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 ...
RhizPaper Feedback
Thanks for your great feedback on the new site. I wanted to touch base
about a few of the RhizPaper-related suggestions we've received.
You've sent us a couple of great ideas. One was to investigate a means
of making the RhizPaper image visible underneath the text boxes, while
still making the text legible. This is very important to me and I'm
going to scope out the possibilities. It's hard to predict what images
people will submit, and to pre-anticipate legibility issues, but I'm
up for the challenge!
Secondly, I absolutely love the suggestion of making the background
image a more open platform. I like that it could be open to all
members and that this would keep the site more lively and dynamic. In
part, the idea grew out of my nostalgia for Rhizome's old Splash
pages, the art project you used to see before rolling to the main
page. Some really great projects were included in that series and I
think it was a nice means of exposing people to new work. If we opened
RhizPaper submission up to all members and made it a live-updated
feature, I hope it would accomplish some of the same things...
Anyway, I need to check on specs and a possible timeline for making
this happen. It's fairly complicated. We'll need a nice "submission
machine" of some kind, some place, and I'd like us to be able to
accommodate a variety of image file-types.
Meanwhile, thanks for the great tips!
All the best,
Marisa
Editor & Curator at Large
Rhizome.org
Fwd: OPEN CALL: LA Freewaves (experimental media art, video, animation, shorts)
OPEN CALL: LA Freewaves (experimental media art, video, animation, shorts)
*PLEASE POST/FORWARD*
Too Much Freedom? LA Freewaves 10th Celebration of Experimental Media Arts
Postmark Deadline: February 15, 2006.
The showcase will present experimental media art from around the world at
art venues in Los Angeles in November 2006 and through the Freewaves web
site. Media art works include experimental video and film (narrative,
documentary, art, animation, etc.), DVDs, websites, simple installations,
and video billboards. Works from the festival will also appear on public
television, cable stations and video-streamed on the Internet.
Competitive selection process will be conducted by a group of
international and local curators with diverse specialties and
backgrounds. Notification of acceptance is in July 2006. Artist payments
will be $200 for selected works.
How to Enter:
* Work must be completed since January 1, 2003.
* Entries must be postmarked to Freewaves by February 15, 2006.
* Include completed entry form
* Label entries with title, artist's name, length, date of work and format.
* Include a resume or bio plus a one paragraph description for each work
submitted.
* For websites, indicate URL address on application form.
* For installation proposals, include additional description and
diagrams/images.
* If you are in US, include self-addressed stamped envelope for return of
work.
* There is no entry fee to submit work for consideration, however, we
highly encourage those who can afford it to become LA Freewaves members
with a $25 donation. With membership, you support our programs so that we
can continue to promote and exhibit innovative new media art during this
difficult time.
Send To:
LA Freewaves
2151 Lake Shore Ave
Los Angeles CA USA 90039
Questions: write anne@freewaves.org
LA Freewaves is a nonprofit organization which survives on grants and
donations.
-------------------------------------
Open Call Entry Form
Too Much Freedom? LA Freewaves 10th Celebration of Experimental Media Arts
Please type or print clearly.
Artist Name:\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Street Address:\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
City, State and Zip Code:\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Country:\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Email Address:\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Phone Number:\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
---------------------------------------
Title of Entry 1:\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Description/Date of Work: \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Format/URL:\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Running Time: \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ minutes
---------------------------------------
Title of Entry 2:\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Description/Date of Work: \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Format/URL:\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Running Time: \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ minutes
---------------------------------------
Title of Entry 3:\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Description/Date of Work: \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Format/URL:\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Running Time: \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ minutes
---------------------------------------
For format, indicate: -DVD -Mini DV -VHS -Website (indicate URL) -Silent
Video Billboard -Other (explain)
\_\_\_Yes! Sign me up for membership. Here's my $25 donation. I want LA
Freewaves to continue to promote and exhibit innovative new media art.
\_\_\_ I'm not entering the festival, but sign me up for membership. LA
Freewaves rocks!! (Indicate name, physical address and email above and
send form with your $25 check.) Make membership check or money order
payable to LA Freewaves.
Enclose resume/bio, work description text and SASE. For questions and
entries, contact Anne Bray at anne@freewaves.org or:
LA Freewaves
2151 Lake Shore Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90039 USA
(323) 664-1510
a media arts magnet
We Are All Together @ Artists Space
I'd like to invite you to a show I've curated at Artists Space
(artistsspace.org), called "We Are All Together: Media(ted) Performance,"
as part of their Empty Space with Exciting Events, in conjunction with the
Performa 05 biennial. (Yes, it's a mouthfull...)
The artists are Sabrina Gschwandtner + Cat Mazza, MTAA, Kate Pocrass,
Chris Sollars, and Lee Walton, and they are each showing work that
involves some sort of mediation--with viewers, computers, etc. The 'band
night' -slash- opening is this Weds (12/14) and Slaang (aka Hector Ducci)
will give an a/v performance 7-9ish...
While most of the works involve internet-based collaboration, others
involve offline mediation within social networks. Thinking about the
similarities and differences within these two modes of production has been
an interesting process. I know that, on this list, we've been discussing
the ever-so-slightly increasing popularity/acceptance of new media; yet,
it's interesting to consider how the discourses of networks, platforms,
codes, protocols, and interfaces have carried themselves over to (or
perhaps been imported from, if not reciprocated) offline
representations...
Anyway, Artists Space is in Soho at 38 Greene, at Grand. It would be great
to see you there!
Marisa
thanks for the suggestions, so far!
Lauren and I have enjoyed reading them! You may not know that we are
in separate offices--in fact, we are on separate coasts of the US, so
we can't turn to each other and talk over each one the second they
come in, but I'm taking note & taking notes, and I know she is too.
I'm inclined to sit back and watch for now, but I hope we can keep the
conversation going and I'll be sure to compile an edited thread and
include it in Friday's digest.
Meanwhile, in between the tips that made me chuckle, I've appreciated
comments that made me think about the new, the old, the old new, and
the new old (etc!!); simplicity versus wordplay (not that they are
mutually exclusive!), to brand or not to brand, Rhizome's and Net Art
News' relationship to the network(ed) and the rhizom(atic), etc.
Good stuff!
Thanks so much!!
Marisa
Re: new name for Net Art News?
James Huckenpahler wrote:
> 3 possible titles, maybe too goofy or opaque...
>
> MEDIA EATS ITSELF
>
> PING
>
> RECURSOR
And Robbin Murphy, of The Thing sent this fun list of ideas
contributed by Thingist subscribers, when they were thinking of
changing the name of bbs.thing.net (I asked Robbin if I could forward
it given it's historical value!):
?ru.thing.net
[x].thing.net
404.thing.net
a.thing.net
a6v92oq.thing.net
abstract.thing.net
ambient.thing.net
ante.thing.net
any.thing.net
are_those_your_real_teeth.thing.net
ars.thing.net
art.thing.net
atomic.thing.net
authorized_version.thing.net
big.thing.net
biplane.thing.net
blog.thing.net
boring.thing.net
boring_again.thing.net
bourgeois.thing.net
broken.thing.net
btw.thing.net
byebye.thing.net
byte-sized.thing.net
called.thing.net
canadada.thing.net
canned.thing.net
caviar.thing.net
click.thing.net
community.thing.net
concrete.thing.net
confusing.thing.net
construct.thing.net
consumable.thing.net
content.thing.net
cool.thing.net
cosmic.thing.net
crazy.thing.net
creative.thing.net
dangly.thing.net
darwin.thing.net
das.thing.net
der-sagin-enkulate-the-foret.thing.net
door.thing.net
electric.thing.net
enter.thing.net
entitled.thing.net
every.thing.net
everylittle.thing.net
fading.thing.net
famous_people_have_better_things_to_do.thing.net
fatso.thing.net
feathered.thing.net
first.thing.net
foolish.thing.net
frank_sinatra.thing.net
free_the_oxford_five.thing.net
fuckedup.thing.net
fuckme.thing.net
fuckyou.thing.net
funky.thing.net
fuzzy.thing.net
gate.thing.net
getalife.thing.net
get-into-the-swing-of.thing.net
glamor.thing.net
global.thing.net
go.thing.net
grand_imperial.thing.net
happy.thing.net
hitme.thing.net
horseless.thing.net
hypomnemata.thing.net
i_havent_the_faintest_idea_what_youre_talking_about.thing.net
i_saw_the_light_at.thing.net
iam.thing.net
iloveyou.thing.net
index.thing.net
industrialstrength.thing.net
interface.thing.net
international.thing.net
iola.thing.net
isocahedral.thing.net
jail_the_oxford_five.thing.net
josh-free.thing.net
just_a_dream.thing.net
just_kidding.thing.net
just-the.thing.net
kinder_gentler.thing.net
know.thing.net
LAFrance.thing.net
live.thing.net
living.thing.net
medicated.thing.net
miss.thing.net
model.thing.net
my.thing.net
my_dog_ate_my_homework.thing.net
napoleon.thing.net
neo.thing.net
net.thing.net
nibbly.thing.net
no.thing.net
not-a.thing.net
ohandonemore.thing.net.
ohthisold.thing.net
open.thing.net
our.thing.net
painless.thing.net
piano.thing.net
pizza.thing.net
platform.thing.net
pointless.thing.net
poor-little.thing.net
port.thing.net
portal.thing.net
proletariat.thing.net
psychotropic.thing.net
public.thing.net
radioactive.thing.net
red.thing.net
res.thing.net
rhomboid.thing.net
rich.thing.net
root.thing.net
round.thing.net
rushing.thing.net
same.thing.net
see.thing.net
serious.thing.net
sexy.thing.net
she_looked_at_me_and_i_looked_right_back.thing.net
silent.thing.net
single.thing.net
smelly.thing.net
so_why_bother.thing.net
some.thing.net
soo.thing.net
source.thing.net
"sponsor".thing.net
square.thing.net
squeeze.my.thing.net
sticky.thing.net
stoned.thing.net
stream.thing.net
sugarfree.thing.net
sure.thing.net
swamp.thing.net
sweet.thing.net
swiss.thing.net
t.thing.net
telnet.thing.net
that.thing.net
thatfucking.thing.net
the.thing.net
the_other.thing.net
themorethingschangethemoretheyremainthesame.thing.net
thenextbig.thing.net
thereal.thing.net
thing.thing.net
things.are.changing.thing.net
thingy.thing.net
titled.thing.net
total.thing.net
toy.thing.net
triangular.thing.net
tuba.thing.net
tumbleweed.thing.net
uboat.thing.net
undergrowth.thing.net
untitled.thing.net
utopia.thing.net
war_toy_free.thing.net
what.thing.net
whathehellisthat.thing.net
what-is-this.thing.net
when_i_hear_the_word_culture_i_reach_for_my_gun_again.thing.net
whyamilisteningtogordonlightfoot.thing.net
wild.thing.net
wolfgangs.thing.net
wornout.thing.net
x.thing.net
your_dog_ate_my_homework.thing.net