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.
The Arcane Art of Tracking vs. the Amen Break

Art of Tracking: Renoise GUI
a digital breakbeat artist? Forget 303s, MIDI keyboards and software synths. If you want get down and dirty with sequenced music, tracking and MOD files is where it’s at. Often thought of as a hacker’s approach to music, tracking started in the Amiga demo scene as a barebones way of programming sound. It’s a bit like writing MIDI files by hand.
Kuro5hin has a good article and how-to on cutting up breakbeats with tracking. It lists possible software (such as Renoise) and gives a step-by-step breakdown of how to go about murdering the Amen Break (the biggest drum’n'bass break of all time…) For more insights into the origin of tracking culture, Salon.com has an article called MOD Love.
The Salon.com article points out that the analogy that tracking is to music what code is to software is a but of an overstatement. Tracking, which involves writing notes and effects in hexadecimal code, is still much like sequencing. Its true significance seems to stem from the fact that tracking started as a DIY culture, by kids who had no access to professional equipment (and frequently, no musical training). But tracking also allows a mechanical approach to music that makes it attractive to practicioners of drum’n'bass, breakcore, digital hardcore or plain old noise.
Go forth and track.
The sitting computer game
NEXT rocks. I heard two mind-blowing talks this afternoon [....] and the exhibtion is awesome. If you´re in Copenhagen, hurry up cuz tomorrow is the last day. [....]
I met the hilarious Falk Grieffenhagen and Thomas Stöckl from Sinua this afternoon.
Their midi-sofa allows you to interact with the game on the screen in front of you.
You control the movement of your avatar by changing the seating position on the sofa, bouncing on it or pressing harder the back of the furniture. The more physical action used the faster the ball gets. Both, the "strategy of power" and the "strategy of minimal movement" lead to success.
They also showed me a video of their musical performace on the Sensitive Carpet (it´s online, don´t miss it, you´re in for a good laugh)
When a person walks on this carpet switches are triggered everywhere a foot touches the ground. In total there are 48 switches integrated into the carpet. The information collected is digitised and fed into a computer which turns impulses into sound.
New monochrom content // "Flowers" / Flower Curren...
New monochrom content // "Flowers" / Flower Currency MP3 online: We are proud to announce that Matthias Kertal finalized his musical adaptation of the "flower song", a song created for the "flower currency" project in spring 2005. The experiment was started to explore a value exchange system, created and owned by children, to enable artists to collaborate on the creation of interdisciplinary art works. Work in progress.
Link
All systems Crystallize!
It’s that time again for a Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture, and what a fine weekend it looks set to be in that disused office building in Utrecht. On Friday EZCT give a workshop on ‘genetic algorithms as a tactic for meandering through the possibility space of architectonic forms’. Saturday brings in the Arch-OS crew who will undoubtedly talk about their ‘Operating System’ for contemporary architecture which has been developed to provide artists and technologists with an environment for developing transdisciplinary work. Sunday looks like be a really exciting day with no fewer than 6 presentations - There’s Tom Carden, whose recent Openstreetmap poster has been a massive hit. OpenStreetMap put together all the GPS data it has in London (mainly via eCourier) and made a beautiful poster from it. Theres also a presentation by Christina Ray, co-founder of Glowlab and special agent in the proliferation of psycogeographic events in New York, notably the PsyGeo Con Flux conventions. Franziska Huebler and Jeremy Abbot, who I had the good fortune to meet two weeks ago at Crystalpunk, run TruthDareDoubleDare, a design studio working on physical computing projects. Other presentations come from the Hyperbody Research Group, Orkan Telhan and the anarchic C6 whose recent exhibition was a sell-out!
FLACK ATTACK MAGAZINE: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
FLACK ATTACK: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
We invite you to contribute to Flack Attack, a new magazine coming out of The Port (http://www.theport.tv/), a community-driven space initiated by Simon Goldin & Jakob Senneby inside the online 3D world Second Life (http://secondlife.com/). The production process of Flack Attack will be continually featured on artport (http://artport.whitney.org/), the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet Art, as a gate page during the month of December 2005. Using The Port as a point of departure we are pursuing a series of investigations into the potential of networked public spheres and the organization of participatory production.
PRODUCTION
The production model of Flack Attack magazine is based on the wiki concept and the workflow starts with the set-up of the wiki at http://www.flackattack.org.=20
Theme
The theme of the first issue is "Flack Attack on Autonomy" [More....]
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.