WellWellWell (a riff on //www.) is Marisa Olson’s newest performative project to consider the nature of life in the postinternet era. Deploying both internet-based videos & live motivational lectures, Olson has crafted an alterego persona resembling an online meditation guru with a cult following as addicted to her as they are to the internet itself. The guru’s videos and lectures guide followers through creative visualization exercises, relaxation techniques, and heartfelt conversations about the way that digital technologies simultaneously stress us out and provide new tools for rebooting. WellWellWell is inspired by the contemporary wellness craze, but rooted in the historical relationship between cyberculture & counterculture, and continues Olson’s ongoing interests in the history of technology. wellwellwell.guru/
Marisa Olson’s work combines performance, video/new media, painting/drawing, and installation to address the cultural histories of technology and wellness, experiences of gender, and the politics of participation within pop culture. Her work has been presented by the Whitney Museum, New Museum, Venice Biennale, Fotomuseum Winterthur, C/O Berlin, National Museum of Contemporary Art-Athens, Tate Modern + Liverpool, British Film Institute, PS122, Performa Biennial, Samek Museum, Bard CCS, and she is also a founding member of the Nasty Nets internet surf club who showed at the Sundance Film Festival, New York Underground Film Festival, and elsewhere. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, Interview, Frieze, Art in America, Art21, Folha de Sao Paolo, Liberation-Paris, Le Monde, the Wall Street Journal, the Globe and Mail, Dis, Dazed, and her own critical writing has appeared in Artforum, e-flux, Aperture, Flash Art, Art Review, Afterimage, The Guardian, Wired, Surface, and numerous books in multiple languages. She is the former Editor & Curator of Rhizome, and the former Associate Director of SF Camerawork; has curated projects at the New Museum, Guggenheim, SFMOMA, White Columns, and Artists Space; and served on Advisory Boards for Ars Electronica, Transmediale, ISEA, Creative Capital, the Getty Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Kennedy Center, and Tribeca Film Festival. She was Artist-in-Residence at Eyebeam, Master Artist in Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and has been a Visiting Artist at Yale, Brown, VCU, SAIC, Oberlin, and elsewhere in addition to serving on the faculty at RISD and NYU. Olson studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. She was born in Germany and lives in New York.
