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.
video games and narrative?
Tomorrow, a new kind of art exhibition is going to open in Toronto: Artcade. This will mark the culmination of years of activisim on the part of people like Toby Grindley (owner of Microplay) and 12 other Greater Toronto artists. Together, this group has strived to represent video games as not "inferior to film and literature." The arts on show is inspired by the world of video games. Objects like the "1 UP" mushroom in Super Mario Brothers that spits spores and lights up are said to be the main attractions. While Grindley and the other artists agree that video games have not been around as long as other art (their examples are "literature" and film) they still have "credibility" in their own way. While those involved with this exhibition (taking place at Grindley's store in Toronto) maintain, on the one hand, that video games offer a new kind of window on the art world, while on the other hand explain that games are just "a different way to experience a story." So, in this realm, narrative still plays an important part. While E.A. asked "can computers make you cry," this lot explain that "good video games tell a story, just like movies and books." The problem with the industry is that it is driven by profit-making (monetizing) and thus is "less creative at storytelling and more driven by profit." I wonder now if the question changes from choosing between interaction or immersion to story or money?
For further information about the games exhibition and samples of art check out: http://www.wire-fu.com/artcade/
The Cellular Noise-Maker
The roadside environment - where the tarmac stops and the grass embankment begins - is full of the detritus of city commuters, and rich in plant and animal life thriving in the nitrogenous air.
The cellular noise-maker is one of the noise farming devices that capture the ethereal turbulence of these roadside ecosystems, transmit these samples in data streams, or display them in light patterns.
The portable steel box is comprised of a fluorescent display surrounded by aluminium flexible flaps. It can be carried around, keeping the house's occupants company. As data is received by the device from other noise farming devices, it is stored in its memory and shown as an intricate pattern of dots on the central display.
When its memory is full, the noise-maker uses its stored data patterns as a score to generate a sound burst of many simultaneous clicking noises by using electromagnets to rapidly move the flaps on its surface. The clicking noise ends in a sharp FM radio pulse which is a highly compressed data burst of all its memory contents. Following this, the memory is wiped and the process starts again.
Video of the cellular moise-maker in noisy action.
Part of the Edge Town Project by Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen.
The Upgrade! Johannesburg proudly presents: Turbulence.org + Gavin Jantjes
Hosted by Wits Digital Arts, University of the Witwatersrand
Please circulate widely! This is an amazing opportunity for South Africans to learn about online contemporary art from two of its ongoing pioneers and most noteworthy supporters of commissioned work. Live and in person!
The Upgrade! Johannesburg and Wits Digital Arts proudly present: Turbulence.org + Gavin Jantjes
Friday 7 April, 3-5PM at the Digital Convent, WSOA
supported by The Trinity Session
Visiting from the US, Turbulence.org is an internationally renowned net.art commissioning organization - a continuing pioneer in funding contemporary conceptual artists working with networked media. For years, Turbulence.org has been commissioning international online art, including Johannesburg artists Nathaniel Stern and Marcus Neustetter in 2005.
Turbulence is co-directed by Helen Thorington (founder of New Radio and Performing Arts, Turbulence's mother organization) and Jo-Anne Green (a Wits alumnus!). The two will be presenting a very biased history of web-based artwork, showing projects they have commissioned as well as some of their own, and will then be taking questions.
No knowledge of web technology necessary!
Open to all!
more information:
http://atjoburg.net/upgrade/
http://turbulence.org/
http://new-radio.org/helen
http://new-radio.org/jo
Convent Seminar Room, WSOA, University of the Witwatersrand Free parking available in front of the Convent at WSOA. For directions go to http://www.wits.ac.za/artworks/contact/map.htm
BONUS:
Gavin Jantjes will also be briefly presenting TRANS CAPE at The Upgrade! in order to court interested artists!
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Next Level - Art, Games & Reality exhibition
Last week, i spent an hour at the Next Level - Art, Games & Reality exhibition at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam. [...]
I had blogged but never seen any work by Brody Condon before. His Karma Physics< Elvis was my absolute favourite [....] all those pink, white and blue Elvis(es) softly dancing and flying in silence on the wall turned out to be one of the most mesmerizing pieces of art i had seen for a long time. < />
The other infinite self generated projection based on a game mod of Unreal 2003 there was KarmaPhysics < Ramdass, but i didn't find it as hypnotising as the Elvis one. Ram Dass, an early advocate of lsd. somehow his head caught on fire(image)< />
Lamborghini Diabolo is based on the Need for Speed games. The life size 1985 Lamborghini model is made out of branches casted in polyuethane.
His Suicide Solution is an investigation into the morphology of death in game. It's a documentation collected over the last year of committing suicide in over 50 first and third person shooter games. Each time he shows the moment at which the player gets hit. I found it a bit depressing, though the other visitors laughed a lot. The title of the work refers to the song of the same title by Ozzie Osbourne, who in 1984 was accused of being responsible for the suicide of an American teenager.
The Dutch participants developed new works especially for this exhibition.
Joes Koppers developed a space in which the visitor can be part of an interactive game. Your entry in the room of the "Touch Me" installation is recorded and shown on the screen with a big arrow above you head that invites other visitors to blast you, which they never miss to do. Koppers plays with the fact that the majority of video games revolve around destroying as much as possible in order to achieve a goal. By allowing 'real' people to enter the reality of the game, he mixes our reality with the fiction of the game and demonstrates that the boundaries are becoming increasingly vague, especially seeing as games are becoming an increasingly important factor in our society.
Other works:
- Cargo Geert by Jan Mulder shows the vacuity of driving a car.
- Jan Van Nuenen's Warning Petrol Pipeline is a b&w; video animation depicting a futuristic industrialized world.
- Chance Encounter, by Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukacs (authors of ...
TOPLAP
(Temporary|Transnational|Terrestrial|Transdimensional) Organisation for the (Promotion|Proliferation|Permanence|Purity) of Live (Algorithm|Audio|Art|Artistic) Programming
TOPLAP is a livecoding audio-visual performance group.
Check their wiki for FAQs to find out such illuminating questions as:
What's the difference between generative music and live coding?
DEFN 1 Generative music is created from some algorithm, usually running autonomously. There may be controls (parameters/arguments) to this process but the algorithm itself is fixed. Live coding is a way to substantially modify the actual nature of that algorithm, even as it calculates, in a realtime performance or interactive composition setting.
DEFN 2 They are kind of opposites.
Generative music is about sowing seeds, comparable with genetic modification; altering DNA, putting the DNA in eggs, and watching it grow to see/hear the effects. In contrast, live coding is more about piecing animals together from scratch in the womb, splicing different live animals together, modifying their DNA while they're still growing, then experimenting with different ways of slaughtering them to get the best audio/visual/aromatic effects.
Note the above contains bold use of metaphor, TOPLAP do not condone any such activities on real life-forms (computer processes are not known to experience pain, and don't have faces).
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.