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.
Collectible After All: Christiane Paul on net art at the Whitney Museum
The Whitney Museum artport has been an important institutional presence in net art and new media since its launch in 2002. Created and curated by Christiane Paul, artport features online commissions as well as documentation of new media artworks from the museum's exhibitions and collections. This year, artport as a whole was made an official part of the Whitney Museum collection; to mark this occasion, participating artist Marisa Olson interviewed Paul about the program's history and evolution over thirteen years.
Douglas Davis, image from The World's First Collaborative Sentence (1994).
Collections like artport are a rare and valuable window onto a field of practice that, in some senses, was borne out of not being taken seriously. From mid-80s Eastern European game crackers to late-90s net artists, the first people working online were often isolated, by default or design, and were certainly marginalized by the art world, where few curators knew of their existence and fewer took them seriously, advocated for them, or worked to theorize and articulate the art historical precedents and currents flowing through the work. Help me fast-forward to the beginning of this century at one of the most important international art museums. Many of the US museums that funded new media projects did so with dot-com infusions that dried-up after 2000. Artport officially launched in 2001; the same year, you curated a section devoted to net art in the Whitney Biennial. What was the behind-the-scenes sequence of events that led to artport's founding?
I think artport's inception was emblematic of a wave of interest in net art in the US around the turn of the century and in the early 2000s. This more committed involvement with the art form interestingly coincided with or came shortly after the dot com bubble, which inflated from 1997–2000, had its climax on March 10, 2000 when NASDAQ peaked, and burst pretty much the next day. Net art, however, remained a very active practice and started appearing on the radar of more US art institutions. To some extent, their interest may have been sparked by European exhibitions that had begun to respond to the effects of the web on artistic practice earlier on. In 1997, Documenta X had already included web projects (that year the Documenta website was also famously "stolen"—that is, copied and archived—by Vuk Cosic in the project Documenta: done) and Net Condition, which took place at ZKM in 1999/2000, further acknowledged the importance of art on the web.
US museums increasingly began to take notice. Steve Dietz, who had started the Walker Art Center's New Media Initiatives early on, in 1996, was curating the online art Gallery 9 and digital art study collection. Jon Ippolito, in his role as Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim, was commissioning net art in the early 2000s and in 2002, Benjamin Weil, with Joseph Rosa, unveiled a new version of SFMOMA's E-space, which had been created in 2000. This was the institutional netscape in which I created artport in 2001, since I felt that the Whitney, which had for the first time included net art in its 2000 Biennial, also needed a portal to online art. The original artport was much more of a satellite site and less integrated into whitney.org than it is now. Artist Yael Kanarek redesigned the site not too long after its initial launch and created version 1.1. Artport in its early days was sponsored by a backend storage company in New Jersey, which was then bought by HP, so HP appeared as the official sponsor. I think it is notable that sponsorship at that point did not come from a new tech company but a brand name that presumably wanted to appear more cutting edge.
booomerrranganggboobooomerranrang: Nancy Holt's networked video
Nancy Holt, Boomerang (1974), still from video.
In her time on this planet, Nancy Holt came to be known as a great American Land Artist, and certainly her brilliant installations, like Utah's Sun Tunnels and collaborations with her partner Robert Smithson and their peers, are profoundly significant, but it was her work in film & video that has had the greatest personal impact on me.
I somehow didn't see Boomerang, her 1974 video performance usually credited to her collaborator Richard Serra, until I was a Ph.D. student in Linda Williams's Phenomenology of Film seminar at UC Berkeley's Rhetoric program, but the time delay was more than made up for by the work's formative resonance. In the video, made during Serra's residency at a Texas television station, a young Holt is seen sitting in an anchor's chair before a staid blue background. Despite brief station ID graphic overlays and one minute of silence in the midst of the ten-minute piece (announced as audio trouble and reminding viewers of the work's live TV origin), the work is in many ways sound-centric.
Sound and Image in Electronic Harmony

On Saturday, April 11th, New York's School of Visual Arts will co-present the 2009 Visual Music Marathon with the New York Digital Salon and Northeastern University. Promising genre-bending work from fifteen countries, the lineup crams 120 works by new media artists and digital composers into 12 hours. If it's true, as is often said, that MTV killed the attention spans of Generations X and Y, this six-minute-per-piece average ought to suit most festivalgoers' minds, and the resultant shuffling on and off stage will surely be a spectacle in its own rite. In all seriousness, this annual event is a highlight of New York's already thriving electronic music scene and promises many a treat for your eyes and ears. The illustrious organizers behind the marathon know their visual music history and want to remind readers that, "The roots of the genre date back more than two hundred years to the ocular harpsichords and color-music scales of the 18th century," and "the current art form came to fruition following the emergence of film and video in the 20th century." The remarkable ten dozen artists participating in this one-day event will bring us work incorporating such diverse materials as hand-processed film, algorithmically-generated video, visual interpretations of music, and some good old fashioned music-music. From luminaries like Oskar Fischinger, Hans Richter, and Steina Vasulka to emerging artists Joe Tekippe and Chiaki Watanabe, the program will be another star on the map that claims NYC as fertile territory for sonic exploration. - Marisa Olson
Tagalicious

The National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens, Greece, has committed itself to curating a number of recent exhibitions of internet art. Their current show, "Tag Ties and Affective Spies," features contributions from both net vets and emerging surfers, including Christophe Bruno, Gregory Chatonsky, Paolo Cirio, JODI, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, Les Liens Invisibles, Personal Cinema and The Erasers, Ramsay Stirling, and Wayne Clements. The online exhibition takes an antagonistic approach to Web 2.0, citing a constant balance "between order and chaos, democracy and adhocracy." Curator Daphne Dragona raises the question of whether the social web is a preexisting platform on which people connect, or whether it is indeed constructed in the act of uploading, tagging, and disclosing previously private information about ourselves on sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook. Dragona asks whether we are truly connecting and interacting, or merely broadcasting. While her curatorial statement doesn't address the issue directly, the show's title hints at the level of self-surveillance in play on these sites. Accordingly, many of the selected works take a critical, if not DIY, approach to the internet. The collective Les Liens Invisibles tends to create works that make an ironic mash-up of the often divergent mantras of tactical media, culture jamming, surrealism, and situationism. In their Subvertr, they encourage Flickr users to "subverTag" their posted images, creating an intentional disassociation between an image's content and its interpretion, with the aim of "breaking the strict rules of significance that characterize the mainstream collective imaginary..." JODI's work, Del.icio.us/ winning information (2008) exploits the limited stylistic parameters of the social bookmarking site. Using ASCII and Unicode page titles to form visual marks, a cryptic tag vocabulary, and a recursive taxonomy, their fun-to-follow site critiques the broader content of the web ...
Reappearance of the Undead

In 1997, internet art hall-of-famer Olia Lialina made a "net drama" called Agatha Appears that was written for Netscape 3 and 4 in HTML 3.2. One of the main features of the interactive narrative was the travel of the eponymous avatar across the internet. Let's just say the girl got around. But the magical illusion of the piece was that she appeared to stay still, even when links in the narrative were clicked and the viewer's address bar indicated movement to another server. But in time, both the browser and code in which the story was written became defunct and the piece unraveled as the sites previously hosting the links and files upon which Agatha was dependent disappeared or cleaned house. Such a scenario is common to early internet art (and will no doubt continue to plague the field), as ours is an upgrade culture constantly driving towards new tools, platforms, and codes. Many have debated whether to let older works whither or how it might be possible to update these works, making them compatible with new systems. For those who are interested, some of the best research on the subject has been performed by the folks affiliated with the Variable Media Initiative. Meanwhile, luddites and neophiles alike are now in luck because Agatha Appears has just undergone rejuvenation. Ela Wysocka, a restorer working at Budapest's Center for Culture & Communication Foundation has worked to overcome the sound problems, code incompatibilities, and file corruption and disappearance issues, and she's written a fascinating report about the process, here. And new collaborating hosts have jumped in line to bring the piece back to life, so that like a black and white boyfriend coming home from war, Agatha now offers us a shiny new webring as a token of ...
Re: DATA DIARIES by CORY ARCANGEL on Turbulence
net in quite some time and, in all honesty, it's restored some of my
recently lost faith/enchantment with net art.
{of course, one may argue that it is not "net art" because arcangel
is not a "net artist," per se, but it's rendered in a way that bears
site-specificity/-reflexivity, given that it's encoded for a
primarily internet-based video medium/channel and is, afterall,
presented on the internet...}
"poverty"? arte poverte this is not, if only because it clearly has a
very specific content (to bracket medium-specific issues). if
"poverty" refers to a certain aesthetic void, i would strongly
disagree. the work is far from static and is visually stunning--yes,
i said stunning... nonetheless, some of history's greatest painters
gave us work that might also be called "wallpaper" but their blue
boxes, white on white, image loops, pinstripes, and swaths of
camouflage remain rich in both content and poetics.
to me, this trumps the work currently being called "net art" simply
because it exists on the net, without awareness of network conditions
or which simply caters to a darwinian-"evolutionary" lust for higher
technologies, resulting in self-congratulatory didactics.. two main
pitfalls in much contemporary "net art," as i see it. this is another
reason that arcangel's interest in "defunct' media and dirt-style
design are refreshing, if not downright nostalgia-inducing.
marisa
> > DATA DIARIES is <...>
>..but of course that's not what we see at all. There's
>no way the viewer can know that what is on the screen
>has some connection to Cory's this and that except by
>way of the artist statement.
>Take the 'concept' away and the poverty of the thing
>immediately becomes apparent - if the artist simply
>constructed the images we see we might say, OK that's
>vaguely interesting and attractive in a kind of
>wallpaper way for about 2 seconds but 11 hours
>...please!
>By far the most interesting thing about the piece is
>the neat lo fi handwritten bubbles and the general
>presentation of the piece, but then maybe that took a
>little bit of craft.
>michael
_________________
Marisa S. Olson
Associate Director
SF Camerawork
415. 863. 1001
correction--call for entries: 'projects'
when we develop too many aliases and addresses... below is a cfe i
sent over the weekend, with the *correct* address:
moprojects@yahoo.com (not hotmail).
if you've sent me anything, please re-send to the correct address!
(and thanks to those observant souls who showed me the error of my
ways!) ~marisa
-----------------------------------------
CALL FOR ENTRIES: "Projects"
I am now accepting proposals for my participation in your project.
Please see project notes and restrictions, below.
PROJECT STATEMENT: "PROJECTS"
PROJECTS is a project exploring conditions of authorship,
communication, 'art world' navigation, nepotism, and collaboration.
PROJECT INSTRUCTIONS
Organizers of projects reliant upon public participation or
collaboration may send project descriptions of no more than 500 words
directly to moprojects2003@yahoo.com. Descriptions must contain:
* Project Name
* Project Purpose
* Project Participants
* Project Medi(a)
* Project Exhibition Venues/Details
* Project Timeline
PROJECT FORMAT
Marisa S. Olson's contributions to your project may include but are
not limited to: e-mails, voice recordings, text messages,
photographs, videos, art on paper, personal details, press clips,
documents, constructions, household objects, and food items.
PROJECT NOTE: Special attention will be paid to projects related to:
* No War
* Site-specificity
* Time and/or Memory
* Consumption
PROJECT RIGHTS
* Project organizers are encouraged but not required to list or
detail the fact or nature of Marisa S. Olson's participation.
* Marisa S. Olson will not claim authorship of your project.
* Marisa S. Olson reserves the right to claim participation (and
exhibition participation) in your project.
* Marisa S. Olson will cover all costs for the production and
"shipment" of project-related work.
There is no entry fee for submission to PROJECTS.
Submission materials may not be returned.
_________________
Marisa S. Olson
Associate Director
SF Camerawork
415. 863. 1001
symposium looking for anti-war artists
>As part of the new Institute for Advanced Feminist
>Research at UC Santa Cruz, a group of faculty are organizing a spring
>symposium event on the topic of Feminism and Global War. The
>idea is to protest the current administration's foreign policy
>and also address the larger issue of what can be done by a determined
>group of feminists against the proliferation of global war
>policies by this and other militaristic governments. This is not going
>to be a traditional academic conference--it is intended to be
>a brainstorming, collaborative event that will
>culminate in public action.
>
>We are looking for feminist ARTISTS who are producing
>anti-war work and who would be interested in participating in the
>event April 18-19. We do not have a large budget, so we are
>hoping to locate artists in the area. However, if anyone on the list
>knows of good people to contact (even out of the area) or even just
>good work to look at, please let me know. And please feel free to
>identify yourselves or to voice your interest in participating
>even if you are not an artist.
>
>We are already aware of Women In Black, and we are
>looking for other feminist anti-war art groups/projects/ideas.
_________________
Marisa S. Olson
Associate Director
SF Camerawork
415. 863. 1001
CALL FOR ENTRIES: "Projects"
I am now accepting proposals for my participation in your project.
Please see project notes and restrictions, below.
PROJECT STATEMENT: "PROJECTS"
PROJECTS is a project exploring conditions of authorship, art world
navigation, nepotism, and collaboration.
PROJECT INTRUCTIONS
Organizers of projects reliant upon public participation or
collaboration may send project descriptions of no more than 500 words
directly to moprojects2003@hotmail.com. Descriptions must contain:
* Project Name
* Project Purpose
* Project Participants
* Project Medi(a)
* Project Exhibition Venues/Details
* Project Timeline
PROJECT FORMAT
Marisa S. Olson's contributions to your project may include but are
not limited to: e-mails, voice recordings, text messages,
photographs, videos, art on paper, personal details, press clips,
documents, constructions, household objects, and food items.
PROJECT NOTE: Special attention will be paid to projects related to:
* No War
* Site-specificity
* Time and/or Memory
* Consumption
PROJECT RIGHTS
* Project organizers are encouraged but not required to list or
detail the fact or nature of Marisa S. Olson's participation.
* Marisa S. Olson will not claim authorship of your project.
* Marisa S. Olson reserves the right to claim participation (and
exhibition participation) in your project.
* Marisa S. Olson will cover all costs for the production and
"shipment" of project-related work.
There is no entry fee for submission to PROJECTS.
Submission materials may not be returned.
_________________
Marisa S. Olson
Associate Director
SF Camerawork
415. 863. 1001
sf art scene?
The Bay Area Art Scene: A Challenge to the Art World | WED 2.12
DOUG HALL, Artist
ARNOLD J. KEMP, Associate Visual Arts Curator, Yerba Buena Center for
the Arts; Artist
HEATHER MARX, Owner, Heather Marx Gallery
THEMIS MICHOS, Collector
MATTHEW HIGGS, Curator of Art and Design, CCAC Wattis Institute;
Former Associate Director of Exhibitions, Institute of Contemporary
Arts in London; Moderator
The Bay Area offers a unique context in which innovative contemporary
artists can create artwork away from the pressures inherent to the
larger art markets. According to a recent Art in America article on
the Bay Area art scene, "Though San Francisco will probably always
serve as a testing ground and jumping off point for many artists, its
intrinsically nourishing character ensures a support system for those
who stay." If that is in fact the case, why do so many artists, as
well as art professionals and collectors, feel that it's necessary
for artist to leave the Bay Area in order to establish themselves as
"major" artists?
This is the 2nd in a series of 4 Inforum panels examining the health
of arts communities in San Francisco. 6 p.m., Pre-panel Reception |
6:30 p.m., Program | 8 p.m., Post-panel Reception | Club Office, 595
Market St, 2nd floor, San Francisco | Free for Inforum/Club/GenArt
members, $10 for non-members. Co-sponsored by
<http://www.genartsf.org>GEN ART SF. Beverages courtesy of
Heineken/Amstel Light and Cinergi by Cameron Hughes Wine.
_________________
Marisa S. Olson
Associate Director
SF Camerawork
415. 863. 1001