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


semiconductor_nanowebbers.jpg
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 ...

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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

Re: RHIZOME_RARE: new name for Net Art News?


thanks!! cc'ing the list...

On 12/5/05, Simon Biggs <simon@littlepig.org.uk> wrote:
> Change one letter
>
> New Art News
>
> Best
>
> Simon
>
>
> On 05.12.05 18:24, "Marisa Olson" <marisa@rhizome.org> wrote:
>
> >
> > To view this entire thread, click here:
> > http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread560&text7163#37163
> >
> > + + +
> >
> > Dear readers,
> >
> > I'm writing to solicit your advice. We would like to change the name
> > of Net Art News and I'd like your input on a new name.
> >
> > As Lauren mentioned in a recent note to you, Rhizome is currently
> > redesigning our site. This is an exciting moment in which we are
> > thinking about all the recent developments in our field and how
> > Rhizome can reflect, support, and foster them.
> >
> > On the editorial side, my goal with Net Art News has been to broaden
> > our scope and reach, getting more international in our coverage and
> > also covering not only internet art but also software art,
> > performance, sound art, data visualization, technology-enabled social
> > sculpture, locative media, video, and the myriad other branches of new
> > media practice.
> >
> > While we are by no means giving up on net art, the title Net Art News
> > no longer reflects the breadth of the publication. The first and
> > simplest title that comes to mind is 'Media Art News,' but of course
> > this is potentially dry. I'm also not necessarily looking to split
> > hairs over the phrases 'media art' and 'new media art.' The title
> > needs to be rather short, self-descriptive, and hopefully also
> > inviting.
> >
> > What are your suggestions? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
> > If you'd like to refamiliarize yourself with Net Art News, you can
> > look up previous pieces, by month, here:
> >
> > http://rhizome.org/netartnews/index.php
> >
> > With thanks,
> > Marisa
> >
> >
> > + + +
> > Marisa Olson
> > Editor & Curator at Large
> > Rhizome.org
> >
> >
> > + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
> >
> > Rhizome.org is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and an affiliate of
> > the New Museum of Contemporary Art.
> >
> > Rhizome Rare is supported by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the
> > Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and with public funds from
> > the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
> >
> > + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
> >
> > Rhizome Rare is filtered by Rhizome SuperUsers, a dedicated group of
> > volunteer editors. To learn more about becoming a Rhizome SuperUser,
> > please email editor@rhizome.org.
> >
> > To unsubscribe from this list, visit http://rhizome.org/subscribe .
> >
> > Subscribers to Rhizome Rare are subject to the terms set out in the
> > Member Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php.
> >
>
>
>
> Simon Biggs
> simon@littlepig.org.uk
> http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
>
> Professor, Art and Design Research Centre
> Sheffield Hallam University, UK
> http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/cs/cri/adrc/research2/
>
>
>
>

DISCUSSION

Re: RHIZOME_RARE: new name for Net Art News?


Thanks for your thoughts, Myriam. I'm cc'ing the list, as one can't
post directly to rare@rhizome.org...

Marisa

On 12/5/05, Myriam Thyes <myriam@thyes.com> wrote:
> Dear Marisa, dear colleagues,
>
> why not re-interprete the word NET? I like the word Net Art,
> though I

DISCUSSION

Re: new name for Net Art News?


Marc,

Thanks for your thoughtful response! A number of these are
interesting. Mark Tribe once told me that the title "Net Art News"
wasn't intended to be just news about net art, but more net-based art
news. Obviously the emphasis is on new media art, but I like that we
(meaning not just staff, but us in the general Rhizome community) are
moving towards a broader conception of what that encompasses... It
says a lot about the vitality of our field!

Anyway, I'd love to hear from more of you, regarding thoughts on
titles. Meanwhile, I particularly like these, among Marc's (and I'd
add them to a list that includes Media Art News):

> Rhizomatic Art News
> Media Art Broadcast
> Media Art Today
> Media Art Radar

I actually think that, of all of them, I might be leaning most towards
Media Art Today. It plays nicely, as [what we now call Net Art News]
goes out three times per week, so it almost feels like a daily piece.
But it also acknowledges that the media arts have a long history and
these articles are about things that are happening in this moment...

But that's just how I feel at this moment... What do others think?

thanks, again!
marisa

> >Dear readers,
> >
> >I'm writing to solicit your advice. We would like to change the name
> >of Net Art News and I'd like your input on a new name.
> >
> >As Lauren mentioned in a recent note to you, Rhizome is currently
> >redesigning our site. This is an exciting moment in which we are
> >thinking about all the recent developments in our field and how
> >Rhizome can reflect, support, and foster them.
> >
> >On the editorial side, my goal with Net Art News has been to broaden
> >our scope and reach, getting more international in our coverage and
> >also covering not only internet art but also software art,
> >performance, sound art, data visualization, technology-enabled social
> >sculpture, locative media, video, and the myriad other branches of new
> >media practice.
> >
> >While we are by no means giving up on net art, the title Net Art News
> >no longer reflects the breadth of the publication. The first and
> >simplest title that comes to mind is 'Media Art News,' but of course
> >this is potentially dry. I'm also not necessarily looking to split
> >hairs over the phrases 'media art' and 'new media art.' The title
> >needs to be rather short, self-descriptive, and hopefully also
> >inviting.
> >
> >What are your suggestions? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
> >If you'd like to refamiliarize yourself with Net Art News, you can
> >look up previous pieces, by month, here:
> >
> >http://rhizome.org/netartnews/index.php
> >
> >With thanks,
> >Marisa
> >
> >
> >+ + +
> >Marisa Olson
> >Editor & Curator at Large
> >Rhizome.org
> >
> >+
> >-> post: list@rhizome.org
> >-> questions: info@rhizome.org
> >-> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
> >-> give: http://rhizome.org/support
> >+
> >Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
> >Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
> +
> -> post: list@rhizome.org
> -> questions: info@rhizome.org
> -> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
> -> give: http://rhizome.org/support
> +
> Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
> Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
>

DISCUSSION

new name for Net Art News?


Dear readers,

I'm writing to solicit your advice. We would like to change the name
of Net Art News and I'd like your input on a new name.

As Lauren mentioned in a recent note to you, Rhizome is currently
redesigning our site. This is an exciting moment in which we are
thinking about all the recent developments in our field and how
Rhizome can reflect, support, and foster them.

On the editorial side, my goal with Net Art News has been to broaden
our scope and reach, getting more international in our coverage and
also covering not only internet art but also software art,
performance, sound art, data visualization, technology-enabled social
sculpture, locative media, video, and the myriad other branches of new
media practice.

While we are by no means giving up on net art, the title Net Art News
no longer reflects the breadth of the publication. The first and
simplest title that comes to mind is 'Media Art News,' but of course
this is potentially dry. I'm also not necessarily looking to split
hairs over the phrases 'media art' and 'new media art.' The title
needs to be rather short, self-descriptive, and hopefully also
inviting.

What are your suggestions? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
If you'd like to refamiliarize yourself with Net Art News, you can
look up previous pieces, by month, here:

http://rhizome.org/netartnews/index.php

With thanks,
Marisa

+ + +
Marisa Olson
Editor & Curator at Large
Rhizome.org

DISCUSSION

Fwd: David Rokeby webcast


From: kpa@sympatico.ca <kpa@sympatico.ca>
Date: Nov 27, 2005 10:38 AM
Subject: please post David Rokeby webcast
To: marisa@rhizome.org

WHAT: Kodak Lecture Series: DAVID ROKEBY
WHEN: Friday, December 2, 2005 @ 7:30 pm EST

LECTURES ARE WEBCAST LIVE & ARCIVED AT:
http://www.ryersonlectures.ca

The Kodak Lecture Series is pleased to announce that Toronto artist David
Rokeby will present a talk about his work on Friday, December 2, at 7:30
pm at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.

David Rokeby has won acclaim in both artistic and technical fields for his
new media artworks. A pioneer in interactive art and an acknowledged
innovator in interactive technologies, Rokeby has achieved international
recognition as an artist and seen the technologies which he develops for
his work given unique applications by a broad range of arts practitioners
and medical scientists.

Born in Tillsonburg, Ontario in 1960, Rokeby studied at the Ontario
College of Art where he began to use technology to make pieces that
directly engage the human body, or that involve artificial perception
systems. His best known work, Very Nervous System (1986-90), premiered at
the Venice Biennale in 1996, won the first Petro-Canada Award for Media
Arts (1988) and is permanently installed in several museums around the
world. Rokeby has twice been honored with Austria's Prix Ars Electronica
Award of Distinction (1991 and 1997). He has been an invited speaker at
events around the world, and has published two papers that are required
reading in the new media arts faculties of many universities. He received
a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2002.

For more information about David Rokeby:
http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/home.html

For more information about the Kodak Lecture Series program visit
http://www.ryersonlectures.ca.