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.
Goodnight/Good-bye
Another one of my favourite projects at the RCA Design Interactions show: Tuur Van Balen's Larry's Pillow - Goodnight/Good-bye.
If you're one of the very few who actually listen to the security announcement made just before take off on a plane, then you know that in case of emergency you're supposed to adopt a "brace position." Apparently the only thing the brace position can do for you is preserve your dental records in case of a crash. It keeps your teeth close to your seat number and makes identification easier for the forensic team.
Larry's Pillow gives you back some of the control you crave for in a moment of flight danger. In case of emergency, it helps you to take the brace position and straps you up securely. If you then choose to pull the tag, the pillow will inflate and suffocate you. You're thus in control over your own life and death. As the sense of losing all control not only exists in aeroplanes, in development are pillows designed for the office and domestic environment. For stockbrokers, board-members, housewives and teenagers.
A Moving World....
A Moving World
Todd Arsenault
Michael Bell-Smith
Euan Macdonald
Mariah Robertson
Christian Siekmeier
In the mid 1960s, the Sony Corporation introduced the first portable video device, a large black-and-white camera connected to a half-inch reel-to-reel recorder. Before the bulky but mobile “Portapak,” the only consumer-grade moving image technology available were amateur film cameras, the eight and sixteen-millimeter formats lacking the instant playback aspects of video. South Korean-born artist Nam June Paik supposedly turned one of the earliest Portapaks on a papal motorcade making its way down Fifth Avenue. The tapes, shot from inside a taxicab, were shown later that night. So, the apocryphal story would have it, video art was born.
Even if obscuring lesser-known figures, this origin myth conveys a defining point: the transformation of the nascent technology into an art form. Video quickly became an accessible artistic tool, a democratic extension of corporate-run television that enabled artists to address the relationship between technology, mass media, and culture. Part of its agency lay in being anti-Establishment, seemingly outside the institutions of art and free of the co-optive character of broadcast media. Video offered a critique of commodified culture—freed from the status of an art object by its reproducibility—and the heterogeneity afforded by a largely undefined medium.....“A Moving World,” shows the medium seamlessly intertwined with photography, painting and sculptural practice. And as with any medium in which technological changes become defining artistic ones, the antecedents of today’s video art—the grainy, muffled tapes often shot in real time—have given way to a refined combination of video, cinema, and new media.
From my exhibition essay for A Moving World, curated by Dinaburg Arts and opening this Wednesday, January 31st, 6-8pm, at Gallery W52, 31 West 52nd.
Interview with Mushon Zer-Aviv
[....]
How about the Little Feet Bureau? What did you try to achive with that project? Did you intend to raise the attention to online surveillance? Which kind of audience did you have in mind when you developed the LFB?
By now you can probably pick an overarching theme I'm working with. You know, growing up in Israel I always had regional maps around me, each one of them looked different... I managed to reach quite a grow up age without knowing what are the borders of my country. In a way I still don't. It has become my own private border conflict. That is why I'm so drawn to the internet and that is why I'm so interested in Postnationalism.
The Little Feet Bureau is concerned with exactly that - the tension between the Postnational tendencies of the web and the paranoid tendencies of national information agencies. Governments and national ideologies secretly surveil innocent internet traffic trying to project and justify their fears and construct fantastic narratives of terrorism, extremism and instability through bundeling of 'dangerous keywords'. For me this is the peak of the tension the core of the digital border conflict. Toshi Ozawa, David Nolen and myself have created the Little Feet Bureau, an independent agency providing surveillance services for different governments. LF's dot-matrix printers are personalized to the client's ideology and print accusation letters to suspect users based on these paranoid keyword narratives. Essentially, these are paranoia machines - embodying national fears and cultural segregation into computer algorithms.
Did we do it to inform and raise attention about online surveillance? I'm not sure. Actually, Little Feet was launched in an Upgrade! New York event we held in Eyebeam. The title of the event was: We Passion Power and Control: the dark desires ...
Version>07 Call for participation
Version07 call for participation. Deadline March 7, 2007.
An unconventional network of creators, workers, musicians, organizations, artists, activists, producers and organizers are collectively waging asymmetrical warfare on the established systems of control in our cultural, political and art worlds.
The Insurrection Internationale is a moment. It is a point of confluence between various networks and subcultures that believe in the solidarity of our multitudes. Together we are waging a revolt against established systems and authority to create new worlds to inhabit. We are creating alternate realities, independent economies, developing alliances and infrastructures to support our beliefs. We are engaging in a culture war against the establishments in all their guises.
This year Version will explore the various networks undermining the forces of stagnation, decay and business as usual. Individuals and groups involved in creating alternative modes of operations, communications and networks of cooperation are invited to our annual convergence this spring to discover the plausible worlds we can create together.
"This is the final struggle/Let us join together and tomorrow/The International/Will be the human race"
Version is a massive complex DIY festival with many components. Choose your own adventure.
To submit a project to Version07 we ask you to select a category or platform And look at our call for participation site:
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION http://www.versionfest.org
ONLINE SUBMISSION FORM http://adoptanamerican.com/version07/submit/add.php
Review of Richard Foreman's new mixed-media play WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD!
Richard Foreman's new mixed-media play WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD! purports to be a response to a world in which visionary sages and poets are being replaced by specialists who make platitudes out of the immediately observable. Supposedly here the unconscious fights back to life in a shape resembling "the stone that rolls up the hill backwards" (the evil one) and from such "evil", life renews itself.
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.