Jenny Odell
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Jenny Odell is an American multidisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in
Oakland, California Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...
. She has taught Internet art and digital/physical design at
Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
since 2013. She wrote ''The'' ''New York Times'' best-selling book, ''How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy'' (2019).


Early life and education

Odell was born in
San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
and grew up in
Cupertino, California Cupertino ( ) is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, directly west of San Jose on the western edge of the Santa Clara Valley with portions extending into the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The population was 57,8 ...
. She graduated from
UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...
in 2008 with a degree in English Literature and received her MFA in Design + Technology from the
San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...
in 2010.


Work

Odell's work consists of acts of close observations such as bird watching, collecting screenshots, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. Many of her artistic projects re-use existing objects or images and put them in context, for example images from
Google Earth Google Earth is a computer program that renders a 3D computer graphics, 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery. The program maps the Earth by superimposition, superimposing satellite images, aerial photography, and geog ...
and
Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...
. Odell has described where this approach comes from,
I often say that medium is context ..Part of the reason I work this way is because I find existing things infinitely more interesting than anything I could possibly make.


''The Bureau of Suspended Objects''

In 2015, Odell was
artist-in-residence Artist-in-residence, or artist residencies, encompass a wide spectrum of artistic programs which involve a collaboration between artists and hosting organisations, institutions, or communities. They are programs which provide artists with space a ...
at
Recology Recology, formerly known as Norcal Waste Systems, is a waste management company headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company collects and processes municipal solid waste, reclaiming reusable materials. The company also operates transfer ...
SF, otherwise known as the San Francisco dump. The residency culminated in an
exhibition An exhibition, in the most general sense, is an organized presentation and display of a selection of items. In practice, exhibitions usually occur within a cultural or educational setting such as a museum, art gallery, park, library, exhibition ...
of her work: ''The Bureau of Suspended Objects'', a detailed archive of objects scavenged and selected at the dump. Odell conducted in-depth research into the manufacturing, distribution, popularity, and use of each object. Much of her art exists within and pulls from the
Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
; this is no exception. The archive is accessible online and much of the content is pulled from the internet, such as Google street views of manufacturing plants and videos of commercials for products. The detailed history is meant to bring attention to resources involved in both the products' production and consumption.


''Neo-Surreal''

Neo-Surreal is a collection of work completed while Odell was
artist-in-residence Artist-in-residence, or artist residencies, encompass a wide spectrum of artistic programs which involve a collaboration between artists and hosting organisations, institutions, or communities. They are programs which provide artists with space a ...
at the
Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
in 2017. While there, she came across a large collection of
BYTE The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...
, an American computing magazine, from the 1980s. She pulled images from this archive, edited and curated in a way to highlight the surreal nature of the industry, both then and today. In her own words,
The reconfiguration of this material highlights the ways in which such imagery, viewed in hindsight, inadvertently portrays some of the stranger and more sinister aspects that technology eventually came to embody. For instance, one finds things like a computer wearing a policeman's hat and wielding a riding crop (evoking surveillance) or a pill opening to reveal a computer chip (evoking biometrics). Similarly to Richard Prince in his ''Cowboys'' series, I've done nothing here except to remove the text, restore some backgrounds, and re-title the images.


''How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy''

Odell's book ''How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy'' (2019) is about "how to disconnect from the
attention economy Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems. According to Matthew Crawford, "Attention is a r ...
". The book builds on the topics that had already surfaced in her previous artistic work: our relationship to technology and how observation can be a critical action. She explains how doing nothing can be a strategy to resist the profit-driven technology which attempts to hold our attention at all costs. Odell says doing nothing can be a refusal to take part in life online and instead re-engage with your physical surroundings. Jonah Bromwich describes the book in
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
' review, "she goes on to construct a complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto." In the end, the book is a criticism of
capitalism Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for Profit (economics), profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, pric ...
, an argument against our standard definitions of
productivity Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production proces ...
and an encouragement to re-engage with nature and local communities.


Publications

*''Travel by Approximation: a virtual road trip.'' Self-published, 2010. *''I Hate to Part With It: Craigslist Farewells.'' Self-published, 2012. *''The Satellite Collections.'' Self-published, 2013. *''The Archive of the Bureau of Suspended Objects.'' Self-published, 2015. . *''Satellite Landscapes.'' Self-published, 2015. *''The Bureau of Suspended Objects at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.'' Self-published, 2016. . Exhibition catalogue. *''The Bureau of Suspended Objects at the Palo Alto Art Center.'' Self-published, 2016. . Exhibition catalogue. *'' How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy'' Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2019. .


Exhibitions

* ''In That Case: Havruta in Contemporary Art.'' Odell and Philip Buscemi. January 28, 2016 – July 5, 2016. * ''Peripheral Landscapes: The Art of Maps:'' A conversation with Odell and geospatial librarian Matt Knutzen. May 1, 2015. * ''The Internet Archive's 2017 Artist in Residence Exhibition.'' August 5–26, 2017.


References


External links

*
Odell's 2017 talk at the Minneapolis art and technology conference Eyeo
from which her book was adapted (video) {{DEFAULTSORT:Odell, Jenny 21st-century American women writers Writers from San Francisco 21st-century American women artists Artists from San Francisco Date of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people) Living people Year of birth missing (living people) University of California, Berkeley alumni San Francisco Art Institute alumni