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.

LILLIAN SCHWARTZ + NATE BOYCE at MONKEY TOWN



Nick Hallett:

HARKNESS A/V PRESENTS
LILLIAN SCHWARTZ + NATE BOYCE

Friday, July 21
MONKEY TOWN
58 N 3rd St (btw. Kent & Wythe)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn 11211
Showtimes: 7:30pm and 10pm
Admission: $8
reservations are recommended
http://www.monkeytownhq.com/reservations.html

Harkness A/V and Monkey Town are proud to present an evening of computer-generated video by pioneering artist Lillian Schwartz and "inheritor" of the tradition, in his NYC debut, Nate Boyce.

Lillian Schwartz, in her tenure as a film/graphics consultant to Bell Laboratories from 1969 to 2002, developed a body of visionary techniques for the creation of computer-generated art. Her works combine these technologies with electronic music and abstract aesthetics to enable some of the most groundbreaking work of its kind, influencing the fields of gaming, special effects and virtual reality, in addition to newer generations of video artists.

You can read more about Lillian Schwartz on her web site,
http://www.lillian.com

Nate Boyce is from San Francisco, where he uses newish software (Jitter, Maya) to nostalgic effect. His videos and installations maximize (in his words) "perceptual anomaly" and "retinal fatigue" to create a mood of general disorientation. He collaborates with acid-noise-electro duo, Eats Tapes, and is part of video trio, Phase Chancellor, featuring members of Matmos.

You can see his video for Pteryd by Eats Tapes here:
http://www.tigerbeat6.com/eats_tapes_pteryd.mov

Both artists will be in attendance to present their work (Lillian Schwartz will only be at the 7:30 performance). We are extremely excited to pair an exciting newcomer to our video scene (Boyce) with an esteemed, established filmmaker such as Lillian Schwartz.

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BAPLab: Festival of Electronic Music and Digital Art



Nick Hallett:

For more information on the following event, please contact the email address mentioned in the press release...

For Immediate Release:

Contact: info@bushwickartproject.org
http://bushwickartproject.org

BAPLab
A One Day Festival of Electronic Music and Digital Art
Saturday, July 22nd 4pm - 6am at 3rd Ward
195 Morgan Ave, Brooklyn, NY

On July 22, Bushwick Art Project (BAP) presents BAPLab, a festival celebrating digital art, music and culture with 16 hours of new media art installations, video work and electronic music from across the audio and visual spectrum. Culling artists from the rosters of the MoMA, The Whitney Museum, and the Venice Biennial along with musicians from labels such as M-NUS, Line, Kranky, Ghostly International and Clink Recordings, BAPLab is featuring over 80 musicians, performers, visual artists, new media installations and DJs side by side. BAPLab is a call to arms to the disparate tribes of New York’s digital-futurists, drawing together from among the best and the brightest of a new generation of artists and musicians.

BAPLab provides attendees with a snapshot of the contemporary digital and new media arts scene, with an international roster of both emerging and established artists such as Guy Ben-Ner and Benton-C Bainbridge . The atmosphere is part high tech museum and part digital community workshop, opening participants, not just contributors, to a free-form dialog on evolution, technology, and identity in this modern era. Consider two fledgling yet world-class events, a junior Sonar and a cosmopolitan Biennial-in-training, and you have BAPLab.

In contrast to the BAP Fall Festival 2005, which drew over 4000 people and was anchored by dance music legend John Tejada, this year’s installment focuses on emerging talent – the hungry generation destined to knock down doors in the near future. The BAPLab seeks to become an integral part of moving ...

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Archived 'Month of Sundays' Real-time Internet Performances.



marc garrett:

Archived recordings of 'Month of Sundays', ready for viewing of the Real-time, Internet Performances.

Session 1, Roger Mills and Neil Jenkins
http://www.visitorsstudio.org/session.pl?id=23

Session 2, Paul Wilson and James Smith
http://www.visitorsstudio.org/session.pl?id=24

Session 3, John Hopkins
http://www.visitorsstudio.org/session.pl?id=25

Session 4, John Kannenberg and Glenn Bach
http://www.visitorsstudio.org/session.pl?id=26

info:

Every Sunday afternoon throughout June, Furthernoise.org hosted live audio-visual internet performances in the online file mixing platform, Visitors Studio - in real-time.

The events featured some of the most innovative international AV artists mixing remotely from various geographic locations and time zones.

Which included audiences and workshops at the Watershed, Bristol.
Audiences and participants at E:vent, (London) UK.
Audiences and collaborations at The Point CDC Theatre (New York) US.

If you want to know more about Visitorsstudio visit link below:
Visitorsstudio.org

If you want to know more about the venues/groups/organisers involved visit links below:
Watershed - http://linkme2.net/8w
E:vent - http://linkme2.net/8x
The point - http://www.thepoint.org/
Furthernoise - www.Furthernoise.or
Furtherfield.org www.furtherfield.org

Furthernoise.org & Visitorsstudio.org are Furtherfield.org projects, >supported by Arts Council England.

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HIDRAZONE - PERFORMATIVITY EDITION


Issue 002: Performativity
julian konczak:

HIDRAZONE.COM are pleased to announce that the 2nd edition of the on-line digital arts journal has gone live with the theme PERFORMATIVITY. This work is also accessible via VODCAST - go to www.hidrazone.com for link.

Incorporating work that cuts across a number of disciplines, the 12 artworks featured ask you to re examine the nature of performance in a post-digital world.

International artists' work featured: LA based Anita Pontin playfully eroticises a camera phone movie in Happy Slap, NYC based Sarah Oppenheimer toys the performance of an art lecture audience, Swedish Interactive Institute artists Geska Helena Andersson and Robert Brecevic examine sexual identity in a series of public installations, UK digital artists Russell Richards and Julian Konczak profile their computational installation of pedestrian performance of Shibuya Crossing in Mass Production, The Institute for Infinitely Small Things perform Corporate Commands, From France Philippe Chollet creates an interactive tableau of Hardwar, India, Birth and Decay invites the user to invoke the generative processes of nature, UK based Boredomresearch investigate machines that perform artificial life, USA - Carole Kim creates dance performances that reconfigure the relationship between performer and audience. London based Igloo artists Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli combine movement with the user interaction of a games engine, Shea Craig creates database psychogeography of suburban America, Pia Lindman creates work at MIT performing human and robot behaviour.

HIDRAZONE is a space for practitioners and writers in the field of digital and interactive arts. We seek to encourage practical and theoretical research into a wide variety of digital art (new media art) such as net art, interactive art, software art, digital painting, and computational video. Our main goal is to provide a forum for encouraging aesthetic quality in digital and interactive arts practice, as well as promoting critical discourse and ...

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OPEN CALL paraflows 06 EXHIBITION Vienna


Judith Fegerl:

CALL FOR ENTRIES
------------------------
PARAFLOWS 06 / annual convention for digital arts and cultures
09.-16.09.2006, Vienna, Austria
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paraflows 06 / EXHIBITION
The exhibition PARAFLOWS 06 invites you to submit contributions. The exhibition deals with current artistic positions within digital media and net cultures. We will present productions which – using new media as a cultural tool – aim for a better understanding of today’s society, thus also being able to utter criticism in order to redesign society. We are eager to see works highlighting and scrutinising the decisive role of new technologies in the development and the perception of presentday culture. This year’s exhibition will focus on the idea of a ‘net behind the net’ which can mean both the digital behind the social net, and the social behind the digital net. Paraflows (the Greek prefix ‘para’ meaning: beside, near, moreover) emanates from the main motors of freedom of the net and its para-experts, the wikipedias and slashdots of all areas within which consumers help each other voluntarily to become and remain critical users and experts in their fields. We are interested in works augmenting our understanding of data protection and privacy, decentralisation, and self-publishing, works that deal with the implications of free ‘social software’ (web 2.0, blogs, wikis, etc.) in realspace, and in works analysing the importance of computer programming as a cultural technique.
------------------------
paraflows 06 / LOCATIONS exhibitions
The exhibition will be held in various locations of the Viennese art and culture scene, ranging from art spaces to clubs, production sites and gallery spaces (details below). We explicitly encourage contributions which are generated for or in accordance with one of the locations, though spatial reference is by no means compulsory. For the seven days of the exhibition, there will be a "net.art-brunch" taking place at ...

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

Rhizome Today: A critic, with opinions about postinternet art


Great post, Michael! What an exciting (if facebook-thread-dramatic!) couple weeks for Postinternet discussion. I appreciate your breakdown of these three (obviously not mutually exclusive) approaches. To my mind, the results of approach #1 have only had fickle results. i.e. Ed, I actually talked about Postinternet Art before I read the "internet aware" comment from Guthrie--I believe first on a Rhizome panel Michael was on at EAI--but then again, Guth & I used to gchat every day then, as we were just about to start Nasty Nets when I brought it up. But moreover, as I recently posted in an FB thread, I truly believe there was a zeitgeist around recognizing these ideas (and using whatever word or phrase to do so; not just postinternet) in 2005-2006, as expressed in writings and talks by Lev Manovich, Steve Dietz, Sarah Cook, Josephine Berry Slater, Jon Ippolito, myself & Guthrie, etc.. (Christiane Paul touched on this in her responses to Karen Archey's Ullens questionnaire.) I don't think it's productive to construct/dismantle/bash origin myths, if only because it's led to a rash of ad hominem attacks on a number of artists & writers lately, completely sacrificing the point of critical writing.

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.


DISCUSSION

Breaking the Ice


Hi, everyone! Wow, I've got to say, it's nice to see some familiar names here! Michael, Congratulations on your new job. As someone who held that same title (and various permutations of it) for several years, I know you are in for a heavy load and I also know that you are also more than up to the task.

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.

DISCUSSION

Conference Report: NET.ART (SECOND EPOCH)


Hi, Josephine.

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.

DISCUSSION

Go Ahead, Touch Her


Why are vocal remixes different than video? This is a very interesting distinction. Can you please say more about this and why one is ok and one isn't, beyond the rubric of industry standards? I think that remix and parody have the potential to be very useful and viable political tools. The best-known examples of such efforts would be the work of the Yes Men, but examples of parasitic media within the field abound. In your comments (i.e. "Here it seems the remix does imply ridicule") it seems as if you think that remixing automatically equals mockery but I don't agree and don't see that implied in the project. Laric's video simply shows us (or arguably amplifies) what's already there and gives both fans and critics a chance to say what they will. This is the pact that all artists make with their audience when they release their work into the world--that people will interpret it as they will, whether that means reading it a certain way, hearing it a certain way, or incorporating it into their lives in a certain way. This is how the popular preconscious works. I don't think it's fair to call this project a senseless derision of Carey, but I do still think that your vehement apprehension towards remixes says something interesting about the ways that certain corners of the cultural community (particularly academia) perceive the effects of these acts. I just think they need fleshing-out. There is a big difference between real violence towards women and perceived theoretical misdeeds towards a celebrity's highly-guarded public image. If this is the true issue, I think our energies are best directed toward prevention of the former rather than scandalizing the latter.

DISCUSSION

Go Ahead, Touch Her


Hi, Brittany.

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.