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: The "Velvet-Strike" underground
Velvet Strike in NewFangle 2001, 3 weeks after 9/11, in which a piece
based on the film Topgun was also seen this way.
it's fun with numbers.....
>Alexander Galloway wrote:
>
>glad Salon can weigh in on a two year old work as if it's a news scoop ;-)
>
>On May 4, 2004, at 9:54 AM, twhid@twhid.com wrote:
>
>>twhid@twhid.com thought you would be interested in this article at
>>Salon.com http://www.salon.com
>>- - - - - - - - - - - -
>>
>>The "Velvet-Strike" underground
>>By Jennifer Buckendorff
>>
>>http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/05/04/velvet_strike/index.html
>>
>>- - - - - - - - - - - - Tue May 4 06:54:19 2004
>>twhid@twhid.com came from IP: 65.242.164.10 + -> post:
>>list@rhizome.org -> questions: info@rhizome.org ->
>>subscribe/unsubscribe:
>>http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz -> give:
>>http://rhizome.org/support -> visit: on Fridays the Rhizome.org web
>>site is open to non-members + Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to
>>the terms set out in the Membership Agreement available online at
>>http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
>
>+
>-> post: list@rhizome.org
>-> questions: info@rhizome.org
>-> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
>-> give: http://rhizome.org/support
>-> visit: on Fridays the Rhizome.org web site is open to non-members
>+
>Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
>Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
POP_Remix @ Camerawork
Camerawork. A description of the show is below. If you are in town,
please stop by our opening, on Tuesday, May 11. It is going to be a
TON of fun--with work made from Starsky & Hutch, Super Mario games,
and Marilyn Monroe films, among other pop sources, this is probably
the most fun I've ever had curating a show!
We are also having a number of fun events, including a hacking
demonstration by Cory Arcangel & Alex Galloway (5/10 in Mountain
View, co-sponsored with Zero1 & Leonardo ISAST) and a screening of
"Enjoy!" and "Value-Added Cinema" (5/18, in the downstairs theatre).
Check here for more details: http://www.sfcamerawork.org/events.html
POP_Remix
May 11-June 12, Opening Reception May 11, 5-8pm
SF Camerawork-1246 Folsom-SF, CA 94103 USA
Cory Arcangel / BEIGE, Matthew Biederman, Anthony Discenza, Radical
Software Group (RSG) featuring Alex Galloway, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy,
Paul Pfeiffer
{{This exhibition is accompanied by an issue of Camerawork: A Journal
of Photographic Arts, featuring essays by Lev Manovich, Philip
Sherburne, Jose Luis de Vicente, and others.}}
The Pop art era of Warhol and Lichtenstein may have officially come
to pass, but the movement has not ended. In today's moving image
culture, the context of Pop art is ripe for reconsideration-a
"remixing" if you willS The creative strategy of appropriation has
only grown, in function and in source-material, since the Television
experiments and video art of the 1960s. Just as Pop artists of that
era lifted logos and vernacular imagery, the work in POP_Remix takes
as its marrow appropriated segments of popular films, TV programs,
and video games. The deconstructed and remixed results serve as
meditations on mainstream image-making and its cultural import.
Anthony Discenza is concerned with the engorgement of our lives by
the images of "mediated culture." His work thus attempts to realize
the decay of the images that work to "decay" our selves. This effort
appears to us in the form of often painterly, abstract, or
kaleidoscopic video (de)constructions. Here he presents portraits of
three "Hosts," the yield of layering footage of seven major network
news anchors.
Paul Pfeiffer explores the visual histories of the film, TV, and
digital/video eras, Pfeiffer's projects often take up issues in (and
parallels among) religion, sports, colonialism, racism, masculinity,
and power. In his photographic series, Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse, Pfeiffer has "erased" iconic images of Marilyn Monroe
from film stills, leaving only a hazy vacant landscape.
Through techniques of parody, pastiche, and laborious dissection,
Jennifer & Kevin McCoy explore the enculturating impacts of genre and
narrative structure. For Every Shot, Every Episode, the McCoys
created a database of every shot in every episode of "Starsky and
Hutch." Viewers can choose to play disks categorizing the indexed
data. In How I Learned, the McCoys similarly catalogued episodes from
the show "Kung-Fu," rhetorically asking 'if all you ever knew about
the world you learned from this show, what would you know?'
Matthew Biederman is also engaged in deconstructing TV clips. In his
AleatoryTV, a computer scans a channel of live TV for specific words
via speech recognition algorithms. The words form a sentence,
pre-selected by the artist. As the agent "hears" the words on TV, it
samples the audio and visual content that accompanies it, placing the
clip in a loop that is continuously played back on a large
television. New utterances of the word replace old ones and the
process begins anew each day.
In 2x2 Alex Galloway, founder of the Radical Software Group (RSG)
"degrades" video clips from popular films and TV programs into linear
animations two pixels tall by two pixels wide. The flickering clips
are played on GameBoys. Galloway's Prepared PlayStation 2 uses
unmodified versions of the PlayStation game Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4
to exploit "bugs and glitches in the code to create dirty, jolting
game loops." Both projects point to an internal collapse of the
system within which they signify.
In NES Home Movies: 8bit Landscape Studies Cory Arcangel spins a tale
about his youth, traced by those images he grew up staring at, thus
revealing his identity to be, in a sense "photosensitive." They work
effects a reverse of the trajectory of the image's "evolution" from
still to film to video to video game by reverse-engineering his 8-bit
videos into panoramic photographs.His relayering of self-composed
Detroit-style rock or old school raver tunes over remixed clips of
Mario and his environs, in Video Ravings, brings new meaning to the
work it mimes. In defiance to the commercially-driven "evolution" of
machine culture, and in recognition of the formal origin of these
remixes, Arcangel saves the new videos on game cartridges and runs
them on original Nintendos.
In each of these works we can begin to chart the cultural shift from
accessing screen-based photographic images in the forms of cinematic
projections, to television screens, to hand-held screens. With each
shift there have come physical and cultural shifts, among them a
change in the allowed modes of representation and access of these
images. In each case, the machinery of a work of art dictates the
conditions of its production, distribution, and-arguably-its
interpretation. These issues are at the heart of Pop art, alongside
questions about authorship, the status of the multiple, and
interrogations of commodity fetishism.
Overall, the exhibition serves as a meditation on mainstream
image-making and its cultural import. Each project is at once
accessible-even fun!-by virtue of its relationship to pop culture,
while simultaneously revealing the deeper cumulative effects of our
relationship to its content. Ultimately, we are invited to consider
the impacts these popular lens-based genres have had upon the ways in
which we choose to look at the world. -Marisa S. Olson, Curator
SF Camerawork encourages emerging and mid-career artists to explore
new directions in photography and related media by fostering creative
forms of expression that push existing boundaries. This year marks
our 30th Anniversary.
We would like to extend special thanks to the Andy Warhol Foundation
for the Arts, Zero: One, Leonardo ISAST, the Hotel Tax Fund of San
Francisco Grants for the Arts, Hosfelt Gallery, Lucasey Mounting
Systems, Steven Blumenkrantz, Jona Frank, Anthony Laurino, and Thomas
Meyer.
Curatorial Internship (SF)
2004-2005 SF Camerawork Curatorial Fellow
SF Camerawork is seeking a graduate-level intern to take on advanced
duties related to the administration and programming of the
organization. Duties will extend to curatorial research and support,
editorial assistance with the organization's Journal of Photographic
Arts, grant research, and other duties related to the administration
of a nonprofit arts organization.
The internship will be organized on a project-basis and is best
suited to flexible and self-motivated individuals interested in the
arts and non-profit organizations. This is an opportunity to become
deeply involved in Camerawork's programming, while preparing for a
future leadership position in the arts.
Hours:
The hours are flexible, dependent upon the candidate's schedule, but
ideally the Curatorial Fellow will work two days per week from 12 to
5 p.m. for an academic year. Hours may be inconsistent, due to
project nature of work, and Fellow may balance work in and out of the
office. In addition to attending openings and other public events,
Fellow will attend meetings of the organization's Programming
Committee, currently scheduled for Wednesday evenings, every six
weeks.
Duties:
Curatorial/Programmatic Support
Defunct @ SFMOMA, 4/29-5/1
grace & i have been working on this for a very long time and are
thrilled to tell you about it. please join us on 4/29 to see the
excellent work & the newest issue of our zine!
best,
marisa
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
DEFUNCT -->
recycled | repurposed | remixed| rehashed
---------------------------------------------------------
Works by the 8-Bit Construction Set, Jon Brumit,
Tommy Becker, Joshua G. Churchill, & JODI
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
WHAT -->
The San Francisco Media Arts Council (SMAC) is hosting an exhibition
of artworks in DEFUNCT media, curated by Grace Hawthorne & Marisa S.
Olson.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a new issue of the SMAC! zine,
featuring essays and artwork by Bruce Sterling, MTAA, Paperrad,
Patrick Lichty, Mark Beam, and others.
---------------------------------------------------------
WHERE -->
The Schwab Room at SFMOMA
151 Third Street, San Francisco
---------------------------------------------------------
WHEN -->
Thursday, April 29, 2004
Exhibit opening and reception: 6 - 8:30 p.m.
Friday, April 30, 2004
Exhibit open to the public, 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Saturday, May 1, 2004
Exhibit open to the public, 11 a.m. - 3 p.m.
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
--> Admission is FREE, but space is limited. Advance reservations are
suggested for Thursday evening reception <-- email
mediaarts@sfmoma.org
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
Description -->
DEFUNCT highlights work in which artists have recycled, repurposed,
or remixed presumably "defunct" hardware, software, audio/visual
data, and representational systems. Whether one feels nostalgia at a
bygone era or anxiety over the future of machine culture's
"evolution," the work in the exhibition is provocative, engaging, and
only a little loud...
THE 8-BIT CONSTRUCTION SET (BEIGE programming ensemble) has created a
legendary DJ battle record pitting the Atari against the Commodore 64
with Detroit-techno style songs composed of the sounds from each. The
record is also the first ever use of the vinyl recording medium for
software distribution--the inside tracks are audio data which can be
dubbed to cassette tape and booted in your respective Atari or
Commodore 8-bit computers. The record was entirely programmed in 6502
assembly language.
--> http://www.beigerecords.com/products/beg-004.html
TOMMY BECKER describes "Daddy Kill," his 90 second video as "a short
film with a rhythm, repetition and tone that poetically conveys the
activities of a murderous father." The video "recycles" a found film
in which a man demonstrates to his son how leaving an object on
grass, in sunlight, will kill the grass under the object. The video
is part of Becker's "Tape Number One" project, a mutating
construction of sentimental vignettes patched together by documented
gestures, words, sounds, melodies, trivial facts and found materials.
Becker thinks of video as "a hybrid medium for personal explorations
in writing, performance, music and costume design."
--> http://www.tommybecker.com
JON BRUMIT's "mineflora" is part sculpture, part "found media
sequencer." Its materials include a timpani drum, acoustical foam,
clock radios, and a flasher, which, as the artist says, makes several
things possible, simultaneously: "1. The tentative relationship of
sounds to physical form via auto switching, 2. The rhythm of signal
loss via unique or unintentional features of discarded technology,
and 3. The residue of improvisation within chance parameters."
--> http://www.bayimproviser.com/artistdetail.asp?artist_id!1
JOSHUA G. CHURCHILL's sound-activated mixed media installation,
"Reciprocation/Retaliation," is based on the notion of 'mixed
signals', both literally and figuratively. On the floor of a darkened
room, electronic components, such as tv's and radios, are connected
to Clappers
ON THE FLY: The Convergence of VJ & DEMO Culture
Have you found yourself wondering, lately, just what do video art, dj
practice, and a 20-year-old form of artistic hacker-tagging have in
common..? Then this is the panel and/or party for you!
Hoping you can join us...
Marisa :)
Announcing the first in a series of ZeroOne HOTSPOTS events...
ON THE FLY: The Convergence of VJ & DEMO Culture
Thursday, March 18 | Panel Discussion: 7:30-8:30 | DEMO Party, 8:30-11pm
Rx GALLERY, 132 Eddy Street @ Mason Street, San Francisco
Admission: $5 benefits ZeroOne
Panelists: Mark Amerika, Matthew Biederman, Aviv Eyal, and Shirley Shor
Moderated by Marisa S. Olson, Zero:One Adjunct Curator
While both have distinctly different looks and cultures, the
practices of Video-Jockeying and DEMO'ing are frequently compared,
particularly as the two become increasingly popular in Europe. Both
involve the quick mixing and construction of sounds and images to
create low-memory, high-impact displays, yet one grows out of a
hacker history and the other is closely tied to the music scene.
VJ/artists Mark Amerika and Matthew Biederman will discuss VJ'ing in
relation to other media art genres and collaborators Shirley Shor and
Aviv Eyal will survey 20 years of the hottest DEMO's, from game hacks
to party pieces. The panel will be followed by a DEMO party,
featuring even more hot DEMO's, and the genre-bending VJ-remixing of
the DEMO's, by Biederman & Amerika.
Participant Bios:
Pioneering artist Mark Amerika, who has been named a "Time Magazine
100 Innovator" as part of their continuing series of features on the
most influential artists, scientists, entertainers and philosophers
into the 21st century, has had two large-scale retrospectives of his
digital art work, including the first-ever net art retrospective.
Amerika is a Professor at the University of Colorado.
Matthew Biederman's audio and video installations have been exhibited
in galleries and festivals, internationally. As a VJ, Beiderman
performs regularly, creating live, algorithmically-based, video
projection improvisations in addition to producing single-channel
videos and installations.
Aviv Eyal is a software entrepreneur who specializes in multimedia
and social networks. Aviv has developed multimedia software for
Microsoft and currently serves as a CTO of a Bay Area software
startup company. Shirley Shor is a San Francisco-based new media
artist. Her software art installations have been exhibited in the
United States and in Europe.
Aviv & Shirley are the authors of an important recent essay on the
last 20 years of DEMO'ing:
http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol4_No1_demo_shoreyal.htm
Moderator, Marisa S. Olson is ZeroOne's Adjunct Curator and Associate
Director of SF Camerawork. She has programmed at the ICA-London, the
Getty, White Columns, and elsewhere. She a board member & founding
zine-editor of SMAC! and she writes for Flash Art, Art on Paper,
Afterimage, Mute, Wired, and others, and has held numerous artist
residencies, including those at Goldsmiths, Banff, and the
Technical-University of Dresden.
ZeroOne HOTSPOTS is a nomadic series of discussions on hot topics in
art & technology, hosted by a range of unique venues through the Bay
Area. ZeroOne thanks Rx Gallery for hosting the first in this series
of events...