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.
Tools for Travelling Streamers
The fact that tactical media artist Adam Hyde is a traveller manifests itself in his work in many ways. For example, he recently established a mobile low-res artist's residency in a campervan in New Zealand; the mobicast system he developed in collaboration with Luka Prinic was first used on the Tran-Siberian Express; and his latest production comes in a suitcase. The Streaming Suitcase is a portable box of tricks for Hyde's streaming workshops on free and open source software. The project's website makes these tools available to the greater public, along with blueprints creating a 'secondary economy' for information. Visitors will find manuals offering plain-language instructions for streaming audio and video over the internet, as well as a glossary of terms and a handy list of links. The suitcase can help one learn the basics of Linux and PureData, and even build their own mini FM transmitter. In the true spirit of open source, Hyde invites viewers to 'have a browse and take what you want.' - Helen Varley Jamieson
Interchange
Showing at the Cybersonica 06 Sonic Art Exhibition.
Created by Wojceich Kosma, Interchange is an audiovisual piece controlled by the Playstation Portable gaming device. The player performs some composed graph score consisting of 98 boxes. Each box represents a note and a shape. The number inside the box is a pitch/length of loop. The player is free to choose any box and make any rhythmical entrance. Dynamics are defined.
Interchange explores the relations between the sound and image on the primary level. The custom software was developed for PSP interface and audio visual unification.
Drones and music charts at the bitforms gallery
bitforms gallery has just opened an exhibition with works by Bjoern Schuelke and by R. Luke Dubois.
Drone 6 and Installation shot
Schuelke is showing 12 of his Solar Kinetic Objects, sculptures powered and adorned by solar cells, some which employ tiny red blinking lights and propellers.; Nervous a fluffy bright ball of fur that shakes, emits beeps and funny sounds as viewers move closer to it (video from Beap04); the Aerophon #4, a motorized pipe organ that responds to motion with bellows of sound and compression of the instrument's body.
R. Luke Dubois' works explore the constructions of pop-cultural ephemera and its temporal value structure.
Billboard, a 37-minute sound installation for iPod, uses all the songs that topped Bilboard's Hot 100 chart chronologically since August 1958. Each of the 857 songs plays for one second, representing each week the song stayed at #1.
Billboard and Academy
His video installation Academy arrays algorithmically determined visual averages of all the past Academy Award "Best Picture" winners since 1927, smearing film sets and actors together in time. In a third installation, Play, the flickering faces of every Playboy Magazine centerfold from the publication's first 50 years (1953 to 2004) meld together, emerging with a collective portrait.
The exhibition runs until July 15, 2006, at the bitform gallery, New York.
Via see art/make art. Images courtesy of the gallery. PDF of the press release.
Art Interactive
Urban Networks
Urban Networks--June 9-August 6, 2006--features five interactive art projects that examine social encounters and explorations in urban places. The works in this exhibition employ a range of technological devices that create urban community connections and offer insights into how emerging technologies might play an alternative role in our experience of everyday urban life.
Finishing School presents two projects Meet/Greet and Write/Send from the Public Interaction Objects (PIO) series. Engineered to create meaningful interaction with individuals in various public contexts, each object is informed by varying cultural customs, market economies, lifestyle, entertainment and commercial technologies.
Imaging Place by John (Craig) Freeman is a site-specific installation that consists of an interactive, location-based, virtual reality environment. The Imaging Place method uses a combination of panoramic photography, digital video, and three-dimensional technologies to investigate, document, and map locations.
Objects of Wonderment created by Urban Atmospheres is the first in a series of new public artifacts that are designed to expand our expectations of mobile phones as they transcend beyond personal connections and begin to interface directly with locations. Combining Bluetooth sensing technology with a newly fabricated public object, this work dynamically generates new urban sonic experiences.
Primarily operating outside of the gallery La rue c'est mise a nu par ses orielles, partout (the street is stripped bare by her ears, everywhere) by URBANtells, is comprised of numerous, micro am transmitters tuned to the same frequency and placed within the Central Square neighborhood.
Disembodied Voices by Jody Zellen is a multi-sensory interactive installation that explores the differences between public and private life and how the global phenomenon of public cell-phone conversations have become a ubiquitous irritant in contemporary society.
Artist Bios [....]
Video: Fijuu2 3D Sound Toy, in Action
Fijuu2 is the kind of art that seems to have dropped in from a wormhole from the future. It’s tough to describe, a rotating three-dimensional world in which visitors can sculpt glitchy and resonating sounds, represented by fluid 3D models, all using a standard PlayStation2 controller. We got a chance to see some stills earlier this month, from London's Cybersonica show where the latest version of the work was installed. Now, the artist has shared a video, and you can really see what this is all about:
The best news is, thanks to the rapidly-expanding real-time 3D capabilities of consumer computers, this could be just the tip of an iceberg. A pulsating, glitchy, morphing iceberg. Further details at the project site. Thanks to Chris O’Shea, Cybersonica curator and sumo of pixels.
3D, alternative interfaces, cybersonica, gaming, installations, interactive, sound artRhizome 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.