In the series HMKV Video of the Month, HMKV presents current video works by international artists for the duration of one month each – selected by Inke Arns.
Marisa Olson: Hash to the Future
HMKV Video of the Month
On view 1 – 31 July 2020
Do you ever wonder what the future will look like? What about the future of the INTERNET? In February 2018, the HASH prize for net-based projects in the fields of art, technology, and design was awarded for the first time by Solitude and ZKM. The 8,000-euro production prize went to the Dutch software artist and writer Marloes de Valk. For the awarding ceremony, the juror, artist and curator Marisa Olson, created this video by combining samples of every nominee's work, together with stock footage and a score similar to that of news videos found at an edutainment content hub. Conscientious of her role as an artist-juror tasked with valorizing and contextualizing a single winning artist, Olson's intent was to honor all of the nominees, comprised of Schloss-Solitude web residency holders from 2016 and 2017, not solely the year's winner. As a cultural historian of technology and media theorist whose artwork often draws on the theme of the time capsule, "HASH to the Future" (which borrows its title from "Back to the Future") ponders whether is is possible to assess such broad selection of work and project a collective sentiment about the state of art and technology in 2018, if not the state of the world. The piece is dated by definition but speaks to perennial concerns, anxieties, and fantasies about the evolving relationship between humanity and technology. (MO)
Marisa Olson, *1977 in Augsburg, DE, based in New York, USA, is an artist, writer, and media theorist. Her interdisciplinary work combines performance, video, net art, sound, drawing & installation to address the cultural history of technology, the politics of participation in pop culture, and experiences of gender and wellness. These works have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, Tate(s) Modern + Liverpool, New Museum, the Nam June Paik Art Center, British Film Institute, Sundance Film Festival, PERFORMA Biennial; commissioned and collected by the Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Houston Center for Photography, and Experimental Television Center; and reviewed in Artforum, Art21, the NY Times, Frieze, Interview, Liberation, the Globe and Mail, Folha de Sao Paolo, and elsewhere.