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.
Modulobe: Free Software for Constructing Virtual Creatures
Modulobe, by Kouichirou Eto et al., is a free software tool for constructing virtual creatures.
[Sample creatures made with Modulobe.]
[....]
Pussy Weevil
Pussy Weevil is an individual software animated character that responds to the viewer's distance or proximity. Your position influences how it acts and behaves. The piece involves choreography in space and deals with subject / object relationships vis-a-vis the viewer. Pussy Weevil ignores you, outrageously derides you, tries to scare you but it runs away in fright if you get too close.
Pussy Weevil is a proto-Tex-Avery character, whose form is malleable and virtually indestructible. It mutates, splits, spits, and glitches; as an immediate object of a viewer's interventions, it never finds a middle ground between dark heckling and pitiful fear. Pussy Weevil lives in the zone of biologically hazardous materials - or maybe it's only a danger to itself. It might be just a sorrowful, botched genetic experiment that has about as much sense as a dull, reactive house pet. Pussy Weevil questions how digital characters can be affected by interactions in analog spaces and examines the relationship between the real and computer made worlds. Demo and Movie. By Marina Zurkow and Julian Bleecker.
Fire speaking to you
Firebirds is based on a scientific experiment from the Victorian area, in which Chichester Bell discovered that a membrane stretched over a gas flame produces audible vibrations in the flame, resulting in a kind of "flame loudspeaker." Gas flames, suitably modulated by electrical fields can be made to act as omnidirectional loudspeakers of surprising clarity and amplitude.
"It's a trick that every high school science teacher knows," said Paul DeMarinis. "But it's not commercially viable, so it became another piece of orphan technology."
Four oracular flames kept captive within birdcages recite speeches of Benito Mussolini, Franklin Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, accompanied by birdsongs. The audio filed are stored in CF-Ram as MO3 files. PIC microcontrollers activate solenoids, solid state relays, audio hardware and high voltage modulating circuits to coordinate the ignition and modulation of the flames.
An installation by Paul DeMarinis.
Katrina's Impact on the Arts
After reading S. Frederick Starr's NYTimes piece "A Sad Day, Too, for Architecture" in which he describes the flooding of New Orleans' Ninth Ward (I lived there once, back when it was gritty and dangerous...) and the destruction of 100's of vernacular houses (including his own), I found my thoughts straying from the thousands feared dead to other, cultural losses. Then I received this email from Tyler Green:
This is the first culture-specific Katrina fund I've found. I'm sure there will be more, but I wanted to share as soon as I heard about this one:
http://www.aam-us.org/aamlates
t/news/HurricaneHowToContribut e.cfm
[...]
Freshen Up
The Refresh! conference starting Sept 28 at Banff New Media Institute in Canada is an event “. . .on the Histories of Media Art and will discuss for the first time the history of media art within the interdisciplinary and intercultural contexts of the histories of art. Banff New Media Institute, the Database for Virtual Art, Leonardo/ISAST and UNESCO DigiArts are collaborating to produce the first international art history conference covering art and new media, art and technology, art-science interaction, and the history of media as pertinent to contemporary art.
