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.
IMAGE WAR: Contesting Images of Political Conflict
IMAGE WAR
Contesting Images of Political Conflict
Examining recent artistic practices that explore media representations of war and conflict.
May 19 - June 25, 2006
OPENING RECEPTION
Friday, May 19, 6-8pm
Organized by the 2005-06 fellows of the Whitney Independent Study Program:
Benjamin Godsill, Stamatina Gregory, Katy Rogers, Susanne Sæther
The Art Gallery of the Graduate Center
The City University of New York
365 Fifth Ave @ 34th Street
gallery hours: Wed-Sun 12-6pm
Participating artists:
Willie Doherty, Claire Fontaine, Coco Fusco, Rainer Ganahl, Joy Garnett, Johan Grimonprez, Jon Haddock, Amar Kanwar, An-My Le, Din Q. Lê, Radical Software Group (RSG), Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand
IMAGE WAR brings together artistic responses to the mediation of images of war and conflict in our current digitized media culture. It focuses on strategies of appropriation of mass-disseminated images of conflict, many of which have received an iconic status due to the mass media's extreme packaging and filtration of images since the first Gulf War. The works in Image War remix, transform, or mimic images from the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the U.S. internment of Japanese-Americans, hijackings, popular uprisings, recent American military interventions, and other violent political events.
GALLERY TALKS
Saturdays 2 pmEVENTS
Conversation
Alex Galloway and Joy Garnett
The artists will discuss strategies of media appropriation related to their own practices.Tuesday, May 23 7-9 pm
Martin E. Segal TheatreScreening
Coco Fusco's Operation Atropos
The artist screens her new video Operation Atropos and leads a question-and-answer session. This video, making its New York debut, documents Fusco and several of her students participating in the activities of a field course in U.S. military interrogation techniques, which involves an immersive simulation of the POW experience.Tuesday, May 30 7-9 pm
Martin E. Segal TheatrePerformance
neuroTransmitter
The ...
HALLIBURTON SOLVES GLOBAL WARMING
Marisa Olson:
The Yes Men....
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Halliburton Emergency Products Development Unit
Date: May 9, 2006 9:50 PM
Subject: HALLIBURTON SOLVES GLOBAL WARMING
May 9, 2006 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
: mailto:EPDU[at]halliburtoncontracts[dot]com Photos: http://www.halliburtoncontracts.com/EPDU/
HALLIBURTON SOLVES GLOBAL WARMING SurvivaBalls save managers from abrupt climate change
An advanced new technology will keep corporate managers safe even when climate change makes life as we know it impossible.
"The SurvivaBall is designed to protect the corporate manager no matter what Mother Nature throws his or her way," said Fred Wolf, a Halliburton representative who spoke today at the Catastrophic Loss conference held at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Amelia Island, Florida. "This technology is the only rational response to abrupt climate change," he said to an attentive and appreciative audience.
Most scientists believe global warming is certain to cause an accelerating onslaught of hurricanes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, etc. and that a world-destroying disaster is increasingly possible. For example, Arctic melt has slowed the Gulf Stream by 30% in just the last decade; if the Gulf Stream stops, Europe will suddenly become just as cold as Alaska. Global heat and flooding events are also increasingly possible.
In order to head off such catastrophic scenarios, scientists agree we must reduce our carbon emissions by 70% within the next few years. Doing that would seriously undermine corporate profits, however, and so a more forward-thinking solution is needed.
At today's conference, Wolf and a colleague demonstrated three SurvivaBall mockups, and described how the units will sustainably protect managers from natural or cultural disturbances of any intensity or duration. The devices - looking like huge inflatable orbs - will include sophisticated communications systems, nutrient gathering capacities, onboard medical facilities, and a daunting defense infrastructure to ensure that the corporate mission will ...
Cybersonica 06 Opens!
My reason for irregular postings on Pixelsumo has been due to curating and coordinating the Cybersonica 06 Sonic Art exhibition. After a huge amount of work by the team, I can now happily say that the exhibition is now open and we have 12 truly great pieces installed in the gallery space. I highly recommend you get to London to check it out. Full documentation of all the work will be posted online, but I don't want to ruin any surprises for now.
We have commissioned 5 new works, plus showing many existing works.
The works have been selected for their exciting approaches to creative interactivity. They move beyond the "screen, keyboard, mouse scenario" and respond to physical input, proximity, sound, kinetics, elapsed time and the surrounding environment.
Dates: Monday 8th - Saturday 20th May
Location: Phonica Records / Vinyl Factory, Soho London
map & opening hours
Preview video 1 - Preview video 2
Behind the scenes photos
List of artist & works
ARTNODES
NEW VIDEO-INTERVIEWS
Roger Malina, Michael Naimark, Gerfried Stocker, Amy Alexander, Lab_au y Christa Sommerer y Laurent Mignonneau--This month we have published a new series of video-interviews in Artnodes with various international experts revising the last digital art and electronic art period, analysing its development until now, where is it coming from and where is it focusing on.
This wide cross section of experts gives us the opportunity for a different points of view analyze. We count on the intervention of Roger Malina, Director of Leonardo, telling us about international networks in Internet, and also about the creation and development of Leonardo as part of them; Gerfried Stocker, Director of Ars Electronica and Digital Artist, who points up the importance on offering a digital art history revision in order to analyze its development; Michael Naimark, Digital Artist with more than 25 years of art experience, he has been a witness to very crucial moments in the development of new media; Christa Sommerer y Laurent Mignonneau, Digital Artists, with them we looked through the relation between art, new technologies and nature; Manuel Abendroth y Els Vermang, members of Lab_au, Laboratory of architecture and urbanism, with special interest in language and new terminologies in the new media; and Amy Alexander, one of the pioneer artist of net art, is telling us about the context within she made her first art works in internet and its development until now.
A Series of Practical Performances in the Wilderness (2)
digging for chicory (2005, 3.6MB, 1:15 min.)
doable (2005, 8.1MB, 3:31 min.)
home economics (2005, 6.8MB, 2:06 min.)
Chapter 3,4,5 from "A Series of Practical Performances In The Wilderness"
by Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir.
Here philosophical bickering, an ever more luxuriant
formalism & a mad -no other word - monologue
on chainsaws & Amsterdam make for a rich dish
& form this week's back door to the sublime.
Looks easy - bet it isn't.
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.