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

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Tagalicious


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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 ...

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

Wired: Documenting Moore's Oscar Chances


bracketing, even, the issue of moore's film, the academy rule described below is an interesting one... documentaries that have been distributed (legally, though perhaps not illegally..?) on the web cannot be nominated for oscars...

the article says, "The original intent was to keep documentaries intended primarily for television from being distributed for the minimum theatrical release needed to qualify, then quickly televised. Internet distribution was included in the ban in 2000. The window was six months but was lengthened to nine months for 2004. The rule applies only to documentaries."

since when does widespread democratic (if tv is democratic) distribution degrade a work's quality? is this even a quality issue or a corporate issue? shouldn't the academy be able to determine quality? (um....) doesn't this unfairly favor documentaries that get distribution over the many, many important stories and well-made films that find themselves "stuck" on the internet?

interesting....

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Documenting Moore's Oscar Chances

A strangely worded rule covering the Oscar eligibility of documentaries could spell trouble for Michael Moore, thanks to illegal Internet downloads. Then again, it may not. By Staci D. Kramer.

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,64184,00.html?tw=wn_story_mailer

DISCUSSION

Score @ White Columns


Hello. If you're planning to be in New York, this summer, I hope you
will check out Score: Action Drawing, at White Columns. The opening
reception is a week from Friday, from 7-9pm on the 25th, and the show
is up through July 31. Details below.

I hope to see some of you while I'm in town.

Best,
Marisa

Score: Action Drawing
curated by Marisa S. Olson
White Columns - 320 W. 13th Street
(enter on Horatio btwn 8th Ave & Hudson)
June 25 - July 31, 2004

Score is meant to ask questions about the object in relation to
performance, while poking fun at our romance with the hand of the
artist. The title of this thematic exhibition is premised on a double
entendre, referring to a line etched, or a composition for a
performance. In contrast to traditional "action drawing," this show
implicates the figure of the artist in drawings that are somehow
related to a performance--whether the drawing is the fruit of the
action or a scheme for one. "Drawing" is loosely defined, and the
materials, surfaces, and "lines" presented in the exhibition vary
widely, ranging from works on paper to painting, installation, video,
and sound art.

Matt Volla's Bartology is a series of drawings and recordings mapping
people's movement on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transportation). Each
drawing has an accompanying sound composition in which musical
elements correspond to the actions annotated by the drawings. While
formulating new characters for his tragicomic performances, James
Bewley makes hundreds of sketches, fleshing out the figures'
identities, gestures, costumes, and histories. Bewley will exhibit a
group of drawings associated with his newest character, "The Bat."
Lee Walton's drawings record actions according to an invented system
of action-classification that determines the color, quality, and
location of each responsive mark. Here Walton will show a group of
performative drawings documenting a series of New York Yankees
baseball games. In his video Glass, Bob Linder "draws" on windows
with his camera, scratching them with his lens in a work that is
simultaneously performance and performance-documentation. Through an
elaborate use of paint and textiles, Heather Johnson's site-specific
wall drawing refers to the gridded map of an unidentified city.
Johnson's work is concerned with the ways in which individuals
experience public spaces, and this project seeks to construct a
personal, performative landscape. Amanda Hughen's sculptural anomalys
result from a series of carefully-considered abstractions of drawn
marks. Using a variety of unconventional objects and methods, Hughen
employs a line of disposable goods associated with the landscape of
consumer culture, inverting the templates of vernacular
representation (screenprinting, spraypainting, and blob-loving
industrial design) to perform a synthetic drawing. Jennifer Kaufman's
work is as much drawing as it is performance. Her
non-representational work transposes meditative etchings, paintings,
and photographic prints. Invoking the corporeal backbone of
action-art, Kaufman relies on a full-body approach to the drawing,
asserting her figure as she creates rigorous pieces sized in
accordance with the body and reflecting the extreme extension of the
hand. Lines are stretched across hinged pages just as manically as
her fingers trace chemical etches on photosensitive paper. Tommy
Becker combines drawing and musical performance in his video, Behind
the TV He Keeps A Diary. In a precarious infusion of 8-bit computer
drawing systems and Photoshop palettes, Becker's absent hand draws
color-coded lines over video stills in a narrative about a man, a
television, and a virtual sketchbook. Marching through Brooklyn and
NYC in a parade-style fashion, with a HyperSonic speaker Jeff
Karolski "drew a line of sound" by projecting the sounds of a full
street parade at the unsuspecting. His video reveals that the speaker
used is extremely directed, so that only a single person can
participate in Karolski's "one man parade," at any time. While not
originally posited as performative, Dawn Clements's drawings have
conceptual, body-intensive, and often endurance-oriented
underpinnings. In this case, her panoramic drawings aggregate the
interiors of three film sets depicting Connecticut interiors,
exploring the way in which this location has become symbolized in the
world of Classical Hollywood cinema. Lyle Starr's playful drawings
feature lacy renderings of people "licking" each other in witty
send-ups of "action drawing." Gesturing fervently with their tongues,
his line-drawn portraits of faces are beset by fuzzy, abstract nests
of looping, vivid-color airbrush lines. These two styles of
mark-making and gesture coexist uneasily within the picture space, as
a kind of gestalt, where the whole overwhelms its parts.

About the curator: Marisa S. Olson has curated exhibitions at a
number of museums and alternative spaces, including SF Camerawork,
where she is Associate Director. She contributes regularly to Flash
Art, Afterimage, Mute, Wired, Artweek, and a number of other
publications. Her own performance and installation work has been
exhibited internationally.

Opening reception: Friday June 25, 7 - 9 p.m., featuring a
performance by Margaret Tedesco.
Gallery summer hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 12 - 6 p.m.

http://www.whitecolumns.org/schedule.html

DISCUSSION

Positions Available-New Langton Arts (SF)


>June 15, 2004
>
>POSITIONS AVAILABLE:
>DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR, GALLERY COORDINATOR / OFFICE ASSISTANT, AUCTION
>ASSISTANT
>
>
>
>DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR
>Salaried, 40 hours/wk, Exempt
>
>The development director is responsible for overseeing and implementing
>annual and multi-year plans in all areas of contributed income including
>individuals (including membership), government, corporate, foundation and
>in-kind support. He/she is responsible for the effective management of
>part-time staff, volunteers and the development committee of the board of
>directors to implement the development department's goals. Additionally, the
>development director manages annual grantwriting process, supervises
>research on existing and new funding sources, writes grants, submits
>reimbursements, and produces final reports.
>
>QUALIFICATIONS: This person is a personable, well-organized individual with
>proven written and verbal communication skills and experience in staff
>management, donor relations, event fundraising and grant writing. Knowledge
>of contemporary art practice in the visual arts, music, video, literature
>and/or performance art is important. This person must be informed and
>conversant in Langton's mission and programs and be available to attend
>evening and weekend events.
>
>
>
>GALLERY COORDINATOR / OFFICE ASSISTANT
>Hourly, 32 hrs/week, Some Saturdays required
>Health and Vacation Benefits
>$9 to $10/hour
>
>This position is ideal for entry-level arts professional who wants
>first-hand exposure to the operations of a non-profit artist organization.
>Responsibilities include; greeting gallery visitors and organizing gallery
>tours, organizing board files, meetings, and communications, managing
>volunteer and intern program, answering the telephones and providing basic
>office support to all departments.
>
>QUALIFICATIONS
>The gallery coordinator/office assistant is a personable, well-organized
>individual with proven communication and office experience. The candidate
>possesses excellent word processing and computer skills, particularly with
>MS Office and FileMaker Pro. Knowledge of contemporary art, literature,
>media arts, music and/or performance is important. This person must be
>informed and conversant in Langton's mission and all programs and be able to
>attend evening receptions and events.
>
>
>
>
>AUCTION ASSISTANT
>Temporary, part-time (7 months-July through January), Non-exempt
>8-15 hrs/week with some hours on weeknights and weekends
>
>
>New Langton Arts announces the opening of the auction assistant position.
>The position is ideal for an entry level arts professional who wants
>first-hand exposure to the planning and management of a benefit auction. The
>auction assistant reports to the communications director.
>
>QUALIFICATIONS
>The position of auction assistant is a critical staff support position. This
>person is a personable, well-organized individual with proven communications
>skills. Experience on a Macintosh computer with Filemaker Pro and database
>management is important. Knowledge of contemporary art practice in the
>visual arts is desirable. This person must be informed and conversant in
>Langton's mission and the purpose of the auction. This person must be
>available to attend the evening auction, as well as the many events leading
>up to and following the auction.
>
>
>TO APPLY
> NEW LANGTON ARTS IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER.
>Send resume and writing sample to Personnel, New Langton Arts, 1246 Folsom
>Street,
>San Francisco, CA 94103 or email gallery@newlangtonarts.org.
>Deadline for all positions: Open until filled
>No calls please.

DISCUSSION

Employment Opp (SF)


SF Camerawork is seeking a Gallery Manager to begin in the last week
of July. The announcement is below. Please forward to appropriate
candidates. (Do not reply to this address.)

Gallery Manager for a nonprofit photography organization. Provide
administrative assistance to the Executive Director, oversee facility
needs; manage membership program, bookstore, visitor reception, book
keeping and outside vendors; assist with fundraising; and oversee the
activities of interns and volunteers. Must have Macintosh experience,
knowledge of photography and good communication skills. Full time,
27.5 k+benefits. Send letter & resume to: San Francisco Camerawork/
Gallery Manager's Position/ 1246 Folsom St./ S.F., CA 94103 or email
to: sfcamera@sfcamerawork.org (no attachments, please cut and paste
resume into the body of the email) by June 26. No calls.
_________________
Marisa S. Olson
Associate Director
SF Camerawork
1246 Folsom Street
SF, CA 94103

DISCUSSION

Uninvited Artist Posts Work at 4 Museums


Uninvited Artist Posts Work at 4 Museums
By ULA ILNYTZKY, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - Paintings of President Bush and former President Clinton,
accompanied by messages referring to the artist's bodily fluids,
mysteriously appeared last week on the walls of two major city
museums and reportedly at two other museums in Philadelphia and
Washington.

Harold Holzer, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said
Wednesday that a cartoon-type painting of Bush against a background
of shredded dollar bills was found hanging Saturday on the wall near
an exit in the museum's modern art galleries.

"The Metropolitan is a repository for the greatest works of human
creativity over the last 5,000 years," Holzer said. "It is not a
bulletin board. For us, it is clearly an unwelcome demonstration of
self-aggrandizement."

The 9-by-15-inch work, done on a frameless canvas, was affixed to the
wall with double-sided tape. A label taped next to the painting said
it was made with "acrylic, legal tender and the artist's semen."

Apparently no one saw it being put up.

Similar paintings of Bush and Clinton were left Saturday at the
Guggenheim Museum. Police and FBI agents determined there was no
threat to the public, authorities said.

Also targeted were the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, the New York Post reported Wednesday.

Representatives of those three museums declined to comment or were
not immediately available when contacted by The Associated Press.

Citing an unidentified source, the Post said the intruder left
typewritten notes at all four locations that read: "I mixed my semen
in some acrylic gel medium and I painted it in the right hand corner
of this piece of art. It is an artistic reference to the silent power
of the biological sciences."

Although the museum screens visitors' bags, Holzer said the small
painting would not have raised any alarms and would not have been
confiscated, because many museum visitors go to the Met to sketch.