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


semiconductor_nanowebbers.jpg
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

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Tagalicious


Picture-1.jpg

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 ...

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Discussions (281) Opportunities (10) Events (4) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

Remix vs Hack (was: Quotation {was: why so little discussion?})


I tend to agree with Lewis, below, and also with
Michael about the creepyness of forecasting quotation
as specifically postmodern, given that it has been
happening "forever."

The question, now, is this... Is every quotation a
remix?

And, furthermore, while we're at it... What is the
difference between hacking & remixing, if hacking is
simply a modification of the object? (Is it?)

Is it a specific intent (ie political, activist,
deviant, whatever...)? Is it a matter of
functionality--ie the object's ability to do so, as
intended, after the mod? Is it a question of the
relationship between a representational form/object
and its machinery? (ie a film object vs the content of
film; software vs the computer it runs on--not that
these are parallel terms, in this analogy!)

??????
marisa

--- Lewis LaCook <llacook@yahoo.com> wrote:

> when you play a musical instrument, all you're doing
> is remixing sounds that exist as potential in the
> instrument in ways you find pleasing---when you
> write
> a poem, all you're doing is remixing the english
> language until you find your text interesting-->
>
> ALL ART IS REMIXING---ALL CULTURE IS REMIXING----
>
> bliss
> l
>
>
> --- Francis Hwang <francis@rhizome.org> wrote:
>
> >
> > On Nov 22, 2004, at 11:40 AM, curt cloninger
> wrote:
> > > But, like Michael, I'm not entirely convinced
> that
> > "remixity"
> > > ["quotations intended"] is uniquely intrinsic or
> > inherent to the
> > > underlying ethos of all digital art (although
> > maybe it is, and there
> > > are sure plenty of people trumpeting the fact
> that
> > it definitely is).
> > > Maybe remixity is just the most immediately
> > obvious thing to do with
> > > digital media, and so we see a lot of it simply
> > because the novelty
> > > hasn't worn off yet. One way or the other, it's
> > safe to assert that
> > > digital art makes remixity and appropriation
> > feasibly/logistically
> > > easier from a production standpoint.
> >
> > I'd say that remixity isn't the raison d'etre of
> > digital art, though
> > digital tools certainly favor remixity
> > disproportionately over other
> > modes of production. Remixity is interesting for
> > plenty of reasons on
> > its own; one of the big ones is that, outside of
> the
> > whole whomping
> > intellectual property debate, it rejiggers the
> > proportional role of the
> > artist in society. For one thing, it takes a long
> > time to get down the
> > craftsmanship of original image- or
> object-crafting,
> > whether that's
> > sculpting marble or using oil paint or whatever.
> > It's a lot quicker
> > just to buy a bunch of LPs and learn to spin. Not
> to
> > say that DJing
> > isn't a skill--but that you're leveraging the
> > creativity of others in a
> > way that requires, on one hand, less effort from
> > you, but on the other
> > hand, more effort if you want to stand out the way
> > Pollock or Picasso
> > did.
> >
> > (As a sidenote, I am pretty annoyed with how "DJ"
> in
> > club culture has
> > devolved into "somebody who knows how to play
> > records" from "somebody
> > who knows how to spin records". I suppose that's
> > just my old club
> > snobbery popping up again.)
> >
> > If we accept remixing as a creative mode that's as
> > worthy of study as
> > painting or sculpture or video or performance,
> then
> > the tent of fine
> > arts suddenly becomes a lot bigger, because people
> > out in the world are
> > remixing all the time without writing an artist's
> > statement.
> > 16-year-old kids making mashups on their Macs at
> > home. PC casemods.
> > Quilts. We probably don't have room in all our
> > museums to show all that
> > stuff, too.
> >
> > Francis Hwang
> > Director of Technology
> > Rhizome.org
> > phone: 212-219-1288x202
> > AIM: francisrhizome
> > + + +
> >
> > +
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> > +
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> set
> > out in the
> > Membership Agreement available online at
> > http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
> >
>
>
> =====
>
>
>
***************************************************************************
>
> Lewis LaCook -->http://www.lewislacook.com/
>
> http://www.corporatepa.com/
>
> XanaxPop:Mobile Poem Blog->
> http://www.lewislacook.com/xanaxpop/
>
> Collective Writing Projects--> The Wiki-->
> http://www.lewislacook.com/wiki/ Appendix M
> ->http://www.lewislacook.com/AppendixM/
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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DISCUSSION

Quotation (was: why so little discussion?)


A general question... It seems that 'quotation' lies
at the heart of "postmodern" cultural production...
That is, simulations, appropriations, and
self-referential "deconstruction" have been cited as
both harbingers and cornerstones of artistic "work" in
the post-modern era--by Jameson, Baudrillard, and so
many others...

It's one thing to see how Warhol might appropriate an
older image in a "newer" painting, but what of "net
art"'s appropriation of earlier works, images,
conversations, etc..? Does the medium make any
difference? What of the difference between the veil of
code and its appearance? What difference does the
ability to forge a "real" link (vs a semi-anonymous
reference) to an earlier work make? From
historiographic perspective, where does the old end
and the new (interpretation) begin?

Sorry for all the quotations. It can, at times, be
hard to keep a straight face using all these general
terms. Plus, we are talking about """"quotation""""
right?

Marisa

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DISCUSSION

Re: Sound in exhibitions


The safest bet, for me, has always been to build separate "rooms" for works with sound, or to place things with sound as far from each other as possible. I suppose that's a bit obvious, though. Not as thoughtful as the Beall..

When the artist is ok with it, I frequently offer headphones for, say, video pieces with an important sound component.

If it is appropriate, it is also nice to offer sound recordings in catalogues, so that pieces can be listened to in different spaces & contexts.

Of course, the issue is complicated. How site-specific is the work? What "embodiment" or "immersion" conditions does it ask for? How reasonable is it (not) to separate the sound from the "rest" of the peice, by capturing & distributing recordings?

Marisa

ryan griffis <grifray@yahoo.com> wrote:
The Beall Center at UC Irvine has used (clear) plastic inverted domes
(suspended from the ceiling), fitted with speakers, for limiting the
range of sound for installations that need to be controlled or are
visually/conceptually tied to a specific space in the gallery.
ryan

On Nov 18, 2004, at 5:20 AM, Seth Thompson wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The use of sound is sometimes very controversial within a museum
> exhibition--especially when multiple works have a sound element. I
> was wondering if you could describe some of the innovative ways that
> museums and galleries have handled sound within a museum/gallery
> environment without compromising the works. Please let me know at
> your earliest convenience. Thanks in advance.

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DISCUSSION

Fwd: Database Imaginary - You're Invited


--- 11 Nov 2004 Steve Dietz wrote:

> You're invited.
>
> "Database Imaginary" opens Saturday, November 13 at
> the Walter Phillips
> Gallery, Banff Center.
>
> http://databaseimaginary.banff.org - website
>
http://www.banffcentre.ca/WPG/exhibits/2004/2004-10-14_database_imaginary/de
> fault.htm - press release
>
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A1=ind0411&L=new-media-curating
> -
> crumb discussion list "data art"
>
> Artists:
> Cory Arcangel, Julian Bleecker, Natalie Bookchin,
> Kayle Brandon, Heath
> Bunting, Alan Currall, Beatriz da Costa, Hans
> Haacke, Harwood/Mongrel, Agnes
> Hegedus, Axel Heide, Pablo Helguera, Lisa
> Jevbratt/C5, George Legrady, Lev
> Manovich, Jennifer + Kevin McCoy, Muntadas,
> onesandzeros, Scott Paterson,
> Philip Pocock, Edward Poitras, David Rokeby, Warren
> Sack, Jamie Schulte,
> Thomson&Craighead, Brooke Singer, Gregor Stehle,
> University of Openess,
> Angie Waller, Cheryl L'Hirondelle Waynohtew, Marina
> Zurkow
>
> Database Imaginary
> Curated by Sarah Cook, Steve Dietz, Anthony Kiendl
>
> "If [with] the arrival of the Web the world appears
> to us as an endless and
> unstructured collection of images, texts, and other
> data records, it is only
> appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a
> database. But it is also
> appropriate that we would want to develop poetics,
> aesthetics and ethics of
> this database."
> Lev Manovich (1)
>
> Database Imaginary presents 23 works made by 33
> artists between 1971 and
> 2004. The art projects in this exhibition span a
> period almost as long as
> the word database has been in use. It is really only
> with the rise of
> computing and widespread access to vast quantities
> of organized information
> that the term has come to the fore in the popular
> imagination. The urge to
> organize, however, is a longstanding trait of human
> civilization. In this
> sense, Database Imaginary is less about databases
> than about this cultural
> moment when they have become ever-present.
>
> Databases structure our economy, our knowledge
> systems, our security. Yet
> these structures serve and are subject to multiple
> goals and agendas. Our
> practical experience of databases in westernized
> societies suggest access
> not just to information about the world, but the
> world

DISCUSSION

Fwd: Show at RX Gallery this Friday 6pm, panel Thursday 6pm


This show @ Rx Gallery looks great. Check it out if
you are in the SF area.

Marisa

--- Scott Snibbe wrote:

> Dear friends & colleagues,
> I'm part of what should be a terrific show at RX
> Gallery in San Francisco
> this week, featuring Brian Knep, Stelarc, and
> Camille Utterback. Talk on
> Thursday and opening on Friday. I'll be showing a
> new piece "Cause and
> Effect". Also, currently up at The Exploratorium
> through December is "Shy".
> Best wishes,
> Scott
> www.snibbe.com
>
> http://www.rxgallery.com
>
> OPENING FRIDAY NOV. 11
> 6:00pm - 9:00pm
> Reactive Art Exhibition
> Rx, 132 Eddy Street
> Get ready for the media art exhibition of the year
> as we feature 4 exciting
> reactive video works by an international lineup of
> artists. The reception
> for the artist occurs on Friday 6pm-9pm. Featured
> artists are Boston-based
> Brian Knep, Australian artist Stelarc, NYC's Camille
> Utterback and SF's own
> reactive-video artist Scott Snibbe.
>
>
>
> Thursday November 11th
> panel discussion
> REACTIVE
>
> Featuring 3 of the 4 artists in the exhibition
> including Brian Knep,
> Camille Utterback and Scott Snibbe. Moderated by
> curator William Linn.
> Artists will discuss their works in the exhibition,
> the technology involved
> in creating interactive media and their various
> aesthetic approaches and
> artistic concerns. Then at 9:00pm, Cocteau Twin
> guitarist Robin Guthrie will
> perform "Illumina" (NOTE: tickets for the Robin
> Guthrie performance will be
> required for anyone staying for the performance and
> capacity is limited) $15
> tickets are selling fast HERE.
>
> 6:00pm - 8:00pm
>
> $10 suggested donation (n.o.r.f.l.o.f.)
>
>
>

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