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.
SITELINES 06
AUDIO BALLERINAS
AUDIO BALLERINAS by Benoît Maubrey and Die Audio Gruppe at SITELINES 06, May 8 through 13, 2:30 pm; Venue: Elevated Acre at 55 Water Street, New York City; Admission: free.
Benoît Maubrey is the founder and director of DIE AUDIO GRUPPE a Berlin-based performance group that build and perform with electroacoustic ('sounding') clothes. Basically these are electro-acoustic clothes, costumes and uniforms (equipped with batteries, amplifiers and loudspeakers) that create sounds by interacting with their environment. The Audio Gruppe's work is essentially site-specific. Usually the electronics are adapted into entirely a new "audio uniform" or "sonic costume" that reflect a local theme (AUDIO HERD, AUDIO CYCLISTS, AUDIO STEELWORKER, VIDEO PEACOCKS, AUDIO VACUUM CLEANERS) or customs and traditions (AUDIO GEISHAS/Japan, AUDIO CYCLISTS/France, AUDIO HANBOK/Korea).
The AUDIO BALLERINAS, initially conceived in 1990 for the festival LES ARTS AU SOLEIL in France where they used solar cells to power their Audio Tutus, have since developed a variety of choreographies using electronic instruments (digital samplers, light sensors, contact microphones, music sticks, and radio receivers) that allow them to work with the sounds, surfaces, electro-magnetic waves and physical topography of the space around them. The AUDIO BALLERINAS will be presenting 3 site-specifically adapted choreographies: the LINE (contact microphones and music sticks), PEEPERS (light-to-frequency sensors), and YAMAHA (movement sensors that trigger digital sounds). Alternative: APPLE RADIOS (solar cells and white noise).
Benoît Maubrey was born of French parents in 1952 in Washington D.C. and graduated from Georgetown University in 1975. After working as a writer and painter and jobbing as hotel concierge in Bordeaux, Paris, New York and Washington DC, he moved to West Berlin in 1979 where he starting building Audio Clothes in 1982. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1992 he moved to the village ...
RFID Popularity Contest
Even if everything in a gallery is there to be looked at, some projects tend to gather more eyes. A new project, called 'Attention Please!' is the vehicle for artist Sara Smith's research into how audiences engage with works of art, and how technology might shift these personal practices. Together with tech partner Kisky Netmedia, Smith has established an 'attention seeking video installation,' in which gallery-goers can swipe an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) card to express interest in a video. When one video becomes most popular, the others exhibit jealous behavior, in hopes of stealing attention from their co-competitors. The project is funded by Liverpool's FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), who has a special initiative to support the development of exhibition technologies. 'Attention Please!' will be on view there, on May 3rd and 4th, but in the mean time the group is putting out a call for active participants. If you're in the area, you too can swipe in support of your attention span, putting your consumption on display. - Marisa Olson
Peter Dykhuis, Visual Artist
Maps, flags and state symbols abound in Peter Dykhuis's art: 'You Are Here' superimposes a map of Halifax on envelopes; 'Radar Paintings' uses airport radar images; 'World View: The G7 Suite' encloses maps from each country within their respective flags. Dykhuis wrote to say this about his site: 'This site is an overview of artwork that explores the graphic, social and political contexts of maps and map-making in contemporary culture. Of major interest is the overlap between fixed, analog, paper-based maps and the fluid domain of digital mapping courtesy of satellite systems and 24/7 computer-based viewing.'
DATA Browser 03
Curating Immateriality
The third book in the DATA Browser series of critical texts that explore issues at the intersection of culture and technology has just been published. The site of curatorial production has been expanded to include the space of the Internet and the focus of curatorial attention has been extended from the object to processes to dynamic network systems. As a result, curatorial work has become more widely distributed between multiple agents, including technological networks and software. This upgraded 'operating system' of art presents new possibilities of online curating that is collective and distributed - even to the extreme of a self-organising system that curates itself. The curator is part of this entire system but not central to it. This book reflects on these changes and examines the work of the curator in relation to a wider socio political context articulated through two key issues: immateriality and network systems. It considers how the practice of curating has been transformed by distributed networks beyond the rhetoric of free software and open systems.
Contributors:
0100101110101101.ORG & [epidemiC] | Josephine Berry Slater | Geoff Cox |
Alexander R. Galloway & Eugene Thacker | Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin |
Beryl Graham | Eva Grubinger | Piotr Krajewski | Jacob Lillemose | low-fi |
Franziska Nori | Matteo Pasquinelli | Christiane Paul | Trebor Scholz |
Grzesiek Sedek | Tiziana Terranova | Marina Vishmidt
For more information see http://www.data-browser.net/03/
All texts released under a Creative Commons License 2006.
The DATA browser series presents critical texts that explore issues at the intersection of culture and technology. The editorial group are Geoff Cox, Joasia Krysa, Anya Lewin, Malcolm Miles, Mike Punt & Hugo de Rijke. This volume is produced in association with Arts Council England and University of Plymouth.
Guthrie Lonergan
Says Tom Moody:
Recommended: Guthrie Lonergan's 9 Short Music Videos.
Reminiscent of BEIGE's cheesy blue (green?) screen vids,
each is built around some corporate sound
(ringtone, Microsoft boot-up noise, DVD intro)
that craps up our daily lives. Also good:
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.