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.

10 Digits




Remember when 'digits' meant 'fingers'? Of course you don't! Few of us lived in the 'pre-digital era,' but that doesn't mean artists aren't exploring the double entendre of the high tech handmade. Take Cody Trepte for example. The New York-based artist has produced a number of works that not only explore overlaps between binary and tactile representational systems, they also cause us to think about that romantic ideal overly celebrated in the art world and all but forgotten in computing culture: the hand of the artist. Included in his Binary Cross Stitch series is a work entitled 'Alan Turing once knit himself a pair of gloves,' a subtle reminder of the man behind the machine--a man whose private life Trepte has plunged in previous exhibitions, ironically adding humanity to our recollection of a character famous for helping us distinguish between humans and robots. The artist has described his work as a process of unravelling the 'translation of data from a physical or analog state to an electronic state.' Seemingly in answer to the question of why technology has become so depersonalized, Trepte's quilted works, or Hand-Quilted Binaries, suggest the security of losing oneself in the comfort of veiled codes. Likewise, in a cross-stitch work entitled 'This is how I cope with my neuroses,' the artist translates natural language into happy couples of zeros and ones, or black and white. Cody Trepte's work can currently be seen in the exhibition '12,5,' at Kunstverein INGAN, Berlin. - Marisa Olson

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Craft Hacker




Ben Fino-Radin aligns his needlepoint work with the emerging genre of 'craft-hacking.' In his case, the Providence-based artist (who has also made his fair share of net art and electronic music) makes crafty sculptures that give form to otherwise 'intangible digital ephemera.' His large-scale representations of old web browser hourglasses suggest the nerdcore set's equivalent of Flava Flav's symbolic timepieces, while his boxy 3D gloved hyperlink pointer points explicitly to the net, pushing the language of browsing into a visceral realm often overlooked by media theorists. It's hard to call the act of pulling yarn through a plastic grid 'new' media, but the work undeniably comments on the status of technology in our domestic lives while recalling the history of homebrew hardware and software kits. Fino-Radin's 'Software' is a brilliant example of that lofty artistic tradition of estranging viewers from a familiar object in order to see it in a new light. The piece is a scaled replica of the Mac SE, complete with mouse and keyboard. The monitor's window has an open slit through which viewers can slide embroidered cards replicating popular websites such as Yahoo and Google, or cute emoticons. Thus, the work is not only interactive, but it also forges a connection between old school craft circles and the collaborative spirit of the open source community. The artist likens his practice to the copy-and-paste assemblages of Web 2.0 hackers and his patterns, palette, and dithering structure are determined by .gif compression standards. Ultimately, he says, "The environments I create with these objects are spaces for the vernacular of crafts and personal computers to rub up against each other with the goal of constructing a fictitious culture with it's own depth of tradition, ritual, and mysticism." - Marisa Olson

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A Day With(out) Art




December 1st is World AIDS day, and as has been tradition since 1989, arts organizations across the United States and abroad will make the day a moment to 'inspire positive action' by participating in the Day With(out) Art program. The initiative began as an effort to mobilize the arts community to amplify their own voice in support of AIDS awareness and to respond to the 'crisis' with proactive programs. On that first day, over 800 institutions went dark, closing their museums and sending staff to volunteer at AIDS services, or mounting special shows on AIDS-related issues. Orchestrated by the organization Visual Aids, this collaborative effort has certainly harnessed the internet's mobilizing power. In the late nineties, as more artists and orgs went online, partners in the program set their web pages to black or mounted dark banners on December 1st, in order to create a moment of visual silence in which to think about how AIDS effects us all. In 1997, the name of the event was changed from 'A Day Without Art' to 'A Day WITH Art' in order to encourage the 8,000+ project participants to use their voices and venues to speak out about AIDS-related issues. Visual Aids ultimately retained the name as 'a metaphor for the chilling possibility of a future day without art or artists.'


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Feed


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Feed: interactive installation to show how life is fed by media - According to Pier Luigi Capucci, nowadays the relationship between arts and life follows two different paths. The first and more ancient is deep-rooted in the organic matter and is inspired by scientific disciplines: biology, biotechnology and genetic. The second path, more recent, comes from different approaches: artificial life and robotics. The essential difference between the two (apart from tools, approaches and technologies in use) is that in the first path life is presented as it is, while in the second it is represented, i.e. simulated. Shane Cooper’s installation Feed, recently displayed at Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei’s Zone_V2_ Unstable Media, combines the two paths. The work is composed of two halves. The upper half is a video wall of television screens, each tuned to a different channel and playing at low volume. The lower half is a garden of ferns that can survive under conditions of extreme lighting. The television screens provide the light to the plants, which grow towards them in a constricted space, eventually colliding. People interact with the installation because the garden survives thanks to the people presence as infrared cameras convert images of visitors into light. Cooper presents life as it is through growing ferns but also applies the biological network to social network, which is deeply influenced by technological civilization. Feed sums up the relationship between new media and human beings poking fun at people who spend their days laying in front of television, fed by TV meals and news, believing that the tv screen is the only source of knowledge and entertainment.” - Valentina Culatti, Neural.

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[Anhedonia, by Aleksandra Domanovic]


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Anhedonia, 2007, 90 min. In psychology, anhedonia is an inability to experience pleasure from normally pleasurable life events such as eating, exercise, and social or sexual interaction. It was also supposed to be the original title of Woody Allen’s 1977 film Annie Hall, but it was considered unmarketable. By Aleksandra Domanovic.

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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.