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

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
Tagalicious

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 ...
Reappearance of the Undead

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 ...
Africa?
query. Do people know of interesting art organizations
(exhibition spaces, residency ctrs, production
facilities, community ctrs, etc) in Africa? I think we
tend to hear more about South Africa and Egypt, but
I'm espcially interested in West, East, and Central
Africa...
Once again, send your links and I'll send them back.
Thanks!
Marisa
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music videos?
interested in the internet as a new, better (?)
channel for music videos, slow and low res as they may
be. (And if you look at the Rhizome Commission
finalsits, it seems like the net is workign on
replacing dead radio, too...) It's interesting to see
folks working within these constraints.
I'm currently doing a taxonomy of summer-themed music
videos, for a future project, and I'm watching a ton
of videos... Do you have any favorites you'd like to
pass along (summer-themed or otherwise)? Forward them
to me and I'll compile them and send them back to the
list. Definitely send your own stuff, too! For now,
the following are in high rotation, on my monitor:
The vidz of Paperrad speak for themselves:
http://www.paperrad.org/animations/animations.html
Anything by Metric. Good-sounding protesty work
rendered at an extra low res. Nice. The song Combat
Baby is especially cool:
http://www.ilovemetric.com/media.html
Anything directed by Ruben Fleischer. The MIA video's
pretty good and so is the "Hit Song," by Format, but I
luv Gold Chains. I come from SF includes the line "I
got a bass degree, it's my PhD." Now that's rap that
rocks:
http://www.ruben.fm/videos.html
Stuff by Har Mar Superstar (prev Sean Na Na),
especially DUI:
http://www.harmarsuperstar.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid1&func=selectcat&cat=2
Husky Rescue's Summertime Cowboy
http://www.catskillsrecords.com/videos/cowboy/cowboy-small.html
And then for the more unusual stuff...
Lord of the Rhymes."Where the shire at?!" Super funny.
Unfortunately, they seem to have addded a very short
Intel ad in the last few days:
http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/contentPlay/video.jsp?id=lord_rhymes&track=0
SUMMERTIME (FAT002) Totaaal Extreeem music video.
Totaaally banal in a possibly cute way. Possibly.
http://www.freude-am-tanzen.com/inc_e/fun_video_s.html
Entertaining, if not controversial:
http://musicvids.richii.com/article174.html
And who, on Rhizome, can forget this?:
http://www.mteww.com/mtaaRR/news/twhid/beastie_beuys.html
But probably best of all is this one (which includes
the line "I am more powerful than dark vapor, oh baby
I am your new dictator."):
http://www.hugi.is/hahradi/bigboxes.php?box_idQ208&f_id75
You can also get info about vidz on IMDB (but not
watch) and if you're really into doing your homework
on songs, rights, authorship, and some vid stuff,
visit
http://www.freedb.org/ or
http://www.musicbrainz.org/
more to be found here:
http://www.lawrence.com/videos/music/
and elsewhere, i'm sure. let's share!
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Re: Re: More Artstar
Jason Van Anden:
> MO>(I feel smarmy giving links, but ask me if you
> want them.)
>
> Please do. I am glad that I found the American Idol
> Audition Blog. (took a quick look for now, plan to
> revist when I have more time) Other links would be
> super appreciated.
Yes, TWhid linked to my AI project:
And then, on a curatorial level, I would point mostly
to the show POP_Remix, at SF Camerawork, last
May-June. This is the only documentation currently
online:
http://www.sfcamerawork.org/past_exhibits/pop_remix.html
and
http://www.sfcamerawork.org/journals/spring_04.html
Best,
marisa
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Re: yet even More Artstar
Thanks to Jason, TWhid, Joy, et al.
I should back up and say that I do not know whether
the artstar.tv folks intend their project as a parody,
and in my heart i doubt that they do, though I don't
know.
What I meant to do, in raising the question of parody
was to sort of unpack or problematize what TWhid said
about everything falling into the two extremes of
great pop art vs a "sickening sycophantical homage to
the dominant media culture,
More Artstar
interesting one, and it covers some of the topics I've
tried to address in my own work and in my curatorial
efforts. (I feel smarmy giving links, but ask me if
you want them.)
Reading TWhid's blog entry, below, I feel compelled to
ask (of him or anyone here who cares) what comprises
this "fine line" between the two extremes of "good Pop
Art and a sickening psychophantical homage to the
dominant media culture"..? And must all art that
appropriates the form and/or content of popular media
fall into one or the other of these extreme
categories?
Where does parody fit in, because to me, for something
to be truly successful, on a parodic level, it has to
be highly imitative--and, hence, to some degree,
reverent, even if only in the sense of (let's say)
what Jameson calls "nostalgia films," which are not
necessarily acting in praise... To me, it is this act
of shadowing (miming, resulting directly from, yet in
contrast and however shape-shifted) that best affords
the opportunity for critique. Admittedly, it is sort
of an act of relinquishing some of the sense of
"value" implied in models of authority (read:
authorship), in order to sort of free one's speech, ie
to protest.
But anyway. I also wonder how TWhid (& MRiver) would
situate their 1 year performance project re: reality
tv--and if they see similarities, then have they given
us "good Pop Art [or] a sickening psychophantical
homage to the dominant media culture"? ;)
Marisa
From TWhid <<
Feb 18, 2005
re: artstar.tv
posted at 17:51 /news/twhid
I'm reversing my earlier ambivalence regarding the
idea of Artstar.tv. I hate it.
How low can the art world stoop? Artstar.tv answers
that question by aping reality television. That is
pretty fucking low. I'm actually a fan of reality TV,
so, nothing against reality TV. I just think of art as
being different from entertainment (perhaps naively).
There is a fine line between good Pop Art and a
sickening psychophantical homage to the dominant media
culture. Perhaps Artstar.tv will stay on the the right
side of that line. Perhaps it will be a brilliant
critique of the reality TV phenomenon. Perhaps it will
subtly explore the nuances of the life of a working
artist in NYC or the nuances of different artists'
creative processes.
I doubt it.
It will be just a bunch of desperate artists doing
their best to suck-up to the art world honchos as they
watch their dignity being stabbed out like a stale
cigarette. >>
--- Jason Van Anden <jason@smileproject.com> wrote:
>
> To view this entire thread, click here:
>
http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread442&text1357#31357
>
> + + +
>
> I searched Google this morning looking for online
> commentary about the upcoming (US) reality TV show
> "Artstar". For those of you who have not already
> quit your day job - I refer you to: www.artstar.tv .
> The week long open call starts next Monday -
> picture a long line of bohemian-types smoking and
> shivering in the cold as they wait to have their
> life's work ambivalently pecked over by some very
> well dressed art world dignitaries, Jeffrey Deitch
> cast in the role of Simon Cowell (or "The Donald"?
> I dunno, I just read about TV). I envision
> something like a living "A Chorus Line" but with
> artists - or "Who Wants to Marry A Millionaire" but
> with artists - or something.
>
> My search revealed that our very own t.whid was the
> only artist in with a blog brave enough to publicly
> express a mix of skepticsm and disgust. I am pretty
> sure we will hear a more about this next week -
> albeit after the cutting begins - links follow.
>
> Good Luck!
> Jason Van Anden
>
> MTAA blog entry:
>
http://www.mteww.com/mtaaRR/news/twhid/re\_artstar\_tv.html
>
> Google "artstar.tv":
> http://www.google.com/search?q=artstar.tv
>
> Clay Aiken:
> http://www.delafont.com/music\_acts/clay-aiken.htm
>
> Whatever happened to "Draw Tippy"?
> http://www.google.com/search?q=Draw+Tippy
>
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