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.
Scape 2006 Biennial of Art in Public Space
/don't misbehave!/
Scape 2006 Biennial of Art in Public Space /don't misbehave!/ in New Zealand presents 4 new media based artworks:
The group SIMPEL contributes Paper Cup Telephone Network (PCTN). Do you remember stringing two cups together and talking with your friend? Well, the PCTN is the same, but imagine people around the world whose cups are all tied together, so that everyone can speak to anyone, any time, for free. The PCTN uses a combination of string and internet technologies to create a free and open communication system similar to Antonio Meucci's (the inventor of the telephone) vision for the telephone, a social network where everyone speaks to everyone. This project is by the new media art group SIMPEL. SIMPEL is Matthew Biederman (CA), Aleksandar Erkalovic (HR), Lotte Meijer (NL), and Adam Hyde (NZ). Forecourt of Christchurch Art Gallery and south quad of Arts Centre.
Auckland based media artist Sean Kerr installs Neighbourhood Watch. Neighbourhood Watch consists of a number of peering eyes which create an inquisitive neighbourhood in the central urban area of Christchurch, unsettling and interrupting the locals in the surrounding environment. These animated eyes are goggling out of windows, observing the ever-changing scenery of Christchurch's streets, and participating in public commentary. Worcester Boulevard.
Swiss artist Johannes Gees will make you see The Christchurch Menetekel. The work is a collaborative, interactive laser text installation inspired by the story of King Belshazzar/s feast, from the biblical Book of Daniel. Taking its cue from the flaming Hand of God and its mysterious warning in the story, Menetekel writes messages on walls in laser light and invites the public to text their own contributions and responses back. The artwork addresses the public's relationship with religion and its meaning in contemporary art and society. 30 ...
submidialogy#2
<p><img alt="sub.jpg" src="http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/sub.jpg" width="150" height="50" border="0" style="float: left; margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px"; /><h4>4 days of studies and debates about theories and practices of brazilian digital media </h4></p><p></p>
"what we really want, actually, is that the ideas become dangerous again"
The first Submidialogy conference, that took place in Campinas, Sao Paulo, in October 2005, was derived of cooperation between India, Netherlands and diverse Brazilian groups. It was a joining of independent projects, the third sector, governmental, artistic and experimental to an international network of collaborators, searching above all to bring these different experiences to the acknowledgment. This year, it becomes an open festival, with lectures, production laboratories, fm radio broadcast, television, the Internet and the delicious chat with cacha among @ll submiditics.
Submidialogy will aggregate talks, production and collaborative learning, as well as music, free radio, vj and independent media. These are some of the typical 'tastes' that could be appreciated - without moderation - during the second edition of the conference.
Another characteristic of this festival is to investigate the social, cultural and political possibilities of the digital media, besides fomenting the dialogue (in)existent between theory - the scope of ideas, and the practices - the scope of actions.
As much subject as much format are still under construction, but are suspended in the convergence among culture, communication, resistance, re-signification, media, technology, art and tactics. In the construction page and by the dicussion list, you can take part of it. We invite you to help to organize this subversion and thus to share our ideas in different contexts and times, aiming future perspective, exchange of experiences, concepts, critical production and, mainly, fun.
<p>If you wish to take part of this mess, sign ...
And/Or reception/artist talk Saturday!!!
And/Or Gallery Show #5:
Nick Ackerman + Michael Bell-Smith
Our reception is this Saturday, Sept 23rd, 6pm-9pm.
And we’ll be having artist talks at 6pm with Michael Bell-Smith and also Dirk Paesmans of the influential deconstructive Internet/video game art collective, JODI!!
JODI is a pioneer of Internet art who created net-art that questioned the nature of the Internet and browser before most people were familiar the Internet. More recently they have been working with hacks, exploits, and glitches in modern first-person-shooter video games. This is a preview of a talk that Dirk will be giving in a few weeks at the MOMA, so don’t miss it.
Michael Bell-Smith is a New York-based video artist who appropriates or emulates video and images from video games and television, tears them apart, and reconstructs them into seamless video loops that are isolated from the original content. Read his recent review in the New York Times.
Leanardo Electronic Almanac Special Issue on Digital Poetry
LEA just released an extensive new issue on Digital Poetry. While I’ve just taken a quick look, it appears to be a terrific collection of essays on contemporary digital poetry, in addition to featuring several compelling works in the gallery. The issue edited by Tim Peterson includes essays by Loss Pequeo Glazier, John Cayley with Dimitri Lemmerman, Lori Emerson, Phillippe Bootz, Manuel Portela, Stephanie Strickland, Mez, Maria Engberg, and Matthias Hilner, in addition to works in the gallery by Jason Nelson, Aya Karpinska and Daniel Howe, mEIKAL aND and CamillE BacoS, and Nadine Hilbert and Gast Bouschet. The correlation between the essayists, authors and works reviewed in this issue of LEA and the contributors to the forthcoming Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One suggests to me that the two free publications will make a great pair for teaching. All of the essays in this edition of LEA are available both in HTML and downloadable PDFs.
Prototyping the perimeters
Artists, architects, designers, and other practitioners are constantly fashioning new forms and challenging disciplinary boundaries as they employ techniques such as rapid prototyping and generative processes. In the exhibition 'Perimeters, Boundaries, and Borders,' at Lancaster, UK's Citylab, organizers Fast-uk and Folly explore the range of objects, buildings, and products being conceptualized with the aid of digital technologies. Aoife Ludlow's 'Remember to Forget?' is a series of jewelry designs that envisioned accessories incorporating RFID tags that allow the wearer to record information and emotions associated with those special items that we put on daily. Tavs Jorgensen uses a data glove in his 'Motion in Form' project. After gesturing around an object, data collected by the glove is given physical shape using CNC (Computer Numerical Control) milling, creating representations of the movements in materials such as glass or ceramics. Addressing traces of a different sort is Cylcone.soc, a data mapping piece by Gavin Bailey and Tom Corby. These works and many more examples from the frontiers of art and design are on view until October 21st.
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.