Marisa Olson

A chapter from the book Public, Private, Secret, in which I explore the relationship(s) between data and photography, in an era of image-making complicated by a tension between a desire for privacy and a desire to be seen.

Public, Private, Secret (edited by Charlotte Cotton, published by Aperture, with ICP) explores the roles that photography and video play in the crafting of identity, and the reconfiguration of social conventions that define our public and private selves. This collection of essays, interviews, and reflections assesses how our image-making and consumption patterns are embedded and implicated in a wider matrix of online behavior and social codes, which in turn give images a life of their own. Within this context, our visual creations and online activities blur and remove conventional separations between public and private (and sometimes secret) expression. The writings address the various disruptions, resistances, and subversions that artists propose to the limited versions of race, gender, sexuality, and autonomy that populate mainstream popular culture. They anticipate a future for our image-world rich with diversity and alterity, one that can be shaped and influenced by the agency of self-representation.

Catalogue for Les Oracles exhibition at XPO Gallery (Paris, 2015), by Marisa Olson, also featuring a short story by Claire Evans. Exhibition featured science fiction-influenced artwork by ten women: Julieta Aranda, Juliette Bonneviot, Caroline Delieutraz, Aleksandra Domanovic, Jeanette Hayes, Kristin Lucas, Brenna Murphy, Katja Novitskova, Katie Torn, and Saya Woolfalk.

A Spanish-translated collection of essays on postinternet art, including "Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture," originally from Words Without Pictures (LACMA, Aperture/ Thames & Hudson, 2008); "Postinternet: Art After the Internet," originally from Foam Magazine #29 (Winter 2011/2012);  and "The Rhetoric of Soft Tools," originally from The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued, ed. Kathy High, Sherry Hocking, Mona Jimenez (Intellect/ University of Chicago Press, 2013).


All but the interview above, in Spanish:

_Arte Postinternet_, Marisa Olson, Cocom Press (Escuela Superior de Arte de Yucatan: Mexico), 2014

Revisiting the origins of the term "Postinternet," a decade on, I assess its contemporary relevance from a psychological, political, and architectural perspective, in the context of the E-Flux series on Postinternet Cities. While I initially conceived of it as a way to refer to "art after the internet," I've more recently called for a focus on the postinternet condition as reflective of "symptoms of network culture." In this text I identify some of those symptoms, particularly the emotional affects of living our lives primarily online. I also speculate about the physical and residential needs of future lonely internet users.

In this contribution to a book about artist-made tools, classic tenets of rhetorical theory are applied to contemporary examples of new media art to look at seemingly-ethereal software applications or "immaterial" video performance interventions as having another kind of activist or conceptual weight under the rubric of Soft Power.

An interview between Marisa Olson and Nick Warner in which Olson calls for a shift from her original definition of Postinternet Art as "Art after the internet" to a consideration of "the symptoms of connectedness." This interview is a precursor to Olson's Fall 2014 Pratt-Upload Keynote Lecture, "Postinternet is Dead. Long Live Postinternet," in which she called for a reification of the term along more historically-aware lines, taking into account feminist precursors to internet art and zooming out to emphasize the postinternet condition itself, over and above postinternet art per se, beginning to outline a working list of Symptoms of Network Culture.