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.
Emotion's Defibrilator
Tobias Grewenig has conceived the installation Emotion's Defibrilator as a play on the clichés of consciousness-manipulation through electronics. His piece doesn't deliver any content as such, but instead tries to reduce the media on their pure physiological effect on the recipient. In Grewenig's view, the bodily effects of media have rarely been considered and often they range from conspiracy theories about subliminal messages to almost folkloristic ideas about the effects of electro-magnetic pollution.
The user of the installation, wearing an oxygen mask and a pincer on his left forefinger that will measure his/her pulse, puts his head into a big sphere. By placing the hands on two metalic spheres, the equipment is set in motion. First, bio data such as respiration, pulse and skin resistance are measured by the sensors and sent to the software to define the starting parameters. There are various sources of audio and a screen within the sphere. In relation to the data picked up from the body, the audio resonates, tiny electric shocks are delivered via the metallic spheres while the screen shows a flickering image of the user which is being interrupted by "subliminals". When the user takes the hands off the spheres, the installation stops.
Grewenig says that it's fascinating to observe how the electronic equipment, although basically off-the-shelf material, starts frightening its user and turns into something profoundly unpredictable. This already happens when the sensoric input is roughly at the level of everyday city-life. (Well, plus electric shocks, that is.)
Related: Dunne and Raby's Placebo Objects and Hertzian Tales, Death Before Disko by Herwig Weiser.
Via neural.
SONARAMA 2006
Year of Japan
As part of its "Year of Japan," Sonar presents Sonarama 2006, featuring two of the brightest stars in the firmament of Japanese electronic culture, Ryoji Ikeda and Toshio Iwai. "Datamatics", the new audiovisual project by Ikeda, and TENORI-ON, a digital musical instrument created by Iwai for the XXIst century, constitute a unique opportunity to assess the future of the new media in relation to advanced music. Along with this event, increasingly popular participatory communities such as Freesound, FlxER or Digitalmusician.net, as well as open-source creative platforms such as Arduino, Supercollider or Blender will also play a prominent role. And all of this without sacrificing a selection of the most innovative proposals taking place within our borders, as represented by AB, Arbol + Obionlab, La Màquina de Turing, Raw and Earth, Wind and Firewire.
Sonarama focuses on the latest developments in new media. Among this year's activities will be the usual concerts, installations, and technology demonstrations as well as medialabs and software presentations. For a few years now, Sonarama's has been held at the Centre d´Art Santa Mónica, the setting for the programmed activities of Sonar by Day. Centre D'art Santa Mònica (Rambla de Santa Mònica, 7) >From 12:00 to 22:00. 15, 16 and 17 June.
Radical Displacements
Sabrina Raaf's mechanical and robotic sculptures, installations, electronic wearables, and digitally manipulated photographs are all speculative fictions. They anticipate a not-so-distant futuristic world in which smart drugs, genetic engineering, experiments with anti-gravity, and climate change have radically altered human perceptions of time, space, nature, and identity. In 'Icelandic Rift,' a kinetic sculptural installation representing a vision of agricultural and industrial activity in a zero-gravity environment, Raaf connects four starkly engineered yet sensuously biomorphic architectural structures floating above the floor in a system of artificial 'islands.' Inspired by the seemingly extraterrestrial landscapes of Iceland, this synthetic ecosystem contains reservoirs of dense black Ferrofluid (liquid magnet) made to spin, rise, twitch, or travel by electronically powered hard magnets and electromagnets that symbolize the systems' energy sources. Vaguely familiar yet unnervingly alien, the scenarios envisioned in Raaf's work offer a sense of the future that's paradoxically comforting, marvelous, and beautiful, yet fraught with incipient dread. 'Icelandic Rift' and other projects are currently on view, through June 3, in 'rift --> ad-rift,' the artist's solo exhibition at Chicago's Wendy Cooper Gallery. - Marcia Tanner
New Media at the ICA
Body, Space and Cinema
In London's ICA, Body, Space and Cinema, an exhibition featuring selected works by artist Scott Snibbe will open this weekend.
- Theatre and Bar -
Scott Snibbe will be showing three interactive installations, including large-scale body-centric physical installations, Outward Mosaic, premiering at the ICA and Visceral Cinema: Chien, to the interactive sculpture, Blow Up, first shown at Ars Electronica in 2005.
Known around the world for his beautiful, simple and yet brilliant pieces that engage with visitors of all ages. For inspiration or sheer enjoyment this is an exhibition that's not to be missed.
Sat 13 May - Sun 28 May 2006.
12noon - 7.30pm daily
- Digital Studio -
Combining intelligent computer programming with a playful ideas and a philosophical approach to the world we live in his work is simple and yet very engaging. Scott's work includes, emergent behavioural patterns of ants in Myrmegraph, a means of drawing with stars in Gavilux and the simple physical but chaotic system of a pendulum swing in Tripolar. This sample from the breadth of his work, gives an insight into his practice and demonstrates his profound influence on other artists working in this medium.
Fri 12 May - Wed 31 May 2006.
12noon - 7.30pm
Artist's Talk on Saturday 13th May - 3pm
As part of his first UK exhibition, Scott will present recent works that explore interaction between cinematic projections and viewers' bodies along with his most recent work, Blow Up, which amplifies human breath as a large field of wind. He will discuss the philosophical divide between language and visceral perception that motivates his creation of interactive media art.
There will be time for questions after the talk.
Unreadable Text Art
A year ago, we discussed the idea of QR Code and unreadable digital text - and this spring, we began work on a QR-based net.art project that uses the unreadability to retell a classic cryptographic mystery. Here is another aesthetic experiment in unreadable encoding - a poem often accused of illegibility, rendered in columns of custom binary.
">Sai Sriskandarajah's "The Waste Land" encodes T. S. Eliot's famous poem as a binary wall-hanging, using small and large squares to indicate ones and zeros. The image was created using Processing, and is featured in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) Spring Show 2006.
One of the things that interests me most about this work is how the claims about visual art function in a literary context. Is this image artful in a way that a raw QR code or Shotcode isn't? The indications are that, rather than a unique image of conversion, "The Waste Land" encompasses a whole conceptual set of possible representations:
The finished product has no set dimensions; the only requirement is that it should be printed and hung on a wall. It may also be presented in a long, narrow format, like a tickertape, which may be displayed horizontally or vertically.
Rather than scale or aspect, it is the individual units of code and their rendering that is important - this is a form of writing. Particularly interesting when considering such artistrty is the decision to choose one's own coding system rather than using some standard - Sai's code, which she terms "arbitrary," is reminiscent of Kac's unique approach to encoding the alphabet in DNA - in particular, in the similar decision to remove spaces and punctuation marks rather than encode them.
Sriskandarajah arrives at this piece at the end of a series of experiments with binary ...
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.