Black or White?

Marisa Olson is a German born New Media artist living and working in New York. This piece titled "Black or White" from 2006 is her response to Michael Jackson's song of the same name. It is a part of her "Performed Listening" series, and is an exploration into the role of spectatorship in performance art. In this piece, Olson makes comparisons to the way machines and humans hear sounds. She has used a video filter developed by Nam Jun Paik called a wobulator which reacts to sound, distorting the image on a TV screen.

This piece takes cues from other performance artists, combining aesthetics of early Nam Jun Paik installations with the message and overtones of later artists such as Pipilotti Rist. As the sound pushes her face around the screen, the viewer is able to see how the machine interprets the song. By connecting our own eyes to our ears we feel the music. So are we doing more than just watching Olson listen to the song? The song's content is about transcending cultural preconceptions about race. By showing us how a cold machine hears while we're watching the artist listen, it becomes easy to drop some of those preconceptions about differences and instead think about how much we are the same.

Olson's Homepage