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.

Collectible After All: Christiane Paul on net art at the Whitney Museum


The Whitney Museum artport has been an important institutional presence in net art and new media since its launch in 2002. Created and curated by Christiane Paul, artport features online commissions as well as documentation of new media artworks from the museum's exhibitions and collections. This year, artport as a whole was made an official part of the Whitney Museum collection; to mark this occasion, participating artist Marisa Olson interviewed Paul about the program's history and evolution over thirteen years.

 Douglas Davis, image from The World's First Collaborative Sentence (1994).

Collections like artport are a rare and valuable window onto a field of practice that, in some senses, was borne out of not being taken seriously. From mid-80s Eastern European game crackers to late-90s net artists, the first people working online were often isolated, by default or design, and were certainly marginalized by the art world, where few curators knew of their existence and fewer took them seriously, advocated for them, or worked to theorize and articulate the art historical precedents and currents flowing through the work. Help me fast-forward to the beginning of this century at one of the most important international art museums. Many of the US museums that funded new media projects did so with dot-com infusions that dried-up after 2000. Artport officially launched in 2001; the same year, you curated a section devoted to net art in the Whitney Biennial. What was the behind-the-scenes sequence of events that led to artport's founding?

I think artport's inception was emblematic of a wave of interest in net art in the US around the turn of the century and in the early 2000s. This more committed involvement with the art form interestingly coincided with or came shortly after the dot com bubble, which inflated from 1997–2000, had its climax on March 10, 2000 when NASDAQ peaked, and burst pretty much the next day. Net art, however, remained a very active practice and started appearing on the radar of more US art institutions. To some extent, their interest may have been sparked by European exhibitions that had begun to respond to the effects of the web on artistic practice earlier on. In 1997, Documenta X had already included web projects (that year the Documenta website was also famously "stolen"—that is, copied and archived—by Vuk Cosic in the project Documenta: done) and Net Condition, which took place at ZKM in 1999/2000, further acknowledged the importance of art on the web.

US museums increasingly began to take notice. Steve Dietz, who had started the Walker Art Center's New Media Initiatives early on, in 1996, was curating the online art Gallery 9 and digital art study collection. Jon Ippolito, in his role as Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim, was commissioning net art in the early 2000s and in 2002, Benjamin Weil, with Joseph Rosa, unveiled a new version of SFMOMA's E-space, which had been created in 2000. This was the institutional netscape in which I created artport in 2001, since I felt that the Whitney, which had for the first time included net art in its 2000 Biennial, also needed a portal to online art. The original artport was much more of a satellite site and less integrated into whitney.org than it is now. Artist Yael Kanarek redesigned the site not too long after its initial launch and created version 1.1. Artport in its early days was sponsored by a backend storage company in New Jersey, which was then bought by HP, so HP appeared as the official sponsor. I think it is notable that sponsorship at that point did not come from a new tech company but a brand name that presumably wanted to appear more cutting edge.


booomerrranganggboobooomerranrang: Nancy Holt's networked video


Nancy Holt, Boomerang (1974), still from video.

In her time on this planet, Nancy Holt came to be known as a great American Land Artist, and certainly her brilliant installations, like Utah's Sun Tunnels and collaborations with her partner Robert Smithson and their peers, are profoundly significant, but it was her work in film & video that has had the greatest personal impact on me.

I somehow didn't see Boomerang, her 1974 video performance usually credited to her collaborator Richard Serra, until I was a Ph.D. student in Linda Williams's Phenomenology of Film seminar at UC Berkeley's Rhetoric program, but the time delay was more than made up for by the work's formative resonance. In the video, made during Serra's residency at a Texas television station, a young Holt is seen sitting in an anchor's chair before a staid blue background. Despite brief station ID graphic overlays and one minute of silence in the midst of the ten-minute piece (announced as audio trouble and reminding viewers of the work's live TV origin), the work is in many ways sound-centric.


Sound and Image in Electronic Harmony


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Image: Semiconductor: Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt, 200 Nanowebbers, 2005

On Saturday, April 11th, New York's School of Visual Arts will co-present the 2009 Visual Music Marathon with the New York Digital Salon and Northeastern University. Promising genre-bending work from fifteen countries, the lineup crams 120 works by new media artists and digital composers into 12 hours. If it's true, as is often said, that MTV killed the attention spans of Generations X and Y, this six-minute-per-piece average ought to suit most festivalgoers' minds, and the resultant shuffling on and off stage will surely be a spectacle in its own rite. In all seriousness, this annual event is a highlight of New York's already thriving electronic music scene and promises many a treat for your eyes and ears. The illustrious organizers behind the marathon know their visual music history and want to remind readers that, "The roots of the genre date back more than two hundred years to the ocular harpsichords and color-music scales of the 18th century," and "the current art form came to fruition following the emergence of film and video in the 20th century." The remarkable ten dozen artists participating in this one-day event will bring us work incorporating such diverse materials as hand-processed film, algorithmically-generated video, visual interpretations of music, and some good old fashioned music-music. From luminaries like Oskar Fischinger, Hans Richter, and Steina Vasulka to emerging artists Joe Tekippe and Chiaki Watanabe, the program will be another star on the map that claims NYC as fertile territory for sonic exploration. - Marisa Olson

READ ON »


Tagalicious


Picture-1.jpg

The National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens, Greece, has committed itself to curating a number of recent exhibitions of internet art. Their current show, "Tag Ties and Affective Spies," features contributions from both net vets and emerging surfers, including Christophe Bruno, Gregory Chatonsky, Paolo Cirio, JODI, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, Les Liens Invisibles, Personal Cinema and The Erasers, Ramsay Stirling, and Wayne Clements. The online exhibition takes an antagonistic approach to Web 2.0, citing a constant balance "between order and chaos, democracy and adhocracy." Curator Daphne Dragona raises the question of whether the social web is a preexisting platform on which people connect, or whether it is indeed constructed in the act of uploading, tagging, and disclosing previously private information about ourselves on sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook. Dragona asks whether we are truly connecting and interacting, or merely broadcasting. While her curatorial statement doesn't address the issue directly, the show's title hints at the level of self-surveillance in play on these sites. Accordingly, many of the selected works take a critical, if not DIY, approach to the internet. The collective Les Liens Invisibles tends to create works that make an ironic mash-up of the often divergent mantras of tactical media, culture jamming, surrealism, and situationism. In their Subvertr, they encourage Flickr users to "subverTag" their posted images, creating an intentional disassociation between an image's content and its interpretion, with the aim of "breaking the strict rules of significance that characterize the mainstream collective imaginary..." JODI's work, Del.icio.us/ winning information (2008) exploits the limited stylistic parameters of the social bookmarking site. Using ASCII and Unicode page titles to form visual marks, a cryptic tag vocabulary, and a recursive taxonomy, their fun-to-follow site critiques the broader content of the web ...

READ ON »


Reappearance of the Undead


agatha_appears_lialina.gif

In 1997, internet art hall-of-famer Olia Lialina made a "net drama" called Agatha Appears that was written for Netscape 3 and 4 in HTML 3.2. One of the main features of the interactive narrative was the travel of the eponymous avatar across the internet. Let's just say the girl got around. But the magical illusion of the piece was that she appeared to stay still, even when links in the narrative were clicked and the viewer's address bar indicated movement to another server. But in time, both the browser and code in which the story was written became defunct and the piece unraveled as the sites previously hosting the links and files upon which Agatha was dependent disappeared or cleaned house. Such a scenario is common to early internet art (and will no doubt continue to plague the field), as ours is an upgrade culture constantly driving towards new tools, platforms, and codes. Many have debated whether to let older works whither or how it might be possible to update these works, making them compatible with new systems. For those who are interested, some of the best research on the subject has been performed by the folks affiliated with the Variable Media Initiative. Meanwhile, luddites and neophiles alike are now in luck because Agatha Appears has just undergone rejuvenation. Ela Wysocka, a restorer working at Budapest's Center for Culture & Communication Foundation has worked to overcome the sound problems, code incompatibilities, and file corruption and disappearance issues, and she's written a fascinating report about the process, here. And new collaborating hosts have jumped in line to bring the piece back to life, so that like a black and white boyfriend coming home from war, Agatha now offers us a shiny new webring as a token of ...

READ ON »



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

Reminder: 9/16 deadline: CAA-New Media Caucus panelist proposals


Hello, again. I've received a few interesting proposals for this panel,
but I'm still looking for more. The call is below. Thanks! - Marisa

CALL FOR PAPERS
The New Media Caucus panel at the College Art Association

DISCUSSION

New Media Syllabi


Hi, all. I've started making a list of new media syllabi, here:

http://del.icio.us/marisaolson/syllabi

It's a very basic list, fleshed-out by my own surfing, Trebor Scholz's
great de.icio.us links, and contributions from subscribers to Rhizome_Raw.
The list includes mostly history & theory courses, in addition to a few
general educational resources.

Please feel free to send me URLs to additional syllabi about which you
know. I will continue keeping the list and if it quadruples in size, I
will post another ping to the list. Meanwhile, bookmark it and watch it
grow! Hopefully it can be a resource to students and teachers, alike.

Marisa

DISCUSSION

Call for Syllabi: History & Theory of New Media


Well, it's back to school time, isn't it?

I'm interested in compiling a list of syllabi for courses on the
history & theory of new media, and I'm sure than many of the other
teachers on this list would love to see them, too. Practice-oriented
courses would also be of interest, though there seem to be more
slightly resources out there on how to teach these things. I'm very
interested to see not only what's on people's reading lists, but also
how people are organizing their
materials--historically/chronologically, formally, thematically...

If you are teaching or taking a class on this (or have in the past)
and the syllabus is available online, send me an off-list message with
the link. I'll add it to my list and send it out to the list and
Digest, next week.

Thanks!
Marisa

DISCUSSION

Fwd: warren neidich


Hi, all. Warren Neidich asked me to forward this to the list...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: mas01wn@gold.ac.uk <mas01wn@gold.ac.uk>
Date: Sep 1, 2005 4:33 AM
Subject: warren neidich
To: marisa@rhizome.org

Dear Marisa,

I hope you have had a pleasent summer. I would like to take this
opportunity to invite you to the opening of my exhibition entitled,
Earthling, which opens at the Michael Steinberg Fine Arts on Sept. 8th and
runs to October 8th. Because you are probably not that familiar with my
work I copied my bio below. If you do come by the gallery you will notice
that I am more interested in the effect of new media on the culture then
the technology involved although I am presently research fellow in
computing at Goldsmiths College. best wishes warren

Warren Neidich, Goldsmiths College, London Neidich believes that a role
of the artist is to enlarge the notion of what art is and what it can be.
Art is a continually expanding universe of possibilities that through its
interaction with other discourses generates new languages with which the
mind can play and create. He uses photography, cinema, and new media to
discover the ways that aesthetic practice, philosophy, architecture, and
design interface in abstract ways with new ideas of perceptual becoming
such as neuro-plasticity and Neural Darwinsim/Neuroconstructivism.
Together they reconfigure and revitalize conceptual based practice as new
means to produce and distribute information.. In the end these co-evolving
systems form a collective choreography produce ways to understand the
construction of global subjectivities, what he refers to as Earthling.
He calls this methodology "Neuroaesthetics" a term he coined in 1995 in a
series of lectures he presented at the School of Visual Arts, New York
City. He founded the Journal of Neuro-aesthetics and co-founded www.
artbrain.org. in 1997. He organized the exhibition Conceptual Art as a
Neurobiologic Praxis in 1999 at the Thread Waxing Space, New York City.
In the past five years he has organized many conferences including "Can
Art Investigate the Brain", College Art Association, New York City, 1999,
"Buildings, Movies and Brains", UCLA Department of Art, 2002, "The Phantom
Limb", and "Neuroaesthetics," Goldsmiths College, 2005. The
"Neuroaesthetics" conference acted simultaneously as a provocative
academic exercise and transgressive multi-authored art work. It dealt
with a broad range of concepts such as bio-political systems, technology
and constructed subjectivity, the cultured bran and mutated observer,
drugs, altered states of consciousness and minimalist/post-minimalist
ideas of form and the relationship between d.j. culture and sampling. His
art work has been internationally exhibited in such institutions as the
Whitney Museum of Art, New York City, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Ludwig
Museum, Koln, , Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles and the
Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota just to name a few. Recent
group shows include Go-Between, Magazin 4 and the Bregenzer Kunzverein,
2005, Bregenz Austria Library,Librarie, IDEALONDON, 2005 and Synaesthesia,
2004, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 10 Hour Performance,
Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithiuania, and Everything is Connected,
Ha,Ha, 2004 Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway, ,. A
planned one-person show will occur at the Michael Steinberg Gallery, New
York City this fall where he will present his "Earthling" project for the
first time. He was the Artist in Residence at Goldsmiths College, London
2004,2005 and is currently American representative at the Glenfiddich
Artistic Residency, Dufftown, Scotland for the summer of 2005. He is
author of many books such as American History Reinvented, Aperture, 1989,
and Camp O.J., Bayle Museum, University of Virginia He is the author of a
collection of essays called Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain
published by DAP and the University of California, Riverside, 2003
Earthling, a collection of photographs with an interview by Hans Ulrich
Obrist and an essay by Barry Scwabsky will be published in September, 2005
by Pointed Leaf Press. .

We all know that making art is a kind of journey into the heartland of the
self and that this self is Transversal, it does not end with the body but
extends into the interactive space beyond itself. The world of things for
the hands, the visual landscape for the eyes, and language and culture for
the brain. It co-evolves through a process by which it sends out
thousands and thousands of fimbria, figuratively extensions of protoplasm,
into the real, imaginary and virtual world which is more like an
interface or membrane constructed of stable and dynamic patterns. These
physical and psychic extensions reach out and inter-digitate themselves
into the infinite array of interconnected information systems that call
out to them and reach them and embrace them. The body is one site of that
interactivity but the brain is to and it is well known that the body, the
brain and this real/imaginary/virtual interface are a co-extensive "one".
They are the most recent manifestation of co-evolutionary forces in which
these three streams of ontogeny are made to mingle and dance with each and
in the end finding points of commonality. Culture plays a significant role
in the mediation of these three systems and its evolution is mapped into
this co-extensive system. What has marked the evolution of the brain as
distinct and separate from the rest of the body is its ability to be
modified something called plasticity. This mutability and changlingness is
a result of a genetically inherited ability which allows neurons and their
connections to be modified and pruned by the combined process now called
Neural Darwinsim/Neural Constructivism. Changes taking place in itself and
in the other spheres can as a result leave their mark or imprint on to the
neurobiological substrate. Modifications in the real/imaginary/virtual or
external reality can effect the distribution and morphology of the
developing brain and as a result cultural mutations that have changed
architecture, art, design and fashion just to name a few, have
implications for how the brain is wired and more importantly how its
different parts dynamically interact.. This permutation and re alignment
of the neurobiological substrate is what is called the Cultured Brain and
it is the new configuration and design of its' maps that allow it to
process information differently, to imagine new possibilities and in the
end to reinvigorate creativity itself.

Earthling is a work that involves film,video, photography, and new media
to explore the various conditions of this new forms of individual
subjectivity that are evolving as a result of the new global character of
our experience.

DISCUSSION

Fwd: BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR - preview [thingist]


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: UBERMORGEN.COM <play@ubermorgen.com>
Date: Aug 31, 2005 2:15 PM
Subject: [thingist] BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR - preview
To: thingist@bbs.thing.net

UBERMORGEN.COM: "just pixels on a screen - just ink on paper"

BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR
by UBERMORGEN.COM

The BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR is an online engine that generates abstract
and very individual bank statements.

The core theme of the project is described in the slogan "just pixels on
a screen - just ink on paper" and consolidated in the term "authenticity
as consensual hallucination" (Inke Arns). The focus shifts from the
authenticity in the time of analogue / technical reproduction
(signature) towards authenticity in the time of informational
reprogramability (automatically generated bank-statements).

In the UBERMORGEN.COM universe, this project can be seen in the
tradition of "Legal Art" and specifically the "[F]originals - forged
original documents - series. A Foriginal is always original and unique.
Foriginals are pixels on screens or substance on material [i.e. ink on
paper]. [F]originals are non pragmatic - they are absurd. They do not
tell you whether they are real or forged - there is no original but also
no fully forged document. Foriginals can be human or machine generated;
Foriginals are digital or analog:

Foriginals are singular multiples.

http://www.ipnic.org/BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR

BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR Exhibitions

White cube ATM Installation 150x150x200cm, net.art, 2005

upcoming:

Ars Electronica Linz / Austria
Exhibition "Hybrid - living in paradox"
September 1st to 6th, 2005

past:

[plug.in] Basel / Switzerland
Exhibition "[F]original - Authenticity as consensual hallucination"

[F]original, BANKSTATEMENTGENERATORR & UBERMORGEN.COM are supported by
the City of Vienna [MA7], .KUNST, Pro Helvetia, Austrian Embassy in
Tokyo, Austrian Embassy in Serbia-Montenegro, [plug.in], hartware Medien
Kunst Verein, Artnode, Overgaden, BAK - Bundesamt fuer Kultur
Switzerland & Pure Lustre Inc. (verylustre.com)

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