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.
Fresh NY at Threshold artspace
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Fresh NY
Alisa Andrasek, Michael Bell-Smith, Brody Condon, Brent Green, Tom Moody, Takeshi Murata, and Prema Murthy
Guest curated by Anne Barlow
Threshold artspace, Perth Concert Hall, Horsecross, Mill Street, Perth
Public preview 11am-9pm, Saturday 3 February 2007, Admission Free
Exhibition continues from 4 February 2007
Anne Barlow: Curator's Talk
11am, Wednesday 31 January 2007, Admission Free but ticketed
Off-site at Dundee Contemporary Arts, 152 Nethergate, Dundee
New York comes to Perth on Saturday 3 February 2007. The meeting point is Threshold artspace - the contemporary art gallery at the threshold of Perth Concert Hall. The occasion is Fresh NY - an exhibition which showcases seven of the most exciting young artists working with animation and digital media in the New York region - most of whose work is being seen in the UK for the first time. Fresh NY's guest curator is Anne Barlow, a Scot based in New York, previously at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and just appointed Executive Director of Art in General - one of New York's leading not-for profit arts organisations.
"Reflecting current tendencies in contemporary digital art", states Barlow, "Fresh NY includes an intriguing mix of projects, from beautifully crafted animations to hypnotic, computer-generated visuals, and work inspired by gaming culture".
"Fresh NY also adds a vibrant group of international work to Scotland's only permanent collection of digital art at the Threshold artspace, which I understand has acquired over 60 works in less than 2 years"
[...]
The public preview of Fresh NY also compliments Bang on a Can --New York's electric chamber ensemble who performs in the concert hall throughout the day including music by Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Brian Eno. After the day long public preview, the works featured in Fresh NY will become part of the Threshold artspace ...
Tagtracker
Tagtracker is software created by Someth;ng which runs on a mobile phone and allows datamatrix tags to link items tagged in the ‘real’ world with online resources such as websites, forums, weblogs, wiki’s etc.
The work has striking similarities to the Semapedia project but this is what datamatrix does best after all; linking ‘real’ place with ‘virtual’ space (object hyperlinking) and it’s difficult to tell which predates the other.
Unlike users of semapedia, who are encouraged to link things with reference information, here users are encouraged to mark their own territory with the tags, markers:
- ‘territory’ could be your office, your t-shirt, your business card, or anything physical.
- A ‘marker’ is a unique two-dimensional bitmap grid which associates with an online resource: a website, a forum, a weblog, a wiki, a corporate intranet, a sales catalogue, exhibition piece information.
Visitors to individuals territories, users of the tagtracker software, can photograph tags to connect to information online and find out more about the territory / item in the territory tagged:
The phone application turns a cameraphone into a ‘magic lens’ through which it can be used to locate, identify and connect to markers … The internet becomes a geographic, physical-world based resource. Discover communities local to your regular haunts, discover resources by taking a stroll, join in with groups you have physical contact with, email people you see in the street.
Note: Related work concerning object hyperlinking includes I can read you, Cemetry 2.0, Meghan Trainor’s RFID work, Moo-Pong: Kaleidoscope of Movie and Tagged the RFID exhibition at space.media.arts.
Professional Surfer
Hello,
We just launched a new online show called Professional Surfer, which explores web browsing as an art form. The show is part of Time Shares, our online exhibition series co-presented by the New Museum.
http://www.rhizome.org/events/timeshares/professionalsurfer.php
all best,
Lauren
Executive Director
Rhizome
Jillian Mcdonald and Carlo Zanni at artMovingProjects


We invite you to aMP artMovingProjects
166 N. 12th St, between Bedford and Berry Sts., Williamsburg (917-301-6680, 917-301-0306). Subway: L to Bedford Ave. Thu- Sun, 1pm - 6 pm www.artmovingprojects.com info@artmovingprojects.com
Jillian Mcdonald
January 27th 7-9pm through March 18th Opening Night Performance 8pm
Zombie Loop
2-channel video, 2006
My new body of work, Horror Cycle concentrates on the manufacturing of fear as entertainment that the horror film genre accomplishes. Unlike contemporary horror films, this work offers no extreme violence, little gore, no character development, and zero plot. These are stripped away in order to highlight the protagonists and their dilemmas.
The zombie, among other "undead" monsters, is the definitive horror creature thanks to its abject existence - robbed of identity, neither fully dead nor fully alive, neither clever nor resourceful, and driven only by its hunger for flesh. The central dilemma of the sub-genre of zombie films is that the survivor must outrun and therefore outlive the zombie. Victims turn into zombies, therefore to be caught and find oneself zombified is the most horrifying resolution. The sub-genre plots survivors on the move and ever vigilant, or temporarily holed-up and sleeping with one eye open. It is impossibly difficult to escape zombies, despite the fact that with little exception they move agonizingly slowly. Although it should be easy to escape them, the earliest victims are those paralyzed by their own fear.
Zombie Loop is a two-channel video in which projections on two opposing walls position the viewer in the center of a visual loop, wherein a gruesome zombie endlessly pursues a running survivor. On screen, I "play" both zombie and survivor. The video tracks are the same length. The zombie, prepared with professional make-up and filmed from the front stumbles, expressionless but threatening, towards its goal of catching the ...
Aram Bartholl
Tagging Interactive Paintings
Aram Bartholl, previously featured with his public installation SPEED and the "do it yourself set" First Person Shooter, created threeinteractive paintings "Static", "Dynamic" and "Centric". Each image shows an individual black and white pattern, handpainted with Edding on PVC foam board, which can be decoded by using a standard camera phone.
Each image shows an individual black and white pattern which has been painted manually with an edding 850. These patterns have been created by a special software on a computer. It is possible for any visitor to decode each "Semacode" by using a standard camera phone. Similar to the generic Barcodes the technology of Semacode makes it posssible to encode a specific amount of data within the pixel pattern. This string of data can be decoded from an image taken by the camera phone afterwards. The technology of Semacode is used in serveral industries for improved logistics. For the users it serves as a tool to get simple access to websites on a mobile phone. Equiped with the software the user navigates to websites by just taking a photo of a semacode which has the specific web address encoded.
[...]
A citation of Joseph Weizenbaum is encoded in the first image named "Static".
"Knowledge does NOT become unnecessary by the Internet!"
more works by Aram Bartholi [blogged on placeboKatz]
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.