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.
Environment of deception and uncertainty
Dislocation, by Alex Davies, attempts to create a mixed reality environment in which the virtual world inhabits the viewers' physical reality. The exhibition room is empty, apart from four small inset screens. Concealed from the visitors, a camera is embedded in the rear wall, and an array of eight speakers is mounted within the walls around the floor of the room.
Visitors need to approach the monitors closely to see what they are showing. After a moment they realise that what they see is their own back (recorded by the hidden camera), and those of the neighbours peering at the adjacent monitors. After a while, the screen flickers slightly, as if there is a minor disruption in transmission, and people -- pre-recorded and superimposed onto the live image -- enter the gallery, one can even hear their movements within the room. It is easy to mistake to pre-recorded images as people in the room with you at the same time.
View of live phantom/human image composite via portal and Production Still -- Phantom Chroma Key Shoot
Apparently, a significant proportion of gallery visitors do a "double take" at this moment, looking in the screens, turning around to clarify their reference of reality and then returning their gaze to the portals to verify what they think they perceived.
Other work by Alex Davies: drift, a sightseeing telescope allowing the viewer to elastically manipulate time and space.
One Hundred and Four Thousand
Call for Voice-Mail Contributions
One Hundred and Four Thousand :: Through the evocative memorials at Forest Hills, people from the past "speak" to us about their relationships and lives. Halsey Burgund uses 21st century technology to add a new layer of expression to this landscape. His sound collage combines music with fragments of conversation he collected during interviews at Forest Hills.
You can download the entire piece to your computer and iPod or listen online: I - Remembering the Dead [mp3 - 5:56] II - Life to Grow [mp3 - 2:16] III - I Just Want to Be Recycled [mp3 - 3:12] IV - How Infinite Memories Can Be [mp3 - 9:18] V - The Stately Oak and the Predatory Owl [mp3 - 4:23]
You can alternatively listen via cell phone by calling 617.344.6796; this system will also collect voice-mail contributions, which the artist will selectively incorporate into the piece on an ongoing basis.
"I wanted to explore the cemetery's contemplative nature as well as the relationships that various cemetery 'dwellers' have to their surroundings. My intent was to create music that evokes my own personal feelings about spending time within the borders of Forest Hills through the words and voices of other cemetery dwellers.
Over the course of several months in early spring, I interviewed 26 people in the cemetery, both visitors and employees. I used these recorded interviews in tandem with traditional instruments. For listeners, the music and voices will mix with the ambient sounds, smells and sights they encounter as they make their way through the cemetery on paths of their choosing." -- Halsey Burgund
[research pranks]
monochrom interview // monochrom featured in V. Vale's RE/Search "Pranks 2":
V. Vale's RE/Search Publications is just about to release "Pranks 2", the follow-up to their legendary "Pranks" book (published 1988). The articles and inteviews in "Pranks 2" feature Jihad Jerry, Jello Biafra, Al Jourgensen, Bambi Lake, The Yes Men, The Suicide Club, The Cacophony Society, Reverend Al, Julia Solis, Billboard Liberation Front, Marc Powell, Frank Discussion, Paul Krassner, Margaret Cho, John Waters, Ron English, Joey Skaggs, Survival Research Labs, Lydia Lunch, Monte Cazazza and (and we are very pround about that) monochrom.
Link
Rooftop Media: Oh the Weight of it All -- August 25, 7:30PM - 10:00PM
Brooklyn Misc.

Ian Epps, Darrin Martin, Shana Moulton, Blithe Riley, Eva Teppe, and JD Walsh present a series of looping video and sound works designed specifically for rooftop installation. Centered on the theme "gravity," the works collectively comment on the physical and psychological impact this invisible force has on human navigation and perception.
Sound artist Ian Epps premieres his new sound sculpture, Untitled in which balloon-like `Ashrams' float suspended in the air. Headphones link the listener to the object broadcasting Epps's new original compositions. The piece is both meditative and metaphorical evoking an illustrative study of an individual's personal sanctuary, dream-like states of emotional release, and the conflict of being firmly planted to the ground.
Darrin Martin's new work was initially inspired by a book-on-tape version of James Gleick's Isaac Newton bought at a truck stop. His video Sensorial Principia, "celebrates the specialization of knowledge through the rubbing of an iconic pinnacle of scientific achievement against the artistic ambivalence of the human body." Martin's work questions the access points, as well as the goals of the producers and distributors of human knowledge.
Shana Moulton's video Inside the Mountain Where Everything is Upside-Down presents an interior space that resembles a familiar domestic setting but exhibits physical properties that defy the laws of nature. Household rituals meant to reduce stress trigger a disruption in the space-time continuum, causing objects in the room to have supernatural properties. The bewildered protagonist unsuccessfully attempts to restore natural order to the space until she accepts its irrational logic.
Blithe Riley's site-specific video projection uses looping repetition to highlight the labor of repetitive action. In Wat(h)er Fall, a performer moves through an old twenty-foot metal frame defunct water tower ...
[Eddo Stern]
"Carnivore's Cathedral: Whose Child is this?," a neo-Christian Karaoke machine. Video.
"Fort Paladin: America's Army." Video. Projects by Eddo Stern.
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.