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.
From Alpha to Omega
Artists are often credited with inventing new languages, but of course the building blocks of these code hacks, if you will, are the letters of the alphabet. A new online exhibition entitled "Abecedarium:NYC" takes the Modern English alphabet as its starting point. Curated by Susan Agliata and Lynne Sachs and appropriately hosted by the New York Public Library, that longstanding database of the alphanumeric, the show invited artists to imagine readings of the city of New York and its boroughs, based on their interpretation of a word beginning with their assigned letter. The twenty-six final pieces construct overlapping narratives about the city and its denizens, as portrayed in interactive maps, videos, and audio works. Each entry takes a different approach as to the genre of story told, ranging from noirish mysteries to nonfiction historiographies to humorous character studies. Start with your favorite letter and see if you're able to resist the other twenty-five. - Marisa Olson
Net-Work
What is new media without networks? Better yet...What are networks? Academics and technologists are fond of saying that "we now live in a network culture," meaning in part that whether they are manifested online or offline, our social relationships, the objects we make, and our worldviews are inherently informed by the conditions of life in the era of the internet. New media art would then certainly fall under this gestalt, as it not only comes out of this era, often explicitly addressing it, but it is also a social movement or art community influenced by the merger of computer networks and social networks. This is the precise point of entry for an exhibition entitled "New Media - New Networks," at the Galzenica Gallery in Velika Gorica (formerly Zagreb), which bills itself as "the first retrospective dedicated to the new media art and culture in Croatia." Unlike most gallery exhibitions, the curators aspired to keep the presentation of art works to a minimum. Instead, the show is truly a context for the production of timelines, the writing of important timelines, and the nurturing of relationships revolving around the history of networks in this region. Thus, included in the checklist are defunct Bulletin Board Systems, DIY zines, documentation of art festivals, and even the archives of a university department's research efforts. The result of this unique initiative is a heretofore unseen picture of art initiatives and collaboration in an area often painted as "off the grid" of the contemporary art world, but obviously deeply engaged in contemporary practice. As a starting point for those outside Hrvatska, visit the gallery's timeline and link collection. - Marisa Olson
Modern Nomad
Iran-based American artist Kristen Alvanson's work often deals with historical conjurings, mythologies, and the aesthetics of speculation. Her drawings, installations, locative media projects, and animations often finely tweak the everyday accoutrements of these subjects, ranging from iconographic imagery to talismans to what look like ancient documents. Her projects excavate the darkly magical sensation of cultural narratives shrouded in mystery by western oppression or negligence, and all of these influences and inquiries are woven into her newest work on textiles, women, and the Middle East. In a show at Tehran's Azad Gallery, entitled "nonad (of nines and nomads)," the artist will present fabricated artifacts, such as nine nomadic fabric chadors (Persian veils), nine drawings steeped in the visual tropes of traditional Islamic art, and an animation called ninefold, which use the folding of fabric as a metaphor in the exploration of the Middle Eastern occult's embrace of the number nine as "the number of unceasing collectivity--worlds created through the hidden bonds of spells and collective tides." The project is part of Alvanson's ongoing Cosmic Drapery Project, which explores "the enigma of the Middle East through its drapery," a history she says "includes clashes and secret dialogues between state and nomad art, their folk beliefs, textiles and modes of creativity." In a way, the artist's projects use newer media to recite narratives and traditions in which history begs for repetition. - Marisa Olson
Image Credit: Kristen Alvanson, Two nomadic fabric chadors - blue (2007) and pewter (2008)
Breaking the Rules
For an invention meant to help us express ourselves, language sure comes with a lot of rules. To some, this is an exciting artistic challenge, while to others this is a barrier to the full expression of an identity that may no more adhere to a culture's norms than it does to the grammar of the mother tongue that culture gave her. This quandary has led many media studies scholars to take an interest in the relationship between natural languages and computer languages, between social codes and computer codes. A new online exhibition, entitled "You Own Me Now Until You Forget About Me," traces these issues and adds to the grist questions about the ownership of language (from authorship to identification with a lexicon to branded alignment with various software platforms, etc) and the looming potential of languages to die. Enveloped within these issues is an aspiration to study and encourage human interaction, and to preserve the traces of these conversations. The show includes work by Karl Heinz Jeron & Valie Djordjevic; Martin Wattenberg & Marek Walczak; Codemanipulator; J�rg Piringer; carlos katastrofsky; Mary-Anne Breeze (a.k.a. mez); and Christina Goestl. Some of these contributions are classic net art pieces already experiencing the interestingly adverse effects of time on web-based media, but all of them are important contributions to this discussion of communication. Surf them for yourself and then add to the show, if you'd like. That's right! Curators CONT3XT.NET have adopted an open curatorial model that allows visitors to chime in and widen the vocabulary used "in the exploration of our language with its arbitrary systems and rules, its corresponding functions within society, as well as with its absurdities and restrictions for the individual." The show will also be installed at the Museum of Modern Art ...
Speaking in Code
Codemanipulator is a Polish artist whose work revolves entirely around code and the pleasurable binary between the latter as text versus its ability to constitute an image. He makes "coded paintings," interactive installations, and data visualizations that address such topics as architecture, urban planning, and that public space we call the internet. While these themes coalesce around physical models, the work is intended to inquire about the impacts of seemingly immaterial code on creativity and social interaction. In a broader sense, this entails a consideration of the ways in which binary models of thought have further polarized or developed, following the emergence of network culture. For his show at Krakow's Foto-Medium-Art Gallery, entitled "I am code" (open May 9-June 20, 2008), Codemanipulator will present "CodePainting, CodePoetry, CodeMovies, CodeSculpture, CodeArchitecture...CodeEverything." That is, he takes the same sequence of code and explores how different machines and systems--from web browsers to video processors--interpret it differently, manifesting in a variety of forms. Judging from the gallery's photos of the exhibition's opening, the most popular manifestation was an installation of printed tiles resembling large-scale magnetic poetry. Despite the simplicity of these shingles laid out on a table, it was the ability to interact with and manipulate the code--physically and syntactically--that made it so popular. Take this as a reminder of the ongoing importance of playing language games. - Marisa Olson
Image Credit: Codemanipulator, Codemanipulator's Toybox, 2007
