Marisa actively contributes to the field, writing for many major art publications, ranging from magazines & exhibition catalogs to academic journals and chapters in books on the history and theory of media art. She has served as Editor & Curator at Rhizome, the inaugural curator at Zero1, and Associate Director at SF Camerawork, whose Journal she edited. In 2013 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, Marisa has also curated programs at the Guggenheim, New Museum, SFMOMA, White Columns, and Artists Space. She has served on Advisory Boards for Ars Electronica, Transmediale, ISEA, the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, Creative Capital, EYEBEAM, the Getty Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kennedy Center, and the Tribeca Film Festival.
Marisa 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, Oberlin, VCU, UC-Boulder's Brakhage Symposium, Penn State, Visiting Faculty at Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, and Visiting Faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Ox-Bow program. She previously taught at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts' new media graduate program and was Assistant Professor of New Media at SUNY-Purchase's School of Film & Media Studies. She is currently Visiting Critic at Brown University.
Saddle-Stitched
Way back before most people had even heard of new media art, one publication (a classy zine, really) was charting the rise of the field. Intelligent Agent was founded in 1996, still the early days of the net for all intensive purposes, by a smart German woman named Dr. Christiane Paul-- she'd later go on to become new media curator at the Whitney. Like many such DIY ventures, the publication has gone through a series of phase changes, from print to online, to hiatus, and back. Now edited by artist and media scholar Patrick Lichty, under Paul's guidance as publisher, the venerable magazine is available in both print and PDF formats. It continues to present the front wave of art and theory, and the most recent issue, which is built around the catalog for the "Social Fabrics" exhibition curated by Lichty and Susan Ryan, is no exception. While big fashion magazines produce their fattest ad-driven issues during the summer months, IA's latest free PDF will give readers a chance to see projects by a handful of forward-thinking artist/designers who not only design wearable art that marries textiles and technology, but also push fashion from the realm of pop culture into deeper social engagement. The resulting portfolios, interviews, and essays offer critical insight into the work and, in keeping with the fashion mag analogy, posit trend alerts for the future of media art. - Marisa Olson
Well-Written Pictures
Chris Ashley's HTML drawings are tightly-executed formal expressions that demonstrate the beautiful things that can be made with code. Drawing on simple elements such as 90-degree angles, shadows, and gradients, Ashley writes strings of code that appear to viewers as solid images. In fact, the often maze-like circuits that snake around in these images might read as optical illusions or even futile labyrinths if one tries to see each piece's components as anything other than part of a cohesive whole. While they initially read as very formal and perhaps even rigid, seeing the HTML drawings in relation to Ashley's paintings and watercolor drawings allows viewers to realize the sense of play that can emerge from rule-based work. In fact, Ashley very precisely pushes the envelope in what might be considered coloring between the lines. The artist posts these images to his blog and has managed to overcome the frequent challenge of translating digital works into the physical realm and shows his drawings on paper and glass in galleries. At the moment, his work can be seen at San Francisco's David Cunningham Projects. - Marisa Olson
Image: Chris Ashley, La Passeggiata, 20080809, HTML, 350 x 390 pixels
Ready and Able Art
The current exhibition at Seoul's Total Museum of Contemporary Art is a challenging one, not so much because the art is complex (though it's certainly dynamic) but because curator Byeong Sam Jeon's explicit goal is to change people's minds. "thisAbility vs. Disability" is a group show of ten projects by Korean and international artists that explore questions of human functioning and capability by addressing the senses. The show is motivated by a desire to "invite a reappraisal of disability" and assert that what many often call "'disability' is but a difference, not a defect." Invited artists Mika Fukumori; Haru Ji & Graham Wakefield; Jae Min Lee; Mian Sheng Lim (Leon); Haemin Kim; Kichul Kim; Pauline Oliveros, Leaf Miller, Zevin Polzin, & Zane Van Dusen; David Parker; Jin Wan Park & Jae Joong Lee; David Parker and Dmitry Strakovsky have created interactive works that reprogram the typical experience of an artwork, with hands seeing paintings, Braille emitting sound, one's touch generating light, and a harmonic bell that musically interprets the listener's heartbeat. Many Korean artists have been early adopters of new media and have actively pursued a relationship to science and technology in their work, but Jeon worries that many of the major exhibitions devoted to this work "have focused only on aesthetic aspects, or the novelty of the genre itself," rather than addressing bigger social and political issues. His hope, with this exhibition, is that "These artworks can spark revelations that break social prejudice and affirm difference." - Marisa Olson
Image: Haemin Kim, dot . a scene = sin? at the sea _ tactuaL [si:gak] series #2, 2008
Walk This Way
Collaborators Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller make work that combines cinema, sound, pop culture, and the suspension of disbelief. Their sound and video walks and installations of multiple media have gained widespread international attention, in part for their ability to very closely engage individual viewers on a psychological level, and largely thanks to their command of genre conventions designed to illicit an emotional response. On view through September 28th at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery, in conjunction with the Edinburgh Art Festival, is a major survey of their work, including five pieces made since 1995 and a new project. Each of these works revolve around a viewer being more than a viewer. That is, they entice visitors to the gallery to enter a space, engaging not only with objects and sights (in a highly choreographed manner), but also with sounds and other conditions that create a unique, if sometimes tense, relationship between reality and the sensorium of the participant. While these works often involve heavy equipment (in the case of one installation, even robotics) and people taking technology into their own hands, Miller has said that the experientially-activated pieces are only as interactive as a painting or film. Instead, the duo emphasize the scripted nature of the interactions on which their pieces turn, likening them to physical cinema. If you're in the region, passing through the layers of meaning and perception created by Cardiff and Miller is highly recommended. - Marisa Olson
Image credit: The Killing Machine (2007), Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Materials: Mixed media, sound, pneumatics, robotics
Choosy Moms Choose GIF
It's no secret that the Rhizome staff loves animated gifs. The best to roll through our feed readers are often reblogged to our front page, and in 2005 we presented The GIF Show, an exhibition of 12 artists using animated gifs to make new work. When we heard about the upcoming "Graphics Interchange Format" exhibition, we knew we had to share the news. Curated by Laurel Ptak, keeper of the popular I Heart Photograph blog, the show at emerging Brooklyn art space Bond Street Gallery features 67 animated gifs made by 26 artists, including Rhizome's own staff writer Tyler Coburn, Petra Cortright, C. Coy, Ilia Ovechkin, M. River, Trevor Shimizu, Jo-ey Tang, Anne De Vries, and Damon Zucconi. Some of the artists are among the net's gif stars and others made their first gifs for the show--they were all commissioned on three days' notice by Ptak and are being sold in unlimited editions (accompanied by a personalized note from the artist) for $20, instigating "gif shop" puns across the net art blogosphere. The curator promises a show that will demonstrate the diversity of what this beloved file format has come to prove capable of since its inception by CompuServe in 1987. Nonetheless, as a show nestled within a group show of group photo shows, called "Young Curators, New Ideas," the artists were encouraged to use photographic media and the resultant works are poised to trigger references to the history of lens-based practices and proto-filmic experimental cell animation. Either that or they will just flicker their way into your hearts as they clearly have ours. - Marisa Olson
Image: M. River, Safarirafas, 2008
