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.
Turning urban noise into music
So far, the headphones of music players have been isolating us from noise but also from one another. Ambient Addition, by Noah Vawter, aims to change that. This kind of Walkman allows one to synthesize music from environmental sound and creates a sonic space in which the listener remains connected with the surroundings, while being cushioned from the most harsh and arrhythmic incursions and maybe also drawn to appreciate more subtle ones. The design of the device is quite peculiar as the listener's ears are visible through the headphones, suggesting that s/he is not in his/her own world, but able to hear and respond to those around him/her.
A tiny Digital Signal Processing chip analyzes the microphone's sound and superimposes a layer of harmony and rhythm on top of the listener's world. New behaviors take place. Listeners tend to play with objects around them, sing to themselves, and wander toward tempting sound sources. The pattern of audio processing is composed to create a song-like sense of anticipation.
Ambient Addition and other cool projects will be presented at the dorkbot-nyc meeting which will take place on October 4th, at Location One in SoHo.
Related: Sonic City enables people to compose music in real time by walking through the streets; TUNA, the walkman as a social experience; Mapamp uses the architecture of a city, navigation and radio systems to layer an artificial acoustic space over the original one; Sonic interface, etc.
Other works by Vawter: Religious Speech Sensor and Smooth Ride.
'Artful Gaming' at the London Games Festival Fringe.
Select Parks and Cybersalon are proud to announce Artful Gaming, a week-long exhibition and one-day forum featuring at the London Games Festival.
Artists on show include Toshi, John and Christian's ChitChat National Park, Susigame's brilliant EdgeBomber, Igloo, The Sancho Plan and Myfanwy Ashmore who created the canonical piece, Mario Battle No.1.
A one day forum on the 5th of October will allow you to meet these artists and learn about their process and technique in a casual setting. The exhibition and forum will both be held at the Dana Centre with an opening on the 2nd.
Read on for our press-release.
Survival Research Labs and their motivations
The last issue of Stanford’s Ambidextrous magazine features an interesting article about Survival Research Labs (heavy pdf):
Survival Research Labs (SRL) has built its reputation on providing 'the most dangerous shows on earth'--it is an art collective that specializes in staging performances, starring enormous robots that beat the crap out of each other. You may think you'e seen robot wars on television, but there's a crucial difference: These exhibitions are explicitly designed not only to entertain
hundreds of paying viewers, but also to threaten their lives.
Then the writer (Angie Heile) reports some interesting thoughts about their motivations:
'Our shows aren't for humans, they're for machines.' But this only hints at the real answer: SRL's shows aren't done for the audience--they'e for the creators.
(...)
Observers often wonder why so much engineering genius doesn't get applied to something more beneficial--after all, people who can make a self-propelled fire-breathing monster from scrap could probably use their spare time to design life-saving-appropriate technologies for the developing world--ather than just blow things up. But SRL's creators seem to feel that using their skills to play with fire is a more exciting challenge.
Why do I blog this? SRL has always been interesting to me and I am intrigued by this argument about the 'why so much engineering genius doesn't get applied to something more beneficial.' Actually the author could have elaborated a bit more about the importance of stuff like SRL; even though it's exciting for the creators, there is a lot more to think about that: what they do convey relevant messages with regards to tech usage, the future of its use and dissemination and how it plays out in extreme contexts.
Re:TX
ReTransmission is a gathering of citizen journalists, video makers, artists, programmers and web producers who are developing online video distribution tools for social justice and media democracy.
The Free Open Source Software community has provided a wide number of production and distribution tool on the Net, while the Creative Commons copyleft licence offers a way to share content without commercial exploitation. The event has been organised to add to the work of these and other communities to contribute to the building of real world usable tools for distributing and sharing video online.
Jonah Bokaer
Dancing Up a Storm of Radical Doubt
Dancing Up a Storm of Radical Doubt by Jonah Bokaer: Flashing as dismissive an attitude toward status quo as Merce Cunningham--whose company he dances for--Brooklyn-based dancer Jonah Bokaer and the artists' collective Chez Bushwick have recently initiated a nomadic experimental dance laboratory called AMBUSH. Each monthly installment of the program occupies a different loft space in Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood. An outgrowth of Chez Bushwick's remarkably successful SHTUDIO SHOW, AMBUSH is identified by the collective as 'an ambulatory new program of dance, performance, and related forms.' NYFA Current asked Bokaer, Chez Bushwick's manager and founder, to explain the evolution of the collective, their propensity for rigorous interviews of critics and curators, and how no reviews are allowed. [continue reading at NYFA]
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.