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.
Cast-offs From The Golden Age
Cast-offs from the Golden Age is a multimedia artwork by Melanie Swalwell and Erik Loyer which allows you to explore the history of early digital games in New Zealand. It is published in Issue 3 of Vectors Journal, an electronic publication which proposes a thorough rethinking of the dynamic relationship of form to content in academic research, focusing on ways technology shapes , transforms and reconfigures social and cultural relations.
Play it at www.vectorsjournal.org and add your reflections to the database.
"Cast-offs from the Golden Age" is a work of fragments: there are moments of fascination and serendipity, as well as the occasional dead end. You are the researcher who is charged with uncovering the history of early digital games in New Zealand. Early on you discover that this will be no easy task. Nevertheless, a picture of the early NZ games industry gradually emerges from your pursuit of various avenues of inquiry. Was it what you expected?
"With little standard textual material on the subject, and even less in the way of material artefacts housed in New Zealand cultural institutions, it was necessary to get creative and innovate as far as research methods were concerned...Ephemera collections quickly proved to be one of the best sources of information...the bits and pieces that many people wouldn't consider worthwhile, the stuff that is usually discarded..."
-- Melanie Swalwell
"In order to experience the largely unexamined history of video games in New Zealand, Swalwell asks us to retrace some of her steps - and occasional missteps - in seeking to discover this arcane and fragmented history. Swalwell's project refuses to deliver a comprehensive history, choosing instead to allegorize the research process by embedding bits of information within an information space... [The experience] is part exploration and part role-playing-game, as different facts ...
Matchbox 2005 and Judas
Stanislav Vajce is currently showing two of his amazing robotic pieces as part of the informARTics-exhibition at ZKM Karlsruhe. The first one, "Matchbox 2005" is a very reduced and tiny light tank, which in fact is an autonomous vehicle that will continously explore a mock-up battlefield. It's got a lifesize puppet of the artist sitting in the hatch, too. For Vajce, light tanks are the technical achievement where great mobility meets maximal destruction and disruption of the social fabrics they come across.
The second piece works a play on military technologies as well: "Judas" comes with the slogan "Digital is better" (Tocotronic?) and is a six-legged robot stuffed into a cute blue jumpsuit. It as well will roam its surroundings, but what looks like a head is an array of sensors which enables it to recognize patterns, letters and allegedly even read. It looks cute in its "dogishness" (Vajce) but actually it's a "little snitch" that will eventually "send an army of light tanks" your way.
Don't miss his hilarious website Maschinismus.
Related: Tom Sachs' Island.
Links for 2006-05-18 [del.icio.us]
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- Bruce Sterling Rant @ Space "ARPHID NOT RFID" | MAzine
Bruce predicts there will be 3 main phases of ARPHID art practice, and a window of opportunity lasting about 7 years before ARPHID fades into obscurity.
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- BRUCE STERLING AUDIO DOWNLOAD | MAzine
Bruce Sterling's RFID Rant (48mb) at SPACE Studios (Tues 16 May 2006)
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With Enemies Like This...
Wiretaps, leaks, and whistle-blowing have recently become popular topics of discussion within the US . The current Administration’s secrecy seems to depend increasingly upon a lack of secrecy for everyone else, as journalists fight to keep their sources private and activists find themselves targeted by the FBI. One assumes that social networking sites like Friendster are under surveillance... So where can conspiracy-minded people get together? Perhaps on Sinister, a social software tool for our collective dark side. Managed by the suspicious team of Cassandra Rand, Georgia Underwood, and Annina Rüst, Sinister is a connection to underground chat worlds revolving around gardening, real estate, and finance, via the web, IRC, and telephone. One can call access numbers provided on the Sinister Calling Card to listen in on ongoing conversations. More than a mere communication platform, the Sinister website uses theories developed by researchers at Rensellear Polytechnic Institute to analyze the 'shape' of communication patterns in order to reveal the topic of discussion. Sure, conspiracies simmered before social software, but have they ever had their own calling card? - Ryan Griffis
Public Broadcast Cart in Berlin - June/July
From June 1st through July 17th, I will be participating in a sound art festival in Berlin - Sonambiente 2006. The festival organizers have invited me to participate with the Public Broadcast Cart - traversing the streets of Berlin. In preparation for the festival, I have revamped the project's website, adding to the site lots of info that others may find useful, such as how to build your own cart. Keeping with the goal of the project as a tool for civil empowerment and to generate discussion surrounding increasing control of dissemination media by very few wealthy private entities the site is intended as an informational repository surrounding radio transmission in the hands of the public.
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.