Solo Show at Bard CCS plus ISCP

Gene McHugh has curated a solo exhibition of my work at Bard CCS. Entitled, Marisa Olson: Noise Pollution, the show is up through May 24th. You can see images, read the curatorial statement and an interview between myself and David Horvitz, and download ASDF's catalogue, right here.

The work revolves largely around the pollution that piles up as a result of upgrade culture. Along the same lines, I'll be showing a new sculpture (a rocket-like stack of gold tv's), entitled The Terrestrial Race in "Financial District," an exhibition at ISCP curated by Miguel Amado and opening May 8th. Here I'm interested in the ways in which international governments are competing with each other by forcing their citizens to upgrade the terrestrial broadcast signal (and thus their tv's and other gear), in a way that I think mirrors the space race.

Feb-March

Hiya! Here's a roundup of stuff happening in the next few months...

I'm currently in LA to sit on the curatorial committee for the Beall Center for Art & Technology. I'm sticking around for CAA, so if you're reading and you're around, let me know!

On February 26th, the Akademie der Kunste, Berlin, opens Recycling_Sampling_Jamming, where curator Sabine Himmelsbach will present my work.

I'll show a new piece called Performed Listening (Boomerang) in The Real Thing, opening February 27 at MU, Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The show is curated by VVORK and revolves around the ideas about representation laid out in the great Henry James short story (1892) of the same name. It includes some of my favorite artists, like Cory Arcangel, John Baldessari, Pierre Bismuth, Claude Closky, Aleksandra Domanović, Claire Fontaine, Gelitin, Matthieu Laurette, Seth Price, Dexter Sinister, Lawrence Weiner, and others.

From March 1-7, I'll be in Buenos Aires, where I'm speaking at the NET.ART (SECOND EPOCH) conference at the Centro Cultural de España.

From March 14-15, I'll be in Boulder, CO, at the 2009 Brakhage Symposium, where Steve Seid has asked me to give a "semi-academic, semi-performative" lecture in connection with a screening he's organized around the subject of weirdness with some great artists: Brian Bress, Ryan Trecartin, Desiree Holman, Mike Kelley/Paul McCarthy, Shana Moulton, Half-Lifers, Ben Coonley, eteam, and others.

On March 17, I'll wear green to my talk at City College of NY.

On March 19, Michael Mandiberg and I will go down to Philadelphia's Moore College of Art to talk about our solo & collaborative work.

On March 21st I'm organizing a panel at the New Museum, as part of Rhizome's New Silent Series, that revolves around Experimental Geography, the ICI exhibition and Melville House book curated & edited by Nato Thompson. Mr Thompson, Lize Mogel, and Damon Rich will sit on the panel and discuss the creative use of landscape hacking, cartography, locative media, and radical urbanism as a means of engaging with the politics of contested spaces.

On March 30th 26th, I'll give a visiting artist talk at Yale University.

Moving into April, on the 2nd I'll give a talk in Provo, Utah, at the Sego Art Center, in connection with the exhibition Forms of Melancholy, curated by my Nasty Nets colleague C. Coy.

Finally, Brett Kashmere has included my work in a screening called "Saturn Returns" at the Images Festival in Toronto April 2-11. He says, "the program focuses on artists who grew up during the 80s, and whose work utilizes music in a central way." That's me! The screening's organized in connection with the launch of a new journal he's editing, called INCITE! Journal of Experimental Media & Radical Aesthetics.

That's it. Email me if you'd like more info on any of these events.

Sundance Film Festival

Nasty Nets is having an installation at the Sundance Film Festival called "endless pot of gold cd-rs" and we're doing a night of performance there on January 17th, called "Night of a Thousand Megabytes." More details.

I'll also be sitting on an artist panel at Sundance, chaired by Creative Capital director Ruby Lerner, at noon on Friday, January 16th.

Speaking of fun things happening in Utah at that time, Nasty Nets member C. Coy is curating a show at the Sego Art Center, called "Forms of Melancholy" that includes a bunch of awesome net artists. I'll be writing a catalogue essay for that and will post it here with more info in a bit.

Meanwhile, happy new year to everyone! I'm looking forward to some fun stuff in 2009 including a solo show at the Bard CCS and a performance run at PS122. More to come!

La Superette Performance

Every December, a group of artists puts on an incredibly fun event in NYC, called La Superette. It's more or less an ad hoc holiday craft shop which has grown into a platform for awesome performances/ installations and a place to buy really awesome art on the cheap. This year, my friends Tali and Kyle, of LoVid (two of the event's main organizers) asked me to perform in the rad lineup. I'm going to do something low-key and fun at 5pm on Sat, Dec 13th. (The day after the Craft Hackers panel!) It's going to be one of my slide-lecture style performances and the theme will be "how to stay calm." Let's just say I've been watching a lot of meditation videos, online, and I'm ready to give some unsolicited advice... Come by if you can. La Superette is not to be missed.

Craft Hackers Panel Discussion

Friday, December 12th at 7:30pm
at the New Museum
235 Bowery, NYC, 10001
Tickets

Craft Hackers is a panel discussion among artists who use crafting techniques to explore high-tech culture and the relationship between needlework and computer programming. Panelists include Cat Mazza, who translates moving images into stills knit in yarn; Christy Matson, who uses Jacquard Looms (some of the earliest computers) to knit landscape images from computer games; Ben Fino-Radin, whose witty needlepoint sculptures translate the World Wide Web into yarn and plastic, one pixel at a time; and Cody Trepte, whose embroidery of retired computer punch cards rekindles an old-fashioned love affair with the hand of the artist.

Organized and moderated by Marisa Olson, Rhizome curator at large.

Rhizome is a leading new media art organization and affiliate of the New Museum. This is the next event in Rhizome's ongoing New Silent Series at the museum.

Falling Forward

Hi. Here are some brief notes on stuff I'm doing in October/ November (in addition to the Athens and Philadelphia shows listed below). More to come...

I've co-curated an exhibition with Vera List Center director Carin Kuoni, entitled Ours: Democracy in the Age of Branding. There are some great artists in it. The opening is on 10/15.

For the 20th Anniversary Exhibition of the Instituto de Artes Graficas de Oaxaca (IAGO), Mexico, Abe Linkoln and I have been asked to show our Blog Art project. It opens 10/20.

Christina Ray is making Glowlab an official gallery and is showing my work in her first show, 30 Grand (they've moved from Williamsburg to Soho and that's the address), opening 10/23.

On Nov 7-8 I'm headed to the bay area to speak at a conference on appropriation in art, at UC Berkeley, entitled Takeovers & Makeovers. My paper's called "Playing by the Rules: Parody and Parasitic Media in Contemporary Protest Art."

The Promiscuous Pop screening I was in at the British Film Institute is traveling to the Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Brazil, and will run Nov 13-23 in conjunction with the SP Biennial.

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FYI, I've also made a bunch of updates to my website's Projects page and, for RSS readers, note that I've added sidebar links to recent interviews with Regine Debatty on We Make Money Not Art and Astria Suparak in NY Arts.

Philly Show and Net Art Essay

I'm having a solo show in one of the galleries at Vox Populi, a really awesome Philadelphia-based art space. I'm showing Break Up Album (Demo) and some related prints. It opens October 3rd.

I was also asked by LACMA (the LA County Museum of Art)--big supporters of photography--to write an essay for their series, Words Without Pictures. I wrote one called "Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture" and there will be official responses posted by artists Jacob Ciocci (Paper Rad), Pradeep Dalal, and Matthieu Laurette. I didn't get to write about everyone I wanted to, but I mentioned a lot of "pro surfer" artists (of Nasty Nets ilk) and looked at their work from the perspectives of found photography and montage.

Back-to-School Season

If you happen to find yourself in Athens, Greece, between now and the end of the year, stop by the National Museum of Contemporary Art where they are showing Abe and Mo Sing the Blogs, the project Abe Linkoln and I did for our Whitney Artport commission. (The one that made Johanna Fateman call my voice "freaky" and "sultry." --Haha, just have to keep reminding myself!)


Speaking of back-to-school, I've actually taken the semester off of teaching at NYU to finish-up my dissertation. (It's on "The Art of Protest in Network Culture, for UC Berkeley's Rhetoric & Film Studies program.) Michael Mandiberg and I are doing a collaborative self-surveillance endurance performance project about it called Marisa Olson Writes Her Dissertation: An Endurance Performance in 31 Acts. It's already been intense, but also productive. Here's a description:

Veterans of web-based autobiographical performance, Olson and "Coach Mandiberg" have teamed-up to get Marisa through her dissertation by framing it as an act of endurance. Every day for the month of September, Olson will spend all day (i.e. EST business hours) writing while webcam shots and screencaps of her desktop are automatically uploaded to the net every 60 seconds. This gesture of transparency is a continuation of Olson's research into the role of sousveillance in "The Art of Protest."

Summertime

Hi. It's been a while. I have a fractured hip, torn ACL, and a lot of damaged bone marrow. I've spent the last few months on a nice pair of hot pink crutches and I had knee surgery last week. I feel olllldddd, but I'm currently recuperating in Berlin, where the living's EZ. Anyway, I'm taking most of the summer off to write write write, but I am doing some live performing and showing my work in the following shows.


MOMA Performance, NYC, 5/19: I performed in a Lovid project called "Help Carry a Tune" at the Museum of Modern Art with eteam, Hanna Fushihara Aron, Michael J. Schumacher, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Thomas Beard, and Bengala.


Netherlands Institute for Media Art/ Montevideo, Amsterdam: From May 24-June 26, I'll be in a show called My [public] space, which is about the blurring of private and public information and spaces and which also features the work of Erich Berger/Elina Mitrunen, Hasan Elahi, Martijn Engelbregt, Kota Ezawa, Dora Garcia, Susan Hartig, Jill Magid, Eva and Franco Mattes a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG, Eduardo Navas, and Guy Ben-Ner


Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati: From May 24-August 31 I'm in American Idyll: Contemporary Art and Karaoke, which also includes Joel Armor, Candice Breitz, Phil Collins, Mark Harris, David Herbert, Mehdi Hercberg, Christian Jankowski, Ryan Mulligan, Reid Radcliffe and Jose Versoza.


WOOLOO's New Life Berlin Festival, June 1-15: Every day at 6pm I'll be performing as a parody of Martha Stewart, in a futuristic TV show entitled Assisted Living, which is focused on coping with the health & environmental challenges (including Global Warming-Related Illnesses or GWI's) of living a life prolonged by technology. I'll devise craft-projects and recipes for 130-year-olds, taping the show on-site before a "live studio audience." Stop by 13-15 Karl-Liebknechtstrasse (Alexanderplatz/Mitte) any time if you're around. On June 14th there will be a closing party DJ'ed by AIDS-3D's Daniel Keller with Oliver Laric, and Martin Backes...


Pompidou Centre, Paris: The "Real Time" show I was in at the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art travels to the Pompidou starting on June 13th, in conjunction with the Pocket Film Festival.


Kunstraum Muenchen: Abe Linkoln and I are showing our work in an exhibit called Into the Music, which also includes Johanna Billing, Jeremy Deller, Iain Forsyth + Jane Pollard, Hadley + Maxwell, Kristin Lucas, Elke Marhöfer, and Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay. It's up June 25-August 10th


Schroeder Romero Gallery, NYC: I'm in a group show here, called Fair Game, which explores sports and competition as political spectacles. It opens June 26th. I'm showing 96-00-04-08, along with a red and blue headphone duet...


Leonard Pearlstein Gallery/ Drexel University, Philadelphia: From June 23-July 25, the Bitmap show I was in at Vertexlist is touring to this venue and they are producing a catalogue, so look for more info on my blog, next month.


Light Industry, Brooklyn: On July 8th, something very exciting is happening. I'm releasing an artist book of my high school poems (designed by Robert Bolesta), called "Songs I Wrote While Listening to the Doors, 1992-1994 (Before the Internet)" and in this one-night event, some of the poems will be read by myself, poets Thom Donovan, Stephanie Gray, Christian Hawkey, Dorothea Lasky, and other surprise guests, PLUS original songs using my poems as lyrics will be performed by members of the bands Professor Murder/ Tan Lines, Aa, and Taigaa. These songs, and a few of my own will be accompanied by videos made by myself. It's going to be a very special night.


Esther Klein Gallery, Philadelphia: I'll be having a solo show here, called "Background Information," from July 11-August 30. The show will feature all new work, including installations, prints, and a video animation revolving around images culled from the internet.


I'm in Exit Art's summer show, "Summer Mixtape Volume One: The Get Smart Edition," opening July 24. The website says: "Drawing on influences from hip-hop and popular culture, the exhibition seeks to evoke the appropriated, personalized essence of the mixtape... The exhibition, curated by Exit Art's Associate Curator, Herb Tam, and Assistant Curator, Lauren Rosati, will also feature a jukebox with mixtapes produced by the artists and some special guests."


From August 22-September 26 I'm in a show at the University of Maine called "Seriously, Funny: Art as social, political, and cultural critique." The show is part of their fifth annual contemporary arts fest called Without Borders.

Extracurricular Activities

Hi. As I've mentioned previously, I've been doing a lot of research and writing on surveillance, including teaching a grad seminar at NYU on "Sousveillance Culture," this semester. Below are notes on a few projects I've been involved in, in the course of this research.


I wrote an essay on online privacy (vs publicity) for the book that is accompanying the Michael Connor-curated ICI exhibit, The New Normal. It opens April 25th, at Artists Space.


The next day (Saturday, April 26th), my Sousveillance Culture students will be presenting their final projects in a one-day conference located at The Change You Want To See, in Williamsburg.
http://rhizome.org/announce/view/51385


From May 9-12 I'll be in Madrid to speak about Tactical Media at the Reina Sofia National Museum, in conjunction with the 15th Rencontres Internationales. More details to come.


Last, but certainly not least, on May 15th, Rhizome is having a Benefit that is sure to be the party of the year. :) Please come!

Nasty Nets at the NY Underground Film Festival

That's right, Nasty Nets has just produced a DVD (with video & data for maximum pleasure!) and we're releasing it in a screening called NASTY AS U WANNA BE at the 15th (and final) NY Underground Film Festival.

It's Friday, 4/4/08, at 8:30pm, at Anthology Film Archives. Please come and enjoy, and get your discounted dvd's--$5 while supplies last!

Big thanks to RHIZOME for sponsoring the dvd!

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who came. I posted the final program in the comments.

March Madness

There's a lot of fun stuff going on at the end of February and into March and early April, including a few talks, some performances, and shows in NYC, California, Dallas, Germany, Sarajevo, and London. Please email me for more details on any of these...


Lecture Series Performance, NYC
Charles Broskoski and I will be giving a Lecture Series performance. We put out a call, a while back, for images that could be used as slides in a Powerpoint lecture about the past, present, and future of the internet. Thomas Galloway is making the PPT and we'll give the lecture without having seen any of the slides. (Improv!) Afterwards, we'll post the PPT online in case any of you are ever called on to give a lecture about the internet. It's at The Canal Chapter, at 9pm on Weds 2/20.


Dallas Contemporary
I'm currently in this show at the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, called Real Time. I'm making a series of low-fidelity "video confessions" which get uploaded live. The museum's throwing a party from 10-midnight, on Thursday, 2/21.

CAA panel
I'll be speaking on a panel at the College Art Association conference, in Dallas, later this week. My co-panelists are James Morgan (moderator), Joel Slayton, and Patrick Lichty--all very cool guys! Come hear us wax art historical: Not Learning from Net.Art: The Rise of Newer Media -- Friday Feb 22, 12:30 - 2:00 pm, Adams Mark Conference Center, Houston Ballroom A


Just Play at the Edith Russ Haus, Oldenberg, Germany
Abe Linkoln and I are showing Universal Acid and Abe & Mo Sing the Blogs in a very nice show, called Just Play: Music as Social Practice, opening March 7 at the Edith-Ruß-Haus für Medienkunst, and touring in May to Kunstraum, in Munich.


Galerija 10m2, Sarajevo
Opening on the same night as Just Play, I'm showing a couple different videos (including a new one on surveillance, which I'll post online as soon as I find a moment), in a survey of contemporary video art, at Galerija 10m2, in Sarajevo. The show was arranged in collaboration with Glowlab.


And/Or Show
Opening March 8 is a two-person show with myself and Christine Gideon, at And/Or Gallery, in Dallas. I'm showing Monitor Tracings, Peace Offerings, and a few videos.

UPDATE: Here are installation shots and links to preview videos.


Artist Talk, Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA
I'll be speaking about my work here, in conjunction with the current exhibition, We Interrupt Your Program, in which I'm showing my video, Golden Oldies. The talk is at 7:30pm on Weds, March 12th, in the Danforth Lecture Hall of Mills' Art Building.


I'm giving another talk at PSU's Palmer Museum of Art and this one will be webcast. The talk is on Tuesday, April 1st (site says Thurs; maybe it's an April Fools joke?), at 11:30am. The webcast link goes live 15 mins before... So high tech!


Promiscuous Pop, British Film Institute, 21st annual London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, London
My videos Black or White and No One will be included in this screening that also features Daniel Barrow, Jibz Cameron (Dynasty Handbag), Kalup Linzy, Tara Mateik, Jillian Peñam, Ryan Trecartin under the tagline "a new generation of performance artists queer the boundaries between art and entertainment."


Martha Stewart Assisted Living, at the Hayward Gallery, London
In conjunction with the Hayward Gallery exhibition, It's OK, I'll be making a series of daily performances called Martha Stewart Assisted Living. It's basically a futuristic version of our favorite homemaking show, geared towards people living abnormally-long lives, prolonged by technology. I'll be presenting craft projects and recipes for these folks, who will surely be suffering all kinds of telecommunicational ailments and global warming-related illnesses. (Stay tuned for videos!) The project is a part of my old bandmate/ongoing collaborator Marc Horowitz's Center for Improved Living project.


Also, SAVE THE DATE for the April 4th release party screening for the Nasty Nets DVD, at the NY Underground Film Festival. It's at 8:45pm on Friday, April 4th, at Anthology Film Archives. More details to come!

Montage at the New Museum of Contemporary Art

My Rhizome colleague Lauren Cornell and I co-curated the 4th installment of Unmonumental, the inaugural exhibition at the new New Museum of Contemporary Art. Entitled Montage: Unmonumental Online, the show introduces works by an international group of artists who use appropriation to create internet-based assemblages. The artists extend the radical practice of collage to the internet. Using digital images, sounds, and code, they interpret fictions and fantasies found online. There's a lot of great work here, and the online version of the show can be found here.

Weight of the World

I'm showing my new "video album," Break Up Album (Demo), at Cincinnati's Reed Gallery, in a group show called Weight of the World:

Curated by Maiza Hixson and Ryan Mulligan, “Weight of the World” testifies to art’s potential for self-healing/coping/and emotional survival. The exhibition features 17 artists, each of whom examine his/her own own life through the practice of art making, using the process of making as a step in healing. The works are simultaneously self-centered and universal. With subjects ranging from homemade support groups, coping with death and grief, self-actualization after a break-up, financial difficulties, and an artist place in a post 9/11 world, the show resonates with sincerity and humble self-reflection. Please join us for an opening reception Thursday, January 10th at 5:30 pm.

"Break Up Album (Demo)" is a four-channel video project about pain as a medium, the breakup album genre, and the notion of a demo--something that shows what an artist may (or may not) have to offer or be capable of... in hopes of getting "picked up." Excerpts from the project can be seen here

Oh Yeah!

Hi! Below is info about a new project and a couple of articles...



Oh Yeah I Love You Baby is my remix album of pop music samples in which each word in the album title is also the title of a respective track whose lyrics consist solely of that word. These are the "greatest hits" of pop music! Enjoy the tracks and please visit the credits page, where you can download the samples to make your own remixes and where I share my gratitude for Daniel Iglesia.


Also, just a note to keep an eye out for the recently-released Jan/Feb issue of NY Arts magazine for which Astria Suparak interviewed me. A bunch of artist friends are in this issue and it looks like a fun one.


Likewise, Andrew Lavallee's Wall Street Journal article, Even Boring Blogs Are Things of Beauty In Some Artists' Eyes, just went out. (Here's a PDF as it appeared in print.)

Happy holidays!