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.
Colour by Numbers
Colour by numbers is a 72 meters high light installation at Telefonplan in Stockholm. "A tower stands at Telefonplan. Austere, slim and dark; rising towards the sky like an exclamation mark. A tower is an archetypical creator of place: it breaks in and becomes an event in a continuous landscape. This characteristic is emphasized by the illuminated windows of this particular tower - but the patterns and colours also vary constantly. The tower speaks in a sign language composed of light. But what is the tower at Telefonplan saying, and who gives the architectonic form meaning?". On the website under live video you can see a live video image of the tower and also read instructions for how to control the light installation over the phone.
Until November 5 the video image is also projected on the façade of the Culture House in Stockholm, as part of the exhibition "Stockholm
bygger ".
Colour by numbers is a collaboration between the artist Erik Krikortz, the architect Milo Lavén and the interaction designer Loove Broms.
thanks to Loove for the tip
sonic.focus
This weekend is the sonic.focus conference at Brown University in Providence RI. I will be on a panel as well as performing.
The description on the sonic.focus website
sonic.focus is a project that examines complementarities and antagonisms between sound and image in contemporary culture. Starting with film & video screenings on October 20th and 27th, the events will culminate in a conference and performance series to be held at Brown University on November 3 and 4, 2006.
This program is prompted by the emergence over the past decade of an auditory culture that parallels the dominant visual culture. Among the phenomena that signal this emergence are: the increasing presence of sound in visual arts exhibitions and venues; the proliferation of visual and media practices in which sound is central to meaning; and the development of a body of theory that examines the nature, history, and circulation of sound as a useful social or conceptual model.
The aim of the conference is to foster a fruitful dialogue among theorists and practitioners working at the intersection of the visual and the sonic arts. Keynote speakers will include David Toop, Diedrich Diederichsen, and Douglas Kahn. Panels will include presentations by Christian Marclay, Renee Green, Stephen Vitiello, Steve Roden, and others. Finally, two nights of performances will include appearances by artists such as Tony Conrad, Robert Lippok, AGF & Sue C. and David Shea.
sonic.focus is organized by Tony Cokes, Roger Mayer, and Christoph Cox
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The panel discussion i am participating in is Saturday Nov. 4
11:30-1:00 Christian Marclay, Michael Bell-Smith, Daniel Perlin, AGF/Sue C.
and the performance is that night of the 4th as well:
8:30-midnight
Daniel Perlin, Art Jones, Philip Sherburne, Tony Conrad
If you are in the area, or not, it looks to be a ...
MTAA At The Art Opening [part 1]
The title of a series of audio files we’re releasing has been sort of up-in-the-air so I decided (unilaterally btw (sorry M)) that I’m going to call it “MTAA At The Art Opening.” It’s a series of audio recordings that we’ll be releasing via our podcast website “To Be Listened To…”. (See this for more info.)
You can download part 1 of “MTAA At The Art Opening” now!
Please stare at this image of MTAA as you listen to part 1. Also, subscribe to the podcast feed in iTunes (iTunes link) or other podcast client (RSS link) to get future parts as they’re released.
Note: alternately, we’ve been calling this piece “2BL2 Rhizome Reception” and “A Live Demonstration of MTAA Art Practice At Rhizome’s Reception For The 2005 - 2006 Net Art Commissions” and having no title at all. It’s all very confusing.
Call for Rhizome Site Editors
Dear all,
We've recently seen some turnover among our Site Editors (formerly known as 'Superusers'), with some inactive members stepping down and some becoming "Emeritus." At this time, I would like to add four new Site Editors to our roster--and more in the future. I'm hoping that some of you will be interested in getting involved.
It would be ideal to bring on people who are familiar with new media art and have a background of involvement in the Rhizome community. One of our goals with a collectively-edited reblog was to have a diversity of voices representing our diverse field, something that only happens when people are able to fully commit to this volunteer position, which entails reblogging at least ten items per month. Community participation is crucial to the Reblog's success, and I thank you for considering this commitment. Below is the official 'job description.' Please email me, off-list, if you are interested or have any questions.
Rhizome's Site Editors play an important role in determining the content that appears on our website. Each Site Editor actively researches and publishes texts on our front page Reblog, including select posts from the Rhizome Raw discussion list, which Site Editors evaluate for merit, quality, and historical significance. Each of these texts is permanently archived and the discussions, announcements, reviews, essays, and other posts published from Raw are assigned searchable "metadata" terms by Site Editors, published to the Rhizome Rare discussion list, and posted on the Reblog. Site Editors are then actively involved in historicizing and initiating discourse about new media art.
Thanks, Marisa
+ + +
Marisa Olson
Editor & Curator
Rhizome.org at the
New Museum of Contemporary Art
Trick or Treat to Hallo-Win
According to artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, 'once a year, at the stroke of midnight, the ancestors of Rich User Experiences raise from the grave.' Apparently, this occurs sometime around Halloween, considering the holiday weekend over which IGAC (Girona Art Contemporani) decided to launch the duo's newest web-based work, 'Midnight.' Despite the artists' heavy reference to now-retro web graphics, users traverse their their piece's video game-like space using the newly ubiquitous Google Maps navigation cross. Along the way, viewers will stumble upon very tiny animated gifs, many of which are simple dots or geometric shapes. These barely representational objects float within the sky of an eternal midnight, evoking the sense of 'lost' space junk resigned to a lonely orbit. Lialina and Espenschied describe the life of the aforementioned navigation cross in the same way, citing its presence 'in a huge number of mash-ups to provide a localization interface for all kinds of data,' ranging from the origin of photos to crime statistics to real estate listings and 'where to find the next Burger King.' Midnight recites gifs like it recites brands, leaving a bread crumb trail of the artists' consumption, across the web, while recycling the resultant byproducts as a real treat for net art fans. - Marisa Olson
Rhizome Today: A critic, with opinions about postinternet art
My own effort in talking about Postinternet, at least in those early instances, as on the panel, was to (a) expand Rhizome's mission--I was then Editor & Curator--to cover and support a wider variety of practices; and (b) just to describe my own work and how a project like my Monitor Tracings (totally "offline" drawings) could be contextualized as internet art, or art 'after' the internet (i.e. In the style of & made after I log-off.) I think Michael puts it *perfectly* when he says, "we should understand all our gestures, 'online' and 'offline,' as actions in a network that is mediated and administered by computers." Perhaps this is obvious, but I'd say this applies to all of waking life, not just art production+reception.
I've personally moved from discussing Postinternet Art as "art after the internet" toward discussing Postinternet as "the symptoms of network culture." I am less interested in discussing PI Art specifically/exclusively, now that people have brow-beaten and/or branded the term into something far different than what I originally meant, and much more interested in discussing the social affects around the production of postinternet conditions and their manifestations. And, meanwhile, I have said (particularly in the Ullens catalogue & also in an interview in the Art and the Internet book put out by Black Dog) that, to me, Postinternet is just a 'placeholder' term around which to convene in having conversations around the latter symptoms. (I've started working on spelling these out more explicitly in recent & forthcoming writing-- including the keynote lecture I just gave at Pratt's UPLOAD conference, entitled "Postinternet is Dead. Long Live Postinternet.")
Likes/Dislikes around the word, aside, I hope this very long-running conversation around art and the internet can continue to incorporate careful consideration of the affects of network culture, as networks themselves evolve.
Breaking the Ice
Like most of the folks above, I too am a "forever member," from the days of the Rhizome Communications ascii RAW listserv and, later, fancy Dreamweaver/Flash "Splash Pages," to the present. Reena Jana and I were the first two paid writers (poached from Wired!), when Alex Galloway was running "content," which at that time meant programming and editorial--though Rhizome was declaratively non-editorial, so they just commissioned book & exhibition reviews, and some interviews from us that were fed into the RAW stream and included in the Digest as Features. Oy vey, I can still remember the cross-eyed weekly ritual of trying to untangle parallel conversations to reassemble them into a coherent thread for the Digest, when I was editing it--and the race to get it out by noon one day each week!!
I've seen Rhizome go through so many changes, and I've been a part of the back channel conversations on years of them, including huge ones that we decided not to go through with. I have to say that it's always hard to serve a membership-based organization, which is what Rhizome has always thought of itself as. But I can say that every change in content or form has been discussed critically, at length, and typically not without a degree of passion.
I am also biting my tongue because I *really* do not want to put words in any staff member's mouth (past or present), but I can say that I believe everyone who's ever worked there has taken their position as a labor of love, with users/reader/members/community (everyone has their favorite self-identification; semantics trolls please don't hate today!) in mind, and everyone has collaborated with the staff to bring a unique take on how best to serve you in the current creative and technological climate. For instance, I remember that my big objective coming in the door was wanting to change the mission statement to reflect not only net art and not only highly technological art, but also art that "reflects" on technology in a meaningful way. In fact, I think contemplating this change was very much a part of my conceptualizing Postinternet.
There is so much to say here, but I think I'd best sign off. This is not my soap box, and in some way, it feels weird to comment so much. I used to be a Superusing Megaposter, but as soon as I became Editor & Curator, I stepped back to focus on trying to facilitate and amplify other voices, which I do believe every Rhizome Editor has done in their own way.
I'll end with this, then. I'd be surprised if every reader, writer, or editor loved everything that ever appeared (structurally or content-wise) in their newspaper of choice. I'd be surprised if every curator or museumgoer loved every artwork shown (or every exhibition design decision) in their favorite museum. But it's the day we stop reading, stop going to look at art that disappoints me. It's the day Rhizome stops experimenting that scares me. And I wish them well on this new experiment.
Conference Report: NET.ART (SECOND EPOCH)
Thank you for these points of clarification. I actually tried to convey (and forgive me if I failed) that your presentation was unique in identifying multiple generations of networked artists, and I particularly liked the way you talked about artists working before the internet in ways that anticipated network culture.
You also made that great point (via Hal Foster) about the ways in which critics' work is influenced by what is/ was happening at the moment they entered the art world. I admire how you helped pioneer new media criticism and yet have continued to stay on the pulse of new work. This is what I had in mind when recalling your point about your relationship to a previous generation of net-dot-artists, versus the artists of the era Inclusiva was calling the "second epoch." I just really liked the way you fleshed out more than two epochs and I wanted to highlight your catalyzing role in the net-dot-art scene, in particular.
In my own presentation, my intent absolutely was not to dismiss any previous artists, movements, practices, etc. It was simply to flesh-out one niche of new media art practice. In fact, I really liked the pointed questions that the audience asked afterwards, because it helped us have a really meaningful discussion about the problematic relationship of pro surfer work to art historical discourse, and my calls to action revolved around getting those artists to participate in learning about their own pre-histories and writing historiographies that situate their own trajectories on their own terms.
So I don't think we're in disagreement. But I appreciate your call to fine-tune my articulation of these scenarios.
Go Ahead, Touch Her
Go Ahead, Touch Her
I'm sorry that you found my article objectionable. I didn't intend to make the implications you suggest, but I believe your response cuts to the most interesting aspect of Laric's piece, which is the effect of remixing.
For those who care to review the lyrics to this song, they are here:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/mariahcarey/touchmybody.html
They include the refrain:
Touch my body
Put me on the floor
Wrestle me around
Play with me some more
Touch my body
Throw me on the bed
So, in fact, I do think that Carey's lyrics (and video) invite sexual fantasy, but my article doesn't say that she is asking to be violated, it says that she's asking to be remixed. Of course, the slippage between the two that you identify is what's so interesting.
In an interview with Laric, he told me that he noticed that the video takes-on an increased sexual tone when all but Carey is masked out. He was interested in how this first-person invitation to "touch my body" could be construed as an invitation to remix the visage of her body (and/or the voice emitted from it), particularly given (a) the implicit link to digital culture embodied by both the lyrics and video, and (b) the fact that the remix is now such an important part of the media ecology of pop culture.
In the last 25+ years of pop music, lining-up celebrity remixes and making singles remix-ready has been an important part of the production cycle, often preceding the release of the original recording. Almost all historical accounts of Madonna's rise to fame cite her relationship with DJs and openness to remixing as a key factor in her success. So while you may see the remix as a violent act, clearly those participating in this industry see it as an imperative.
Discussions of why a remix is or isn't violent are interesting, as they get to questions of the status of the digital reproduction. Are we remixing a person or "just" her image, and what's the difference when thinking about how a person's identity--particularly a famous person's identity--hinges upon their image? Carey's image was already manipulated before it came to us. In the interview with Laric, he pointed to a segment in the original video in which the shape of a cup becomes distorted as a result of distorting the footage to make the singer standing behind the cup appear slimmer. So this is already not her. If you listen closely, I believe there is also a question as to whether all of the voiced parts of the song are her, so the audio issue adds another layer to the phenomenological question of the brute force of the remix.
These issues of the import of the remix, the relationship to broader pop culture (rather than an insular art world), collective authorship, and the nature of Carey's invitation are what I hoped to address in this article.