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.
And/Or #7 ¦ Artificiel + Texelectronica
And/Or Show #6: Artificiel + Texelectronica
reception Friday, Oct 27th, 6pm-11pm.
We’ll be featuring a light and sound piece by the Canadian collective Artificiel, with their collaborator Pascale Malatarre designing the installation. The work is based on a simple concept: playing voice recordings through high power audio amplifiers and feeding them through large 1000 watt light bulbs. The tungsten and glass materials of the bulbs act as rich but band-limited filters, resulting sometimes in understandable whispers, other times purely synthetic tones, creating flowing and ebbing waves of light and sound.
At our opening reception, we will also be hosting additional digital art installations and performances by regional and international artists that are part of the Texelectronica Festival organized by UNT and the French Embassy. And be sure to check out their schedule for other events and the symposium that will be going on Thursday through Sunday.
Performances at the reception start at 8pm and will include Yao Bin, Frank Dufour, Washboard Leo, and some of the local Laptop Deathmatch crew.
And if that’s not enough, our awesome new neighbors, House of Dang, will be having a Halloween party next door!!
Blip Festival 2006 NYC NOV 30 - DEC 3
If you're in the NYC area mark your calendars for 11/30 to 12/3, this looks to be a great fest! I'm pretty sure MAKE is going to be doing something there, so when the details are all set, we'll have another post -
"THE TANK and 8BITPEOPLES are pleased to present the Blip Festival, a four-day celebration of over 30 international artists exploring the untapped potential of low-bit videogame consoles and home computers used as creative tools. Familiar devices are pushed in new directions with startling results -- Nintendo Entertainment Systems and Game Boys roaring with futuristic floor-stomping rhythms and fist-waving melody, art-damaged Sega hardware generating fluctuating and abstracted video patterns -- and that's only the beginning. An exploration of the chiptune idiom and its close relatives, the Blip Festival is the biggest and most comprehensive event in the history of the form, and will include daily workshops, art installations, and nightly music performances boasting an international roster larger and more far-reaching than any previous event of its kind. Small sounds at large scales pushed to the limit at high volumes -- the Blip Festival is an unprecedented event that is not to be missed. " [via] - Link.
Kristin Lucas - Recent Work
Support the Arts, Score Some Art!
Rhizome is a leading platform for the global new media art community. Our programs and resources, which include exhibitions, journalism, commissioning and collection, all serve to nourish contemporary art that engages new media. This year, Rhizome celebrates its tenth anniversary, and its tenth year of supporting the new media art field. At this pivotal moment, we need our community more than ever! Our annual Community Campaign began on October 17th and will run through December 31st. We are petitioning our community to renew their membership, join for the first time, or make a generous donation. Our Campaign goal is $25,000, an amount that is absolutely essential to Rhizome's survival and growth over the next year. This year, we are planning on enriching our site, developing the ArtBase, and other areas of participation and interaction. In order to make these positive changes, we need support from our community! These are important developments that members have expressed interest in and, we believe, they will foster the broader spirit of exchange and internationalism which has made Rhizome such a unique artistic platform over its first ten years. Meanwhile, there are several ways you can contribute, and donations of $50 or more are recognized with a gift of editioned art works by Lovid, Brody Condon, Kristin Lucas, MTAA, RSG, Rick Silva, and Lee Walton. Thanks for your ongoing support! - Rhizome.org
Sliding Scale:Gail Wight exhibition
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 16 2006
Lisa Vestal, Publicist 650-725-3107, lvestal@stanford.edu
DIGITAL IMAGES AVAILABLE
Sliding Scale: Gail Wight
Stanford, CA-The Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University is pleased to present Sliding Scale: Gail Wight, an exhibition that opens November 7, on view through December 10, 2006 at the Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery where a reception will take place on November 10 with honored guest, Gail Wight.
When conducting an experiment a scientist should always control as many variables as possible, reducing the object of the investigation to the one aspect she is seeking to understand. This insight has been the great strength of the scientific method; it has allowed enormous increases in our understanding of the world through the summation of millions of tiny investigations. As we have become increasingly aware in the last fifty years, however, conducting research at such a level of abstraction is also science’s most dangerous weakness. In “Sliding Scale,” Gail Wight’s art playfully resists the dematerialization of the objects of scientific investigation. Mice eat through a representation of their genome, butterflies struggle to escape their pins, and beetles tell their stories.
Wight’s art simultaneously takes on the two great flaws of abstract scientific thinking—oversimplification and loss of perspective. In Crossing a live mouse plays with a robotic one, and the viewer is left marveling at the incredible complexity of the living being. Recursive Mutations gives a muse the chance to redesign it own genome through its interaction with the paper it lived on. With humor, “Sliding Scale” asks the viewer what has been lost in abstracting a mouse to its genes or to a mechanical prototype that replicates only some of its functions. As viewers zoom in and out with The Meaning of Miniscule they find ...
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.