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.
Emulating Digital Sound with Acoustic Instruments
cbaba - Pleasant Voice of (wo)Man and Machine 29:43
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[....] "The earliest purely electronic instrument was the Teleharmonium or Telharmonium, developed by Thaddeus Cahill in 1897. Simple inconvenience hindered the adoption of the Teleharmonium: the instrument weighed seven tons and was the size of a boxcar. The first practical electronic instrument is often viewed to be the Theremin, invented by Professor Leon Theremin circa 1919 - 1920." [wikipedia] The theremin was commisioned by Stalin and popularized by a young savant violinist who'd lost the use of her fingers. Prior to this, music was composed with for and performed with non electronic instruments, such as the violin.
Composers wrote music for kings and nobility, the patrons thrilled as the sounds of powerful harmonic vibration. Electronic strings are sometimes able to compete with the complexity of real strings, but their value is only augmented by their reference to real strings, not provided wholly. The synthetic sounds of today may refer memetically to their physical models, however we've come full circle to a condition of real instruments often being used to emulate electronic sounds. Ever seen anyone play drum and bass on buckets? The symbiotic growth of language and music also reflects this phase shifting-- Vocoded voices are teaching people how to pronounce and inflect their words, perfect electronic rhythm is seeping into our natural progressions and syllable cadence. We will explore phase shifts and glitches further at a later date. On an almost related note, say outloud: "Yeah-Yeah" and fully annunciate it. You have just discovered the best way to imitate Little John. Yeah-Yeah is a silly little meme.
This mix contains many voices, some synthetic, some derived from samples, as well as many other techniques of vocalizing sounds. All sound is vibration, fractal ...
On blogging as curating
What if a blog could be thought of as an exhibition? It would turn blogging activity into curating.
The idea isn't new at all, but is still somewhat difficult to accept by those practicing traditional curatorial activities. I thought about it last week. What has SOURCE CODE become? I (the blogger) am responsible for selecting works (and other relevant documentation for the purpose of this blog/exhibition), displaying them (their urls) and recontextualizing them from my own point of view. What I am doing in this process is basically what any curator does. Starting from my own subjective views of the world, I try to organize, to give meaning, to make sense out of the cultural production I'm interested in. I include them in my discourse, using them to pass a message. The choices I make have a purpose, they are not random, and consequences can arise from them.
The practice of curating remains the same, only the context changes.
So start staging your own shows. Select, include, exclude, draw similarities, contextualize, organise the unorganisable. Blog your heart out.
Art bots!
The art bots are in Philly @ the The Esther M. Klein Art Gallery (thanks Jim!) -
Robots, once only limited to the realm of imagination, now permeate our daily lives, used widely for exploration of sea and space, labor and industry, medicine, military and police. But what happens when a few renegade artists, scientists and inventors start dreaming again of the gloriously whimsical and emotive possibilities of technology? We get ArtBots, marvelous machines that exist at the intersection of art and technology, and that create art, play music and more.ArtBots, the international robotic talent show, comes to Philadelphia for the first time at the Esther M. Klein Art Gallery at the University City Science Center. ArtBots Director, Douglas Repetto, has curated a selection of robotic art and art-making robots...
. Klein Art Gallery - Link.
Object of Desire by Yael Kanarek
Three Languages, Four Ports of Entry
World Premiere of Internet art project Object of Desire by Yael Kanarek: Object of Desire is the third chapter in World of Awe, and online travelogue that chronicles a search for lost treasure in a parallel world called Sunset/Sunrise. The project imagines a post-gender and post-national protagonist. Born from an observation that language defines borders and territory on the Internet, Object of Desire examines these borders, as the chapter is written in three languages: English, Arabic and Hebrew. Challenging the notion of fixed territory, thirteen scenes of the online project download from servers in four locations-�in Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Izmir and New York.
Object of Desire has four web addresses by which to enter: New York; Tel Aviv; Ramallah; Izmir.
Object of Desire was awarded a 2005 Renew Media Fellowship (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation)
Friday April 20, 2007, 7:15 PM: Artist's Talk with Yael Kanarek :: 8:00 PM: Panel Discussion: Plausible Maps, Possible Worlds: Memories for a Post-National Future with Galit Eilat (moderator), Livia Alexander, Hakan Topal, and Michael Connor :: Exit Art, 475 Tenth Ave (at 36th street), New York, NY 10018, Tel. (212) 966-7745.
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.