking on his/her phone, this aura follows the conversation as a light shadow through the space.
Mobile Drawing: Less sensitive cells create a canvas for an inkless marker. The LEDs get activated by an extreme proximity of the EM source. Moving the phone close to the cells leaves a trace of light, an electromagnetic drawing.
The installation premiered at the Lamball Bakra exhibition at the Showroom MAMA in Rotterdam.
By Ursula Lavrencic and Auke Touwslager.
Via Informationlab.
Turbulence Commission:
Machine Fragments
Machine Fragments by Onoma Ekeh :: Needs Flash player 8+ and speakers; optimized for Internet Explorer and Safari :: Perhaps the question, "Can Machines Think"? should be re-articulated as "Is the Machine different from you or I"? Why is there a perceptive gap between our tools and ourselves? Do they also not constitute consciousness and by extension the body?
The cultural schisms that generate this differentiation between "man" and "machine" are also responsible for spawning voids and displacements --and the ghosts that inhabit them. It is these ghosts who constitute "Machine Fragments." Machine Fragments are essentially sound fictions spun from the perspective of sentient machines, testing humans for machine intelligence. Not so much to expose the machinic dimension in humans (we suspected as much), but to arouse the sense that "Machine" is also a kind of gender.
"Machine Fragments" is a 2005 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from The Greenwall Foundation.
BIOGRAPHY
Born and raised on most sides of the Atlantic, Onoma Ekeh started out as a painter, gravitated towards design and fell in love with cinema. The collusion effect is a lifelong fascination with hybrid forms of media and their perpetuation in contemporary culture. Ekeh has written for film, and literary and technological journals both in Europe and the United States; produced works for theater; and created "radio fictions." She is a frequent collaborator in a number of cross-disciplinary projects. She lives in New York City and has been the recipient of several fellowships and grant awards including the Jerome Foundation/Media Alliance (2000); Harvestworks Digital Media Center Artist-In-Residence (2002). Ekeh is currently a Fellow at the Kunstlerhaus Buchsenhausen in Austria.
Social technology and the hidden dimension of time
<p>Anthony Giddens, British sociologist and one of my long-time personal guiding lights, has characterized the primary interest of sociology as an effort “to explicate how the limitations of individual 'presence' are transcended by the 'stretching of social relations across time and space.' It' always seemed to me that the growing adoption of social technologies--like this very one here--into our communication practices (activities, coordination, exchange, commmerce, learning, etc.) serves as a direct reflection of this 'stretching of social relations across time and space.' I've felt that these technologies line a frontier defined by concerns that touch our society and culture deeply. And that our very proximity to one another is shaped and informed by our use of these technologies to conduct our lives in non face-to-face communications.</p>
We often speak of proximity as a matter of space, of closeness, nearness, even touch. We've seen that distance collapse, foreshortened by the spin of a mouse on the point of a click. Who among us is not a click away? But interestingly, I think, the dimension that's transformed most by social media is time, not space. It's time in the sense that the duration, episode, and rhythm of our interactions with others is radically lightened by social technologies, faciliated by a medium that has no 'there' there, presented but not with a deep presence. It's a strange thing, this discontinuous time of media. Things happen, but are not tied together, perhaps because we have such difficulty negotiating our availability and thus presence to others. Interruptions occur so frequently they become a continuity in and of themselves. We'll have 16 tracks of conversation going but at different time signatures, and our presence to and in all of them will feel more fragmented than whole.
I ...
Zach Lieberman and Golan Levin at NTT ICC
Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman are taking over Japan. As part of the Kids Program exhibition at the NTT InterCommunication Center, they have a range of collaborative and individual projects on show from 2000-2006.
[from interview mp3 ]
“These collaborative projects came about through their common interest in gesture and audio visual performance. They have been working together since 2002 under the name tmema (which means little pieces). Each project is made up of many small ideas to make a larger project. The installations Remark and Hidden worlds (from 2002) we based upon the idea of visualizing the voice, if you could see the voice, what would it look like? This led on to Messa di Voce, a performance work. Their work tends to operate in both domains of installation and performance. The works are accessible to children and adults, are universal, playful and expresive. Have fun and learn things. They like to see people experience shock and wonder, not to be afraid, nothing will break. They wish they had these kinds of exhibitions when they were young. Golan was very much more interested in interactive works in the childrens exhibitions, rather than static artworks, so hopes they can give the next generation an idea about the future”.
Now this is a kids exhibition I’d cetainly like to see.
Works on show:
The Audiovisual Environment Suite.
Messa di Voce Installation.
The Manual Input Sessions, seen for the first time as an installation.
Drawn installation.
Click here for a photo of the whole space (thanks Zach).
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.