Marisa Olson
Since the beginning
Works in Brooklyn, New York United States of America

ARTBASE (7)
PORTFOLIO (3)
BIO
Marisa Olson is an artist, writer, and media theorist. Her interdisciplinary work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, Tate(s) Modern + Liverpool, the Nam June Paik Art Center, British Film Institute, Sundance Film Festival, PERFORMA Biennial; commissioned and collected by the Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Houston Center for Photography, Experimental Television Center, and PS122; and reviewed in Artforum, Art21, the NY Times, Liberation, Folha de Sao Paolo, the Village Voice, and elsewhere.

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.

CALL FOR ENTRIES :: The Upgrade! International



Adam Brown:

Call For Entries Upgrade! International: Oklahoma City Upgrade! OKC
811 N Broadway
Oklahoma City, OK, 73102
December 1st - 29th

DIY Exhibition:
DIY (do-it-yourself) is the overarching theme for the exhibit. We live in an era of increased technological dependency in which the phrase, “Do-it-Yourself” has and will continue to take on new cultural meanings. The Upgrade! OKC and IAO (Individual Artists of Oklahoma) are inviting local and regional artists working with digital and electronic media to submit examples and interpretations of this concept to be exhibited as part of the 2006 Upgrade! International Symposium. These works will be shown at the IAO Gallery with a net art exhibition curated by Tubulence.org and Rhizome.org. The Symposium will be a four-day event running from Thursday, November 30th – Sunday, December 3rd. However, this exhibition will remain on display through December 29th.

About Upgrade!:
Upgrade! is an international, emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. While individual nodes present new media projects, engage in informal critique, and foster dialogue and collaboration between individual artists, Upgrade! International functions as an online, global network that gathers annually in different cities to meet one another, showcase local art, and work on the agenda for the following year.

About the Upgrade! International Symposium:
The UIOC will be the second annual international gathering where individual Upgrade! organizations and their artists converge in one physical location to present art and ideas to each other and the community. Included in the event will be workshops on art and technology, audio/video performances and presentations, and an exhibition of international and regional artists. Workshops will cover topics such as net art and creating content for the world wide web for children, creative application of open source software, social mapping ...

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Hosfelt: Jim Campbell, 4300 watts


531 West 36th Street

212-563-5454

Hell's Kitchen

September 16 - October 28, 2006

Opening: Saturday, September 16, 3:00PM - 6:00PM


Jim Campbell


Known for his extremely low-resolution moving images accomplished utilizing L.E.D. technologies, M.I.T. educated Jim Campbell presents his first New York exhibition of installation pieces.

For the past seven years, Campbell has presented pixelated representations created with so few L.E.D.s (more than a thousand times fewer than the number of pixels on your computer screen) that a viewer should not be able to comprehend what they are seeing. And yet, because of the brain's ability to interpret abstract data and "fill in" the gaps in the information needed to create a complete idea, a viewer recognizes an image.

Campbell's is a unique and humanistic approach to information theory. He explores the distinction between the analogue world and its digital representation as a metaphor for the human ability for poetic understanding or "knowledge" as opposed to the mathematics of "data."

In a group of works in this show, Campbell abstracts the data even further while manipulating our voyeuristic tendencies by revealing information and at the same time obscuring it. The pixelated imagery, at even lower resolution (one piece uses only 5 L.E.D.s), is turned away from the viewer, toward the wall. There is no longer a visible "image," only the reflection of an image.

Image from Hosfelt.


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Art & Activism exhibition in Sweden


Mejan Labs has just opened Art & Activism, an exhibition featuring artists and organizations using technology to communicate a political message.

The works presented include:

vaticano.org, by 0100101110101101.ORG. In december 1998 the net artists published a spoof version of the official Vatican web site. At the time most visitors didn't know that the Vatican, being legally a state, owns its own national domain name extension ".va", and therefore many of them digited the ".org" one that the net artists had bought. The copy site was aesthetically identical to the real one but with slightly modified contents (for example, they added lyrics from pop music groups.) For 12 months, thousand of people visited the vaticano.org without realising the prank. At the expiring of the first year of contract, Network Solutions prevented the renewing of it.

0feraltra.jpg

Feral Trade where Kate Rich trades coffee over social networks. The project operates largely outside commercial channels and makes a direct intervention into the business of grocery running, using the surplus freight capacity of commuter, vacation, migration, cultural and other social movements for the underground distribution of goods. The Feral Trade Courier is an online database that helps organise shipping information, facilitate communications between suppliers, couriers and buyers, and assemble documentary product-packaging which report on the origins, transport and social connections of the feral trade product.

The artists group C6 will show Want & Need, a project where the audience can SMS their wants and needs, which will be screened in the gallery. The work asks if people aren�t mixing up they actual needs with what they want to have.

0smsoo.jpg 0glyphiy.jpg

Glyphiti, by Andy Deck, is an online collaborative drawing project. Visitors are invited to edit and add graphical units or 'glyphs', which compose the image, in real time.

Emails with false ...

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Open Burble - Usman Haque



Project Development, visualisation & flight tests

Commissioned for the Singapore Biennale 2006, Open Burble is the most recent public art work of Usman Haque. It is a further development of his earlier well known Sky Ear project where a non-rigid carbon-fibre structure, embedded with one thousand glowing helium balloons, mobile phones, sensor circuits and LEDs responsed to electromagnetic waves creating a floating "cloud" of light that revealed the natural electromagnetism of our environment, and also how our mobile phone calls and text messages delicately affect the new and existing electromagnetic fields.


Sky Ear 2004

Open Burble adopts the technology of Sky Ear but explores a more intuitive way to enable people to engage directly with the tactile experience of flying the cloud. 'Participants will divide into groups in order to assemble about 140 hexagonal "clouds" into a complete Burble, built to such a scale that, when inflated with helium, it will soar upwards like Jack's beanstalk.'


Building a module of Open Burble structure, the final construct will be 10 times as big

Just as the participants are the generators of the Burble's 60m tall form, so too are they the ones to control it. They hold on to it using handles with which they may position the Burble as they like. They may curve in on themselves, or pull it in a straight line - the form is a combination of the crowd's desires and the impact of wind currents varying throughout the height of the Burble. The Burble will move, rustle, tangle, fold in on itself and create turbulence as the wind catches it like a sail. Suddenly, the entire construction will ignite with colour, sparkling in the evening sky.


These images some some night testing of 1/10th of the whole piece.

As people on the ground ...

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Positive Pranking



The Yes Men are at it again! This week the artists managed to work their way into a conference on the reconstruction of New Orleans, one year after Hurricane Katrina, and present a speech while masquerading as an executive of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum outlined a plan for HUD to immediately reverse their policy rto destroy 5,000 units of 'perfectly good' affordable housing, and outlined all the reasons that the existing policy had harmed the community. The Yes Men are 'media artists' not only in the sense that they use new media to carry out and document their work--often erecting websites parodying those targets in need of their 'identity correction'--but also in the sense that their work very much plays out within the news media. Such was the case when they scored a BBC interview, posing as a Dow Chemical representative, and again when they appeared as 'themselves,' in a follow-up to the hoax. CNN.com reports that Bichlbaum told a reporter, this week, 'The real reason we do it is what we're doing right now... You're paying attention to this issue of affordable housing and the absurd policies of HUD.' The Yes Men make the truth sensational and newsworthy, giving reporters an opportunity to write about it. Thus, by lying about who they are, in order to expose horrible situations, the artists turn a double negative into something slightly more positive. Visit their website to read a transcript or watch a video of this post-Katrina positivity in action. - Marisa Olson

http://www.hano.us/announcement.html

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Discussions (281) Opportunities (10) Events (4) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

Rhizome Today: A critic, with opinions about postinternet art


Great post, Michael! What an exciting (if facebook-thread-dramatic!) couple weeks for Postinternet discussion. I appreciate your breakdown of these three (obviously not mutually exclusive) approaches. To my mind, the results of approach #1 have only had fickle results. i.e. Ed, I actually talked about Postinternet Art before I read the "internet aware" comment from Guthrie--I believe first on a Rhizome panel Michael was on at EAI--but then again, Guth & I used to gchat every day then, as we were just about to start Nasty Nets when I brought it up. But moreover, as I recently posted in an FB thread, I truly believe there was a zeitgeist around recognizing these ideas (and using whatever word or phrase to do so; not just postinternet) in 2005-2006, as expressed in writings and talks by Lev Manovich, Steve Dietz, Sarah Cook, Josephine Berry Slater, Jon Ippolito, myself & Guthrie, etc.. (Christiane Paul touched on this in her responses to Karen Archey's Ullens questionnaire.) I don't think it's productive to construct/dismantle/bash origin myths, if only because it's led to a rash of ad hominem attacks on a number of artists & writers lately, completely sacrificing the point of critical writing.

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.


DISCUSSION

Breaking the Ice


Hi, everyone! Wow, I've got to say, it's nice to see some familiar names here! Michael, Congratulations on your new job. As someone who held that same title (and various permutations of it) for several years, I know you are in for a heavy load and I also know that you are also more than up to the task.

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.

DISCUSSION

Conference Report: NET.ART (SECOND EPOCH)


Hi, Josephine.

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.

DISCUSSION

Go Ahead, Touch Her


Why are vocal remixes different than video? This is a very interesting distinction. Can you please say more about this and why one is ok and one isn't, beyond the rubric of industry standards? I think that remix and parody have the potential to be very useful and viable political tools. The best-known examples of such efforts would be the work of the Yes Men, but examples of parasitic media within the field abound. In your comments (i.e. "Here it seems the remix does imply ridicule") it seems as if you think that remixing automatically equals mockery but I don't agree and don't see that implied in the project. Laric's video simply shows us (or arguably amplifies) what's already there and gives both fans and critics a chance to say what they will. This is the pact that all artists make with their audience when they release their work into the world--that people will interpret it as they will, whether that means reading it a certain way, hearing it a certain way, or incorporating it into their lives in a certain way. This is how the popular preconscious works. I don't think it's fair to call this project a senseless derision of Carey, but I do still think that your vehement apprehension towards remixes says something interesting about the ways that certain corners of the cultural community (particularly academia) perceive the effects of these acts. I just think they need fleshing-out. There is a big difference between real violence towards women and perceived theoretical misdeeds towards a celebrity's highly-guarded public image. If this is the true issue, I think our energies are best directed toward prevention of the former rather than scandalizing the latter.

DISCUSSION

Go Ahead, Touch Her


Hi, Brittany.

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.