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 ...
Fwd: Call for Proposals: Sarai-CSDS Independent Research Fellowships
>To: newsletter@sarai.net
>Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 12:23:10 +0530
>List-Subscribe: <https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/newsletter>,
><mailto:newsletter-request@sarai.net?subject=subscribe>
>
>CALL FOR PROPOSALS - SARAI-CSDS INDEPENDENT FELLOWSHIPS, 2004-05
>
>Applications Invited for Independent Research Fellowships
>The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi
>
>Sarai is a public initiative of media practitioners and scholars looking
>at media cultures and urban life. Sarai's interests are in the field of
>old and new media, information and communication technologies, free
>software, cinema, and urban space --its politics, built form, ecology,
>culture and history--with a strong commitment to making knowledge
>available in the public domain. Sarai is a programme of the Centre for
>the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. (For more information, visit
><http://www.sarai.net/>)
>
>*Who Can Apply? *
>Sarai invites independent researchers, media practitioners, software
>designers and programmers, urbanists, architects, artists and writers,
>as well as students (postgraduate level and above) and
>university/college faculty to apply for support with regard to
>research-driven projects. We support projects from all over India, and
>have an established track record of supporting deserving project
>proposals that originate outside the metropolitan centres of Delhi,
>Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore. We would like to see the focus
>of our fellowship programme expand to support more research in smaller
>towns and non-urban areas.
>
>
>The duration of the fellowship is six months, beginning from 1 January
>2005. The final presentation of the research project will be made in
>Delhi in August 2005.
>
>*Why Research ? What Do We Mean by Research? *
>Sarai is committed to generating public knowledge and creativity through
>research. By research we mean both archival and field research,
>practice-based research and forays into theoretical work, as well as any
>process or activity of an experimental or creative nature--in the
>audiovisual media, for instance, as well as in journalism, the
>humanities and social sciences, computing and architecture.
>
>We are especially interested in supporting projects that formulate
>precise and cogent intellectual questions, reflect on modes of
>understanding that implicate knowledge production within a critical
>social framework, foreground processes of gathering information and of
>creating links between bodies of information. We also encourage research
>that is based on a strong engagement with archival materials and
>imaginative ways of tackling the question of the public rendition of
>research activity.
>
>**The Experience of Previous Years**
>This is the fourth year in which Sarai is calling for proposals for such
>fellowships. We would like to describe how the process has worked in
>previous years, as an indication of what applicants should expect.
>
>We have so far supported a hundred research projects over the past three
>years, including work in the areas of popular culture, literature, urban
>ethnography, architecture, geography, creative writing, graphic arts,
>new media, cinema studies, FLOSS software, histories of media forms and
>practices, sexuality, studies of technology and culture, and oral history.
>
>Successful applicants have included freelance researchers, academics,
>media practitioners, writers, journalists and activists. (For a detailed
>overview of successful proposals from the previous years, see
>_http://www.sarai.net/community/fellow.htm_)
>
>The project proposals, postings and reports were submitted in English,
>Hindi or a combination of the two languages. We have seen that projects
>which set important but practical and modest goals were usually
>successful, whereas those that may have been conceptually sound but
>lacked sufficient motivation to actually approach a research objective
>in the field usually did not sustain themselves beyond the interim stage.
>
>Sarai interacts closely with the researchers over the period of the
>fellowship, and the independent fellows make a public presentation of
>their work at Sarai at the end of their fellowship period. During the
>term of their fellowship each fellow is required to make a posting to
>the Sarai Reader List every month, reporting on the development of their
>work. These postings, which are archived, are an important means by
>which the research process reaches a wider discursive community. They
>also help us to trace the progress of work during the grant period, and
>understand how the research interfaces with a larger public. Fellows
>also receive structured but informal feedback from Sarai in stages
>during the course of their work. Submissions by fellows include written
>reports and essays, photographs, tape recordings, pamphlets, maps,
>drawings and html presentations. On occasion, fellows have also
>incorporated performance into their final presentations.
>
>**What Happens to the Research Projects?**
>The annual research projects add to our now substantial archival
>collections on urban space and media culture. These are proving to be
>very significant value additions to the availability of knowledge
>resources in the public domain. Researchers are free to publish or
>render any part or all of their projects in any forms, independently of
>Sarai (but with due acknowledgment of the support that they have
>received from Sarai). Sarai Independent Research Fellows have gone on to
>publish articles in journals, work towards the making of films,
>exhibitions, websites, multimedia works and performances, and the
>creation of graphic novels, soundworks and books. We actively encourage
>all such efforts.
>
>**What We Are Looking For**
>Like previous years, this year too we are looking for proposals that are
>imaginatively articulated, experimental and methodologically innovative,
>but pragmatic and backed up by a well argued work plan which sets out a
>timetable for the project, as well as suggests how the support from
>Sarai will help in generating/providing specific resources (human and
>material) that the project needs.
>
>Suggested Themes:
>Sarai's interests lie in the city, and in media. Broadly speaking, any
>proposal that looks at the urban condition or at media, is eligible.
>More specifically, themes may be as diverse as habitation, sexuality,
>labour, migration, surveillance, intellectual property, social/digital
>interfaces, urban violence, street life, technologies of urban control,
>health and the city, the political economy of media forms, digital art
>and culture, or anything that the applicants feel will resonate with the
>philosophy and interests that motivate Sarai's work.
>
>We are particularly interested in supporting work that delves into what
>we are beginning to call 'Histories of the New'. This can include
>excavating the histories of different forms of media practice (early
>photography, cinema, print, radio, the music industry), as well as the
>histories of urban spaces and phenomena, neighbourhoods in cities, the
>evolution of utilities, transport and communications networks
>(electricity, telegraphy, telephony, the early Internet in India,
>railways, roads, urban public transport), labour, histories (including
>oral histories and biographical research) of dissident political
>movements, milieus and cultures and people associated with them.
>
>Again, Sarai supports innovative and inventive modes of rendering work
>into the public domain. Proposals which pay attention to this principle
>will be particularly valued.
>
>Also, proposals that include the collection of materials for our archive
>will be appreciated: in the past, fellows have submitted photographs,
>recordings, printed matter, maps, multimedia and posters related to the
>subject of their study to this archive.
>
>Preferred Approaches:
>We especially welcome the articulation, within the text of the proposal,
>of innovative and interdisciplinary methodologies that gesture towards
>how research, practice, and delivery or rendition methods will dovetail
>into each other in the project.
>
>**Conditions**
>Applicants should be resident in India, and should have an account in
>any bank operating in India.
>
>The research fellowship would be available for up to six months and for
>a maximum amount of Rs 60,000.
>
>The fellowships do not require the fellows to be present at Sarai.
>Fellowship holders will be free to pursue their primary occupations, if
>any.
>
>**What Do You Need To Send?**
>
>There are no application forms. Simply post your:
>- Proposal (not more than 1000 words)
>- A clear work plan (not more than one page)
>- An updated CV (not more than two pages)
>- Work samples (maximum two)
>- Envelopes should be marked - "Attention: Short Term Independent Research
>Fellowship" (Email proposals will not be considered). Proposals may be
>sent in English or Hindi.
>
>Mail these to: Independent Fellowship Programme, Sarai, Centre for the
>Study of Developing Societies, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054, India.
>Inquiries: vivek@sarai.net
>Last date for submission: October 30, 2004
>The list of successful proposals for 2004-2005 will be notified on the
>Sarai website by 15 December 2004
>
>Note: Proposals from teams, partnerships, collectives and faculty are
>welcome, as long as the grant amount is administered by a single
>individual, and the funds are deposited in a single bank account in the
>name of an individual, partnership, registered body or institutional
>entity.
>
>Applicants who apply to other institutions for support for the same
>project will not be disqualified, provided they inform Sarai that
>support is being sought (or has been obtained) from another institution.
>The applicants should inform Sarai about the identity of the other
>institution.
>
>--
>The Sarai Programme
>Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
>29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
>Tel: (+91) 11 23960040
> (+91) 11 23942199, ext 307
>Fax: (+91) 11 23943450
>www.sarai.net
>The Newsletter of the Sarai Programme,
>29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054, www.sarai.net
>Info: dak@sarai.net.To subscribe: send a blank email to
>newsletter-request@sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header.
>Directions to Sarai: We are ten minutes from Delhi University. Nearest bus
>stop: IP college or Exchange Stores
>
>See Calendar and Newsletter online:
>http://www.sarai.net/calendar/newsletter.htm
video from inside pier 57!
>Subject: video from inside pier 57!
>
>listen very closely... the video is being shot off a digital camera
>from INSIDE the portapotty by one of the most celebrated underground
>hackers who has ever lived. his camera was immediately confiscated
>afterwards but the video exists (and is coincidentally licensed
>under a 'no rights reserved' license from creative commons) so I'll
>be using it in the video piece! thank you emmanuel.
>
>http://nyc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/118946/index.php
>
>more on emmanuel:
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Goldstein
From RNC: FREE EDDIE!
those following the rnc situ...
>Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 18:54:42 -0400
>To: free.eddie@texasmonkey.com
>From: ryan junell <ryan@texasmonkey.com>
>Subject: FREE EDDIE!
>
>the rnc video project is in a weird spot... while I was inside the
>convention hall last night holding up a sign that said "girlymen for
>arnold" (I voted green in cali, btw)... project producer eddie codel
>was following the action at one of the protests when he got fenced
>in by cops arresting everyone on the block. they arrested over 1000
>people last night and have detained them at the piers for now over
>20 hours.
>
>honestly, I don't know what to do. he has not even been BOOKED yet
>(I called central booking). I'm about to file a missing persons
>claim on him because he is really nowhere to be seen.
>
>THE BIG FUCKING PROBLEM is that I think they are holding these
>protestors in cages down by the water for as long as they can
>possibly do it so that they don't return to the streets to protest
>the second they are let out!!! this is BULLSHIT!!! what happened to
>due process!?!!
>
>anyways.... I think you guys should know this and if you have any
>insight to the situation please let me know. I'm pretty sure the
>mass media has agreed to choke this story but there are literally
>thousands of people protesting this convention. sunday's march was
>without question over 400,000 if not a full half million. seriously.
>
>eddie is an inspired political activist. we started working together
>six years ago on an event series about independent publishing on the
>internet. he's gone on to do work with indyvoter.org, the matt
>gonzalez campaign, and a ton of other non profit benevolent
>projects. he's got a heart of gold and a really awesome and gnarly
>sense of humor.
>
>I feel bad now that I convinced him to come to nyc and work on this
>project over burning man this year (he didn't need much convincing).
>right now he could be delirious, tired, smelly and around the
>coolest people in the world out in the desert instead of delirious,
>tired, smelly and around the coolest people in the world in the
>guantanomo by the hudson.
>
>throw money his way via the paypal link at www.junell.net or do a
>search for "girlymen" on ebay and donate there. or just drop him a
>line and let him know he's a kickass fighter! eddie@eddie.com
>
>and watch this:
>http://in8.com/fucknewyork/Resources/fucknewyork.mov
>
>--
>rj ... keep it real
>texasmonkey.com/junell.net/four.one.five.three.two.zero.two.four.eigh
>t.seven/chat.texashanuman
Fwd: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: America Idol Audition Training Blog
>
>is this tongue-in-cheek or for real?
both! i am really going to line up & try to get an audition. but i am
trying to have fun with my training. because it is hard work & very
expensive (all those lessons, gym sessions, and wardrobe items!). and
the art element makes me feel like less of a nerd...
thanks for your support. :)
~marisa
America Idol Audition Training Blog
Yes, that's right... I am officially in training to get an Idol Audition.
Over the next few weeks/months I will do a series of intense practice
drills, research projects, and training exercises... like researching
camp-out gear & food, taking dance & singing lessons, working out,
meeting with a nutritionist, working on my wardrobe (which blog
readers can vote on, in addition to songs & hairstyles), etc...
Stay tuned for more details...