PAGES IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE (former FIRST AND THE ONLY REAL NET ART GALLERY) Olia Lialina Olia Lialina (born in Moscow) is a pioneer Internet artist and theorist as well as an experimental film and video critic and curator. Lialina studied film criticism and journalism at Moscow State University, then followed with art residencies at C3 (Budapest,) and Villa Walderta (Munich,).[1] She founded Art Teleportacia, a web gallery of her work, which also features links to remakes of her most famous work "My boyfriend came back from the war" [2] and was one of the organizers and later, director of Cine Fantom, an experimental cinema club in Moscow co-founded in 1995 by Lialina with Gleb Aleinikov, Andrej Silvestrov, Boris Ukhananov, Inna Kolosova and others. In 2012 Lialina coined the term Turing Complete User in an essay of the same name.[6] The piece was well received internationally and got reviews by Bruce Sterling [7] and Cory Doctorow [8] among others. Works[edit] Olia Lialina created the netart work My Boyfriend Came Back From The War. References[edit] Further reading[edit]
Olia Lialina, 'Summer' (2013) Summer (2013). Olia Lialina. Screenshot of animation comprising individual GIF images displayed across multiple websites. In a 2006 interview with Valeska Buehrer, artist Olia Lialina observed that her early web-based works, particularly My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, have been irrevocably changed by the accelerating speed of the internet. Though the work is still as it was: same files, same address, links -- it is now more like a documentation of itself. It wasn't that Lialina was inspired at the time by the creative possibilities of the slow-to-load early web (she recalls being as frustrated as any user); it was that the work functioned within a specific technological context. Lialina's increasing awareness of the interplay between technological context and artwork is at the forefront of her latest work, Summer (2013). In other words: MTAA, Simple Net Art Diagram, c. 1997.
Sometimes a GIF Is All You Need Today and yesterday were glorious days in New York: August had come, the sun was shining, the weather was just right. They were the type of days that make you want to frolic, or skip or swing. And so it happened, when I clicked on a link in a tweet by pioneering net artist and critic Olia Lialina, that I saw her swinging joyfully towards me in my browser. This, I thought, is the perfect expression of summer. Lialina’s piece “Summer” is a GIF, and at first glance, a fairly simple one: it features an image of the artist swinging to and fro against a blank background that bleeds from bright blue to white. She wears a summery outfit, with her loose hair puffing out as she moves and a slight smile on her face. But that placement is more than clever — it’s quite brilliant, as it connects the swinging Olia to the address bar, which you’ll notice is constantly changing. Tagged as: GIFs, Internet Art, Olia Lialina
WYSOCKA, E. Agatha Re-Appears, net art resoration project, 2008 Restoration Project: Olia Lialina’s early net.art piece “Agatha Appears” from the Collection of C³ Center for Culture & Communication Foundation Author: Olia Lialina (C3 Residency Program); Márton Fernezelyi (Programmer) Title: Agatha Appears Created: 1997 Type: Interactive resource, net based art Available: www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/ Format: HTML (included: ram, gif files) Abstract: The work presents the dialogue between a system administrator and Agatha, the lost country girl. Related resources: Conservator: El? Programmer: András Sz? Organization: Center for Culture & Communication Foundation in Budapest Date: January – October 2008 State of the artwork before the restoration. Work was originally created for Netscape 4.0 browser in HTML 3.2 language and real audio sound format. Due to corruption and disappearance of some files, sections of Agatha's trajectory got lost and so was the original idea of the piece.
Dragan Espenschied to Lead Rhizome's Digital Conservation Program After an international search, leading digital preservation specialist, artist, and musician Dragan Espenschied has been appointed to lead Rhizome's growing and award-winning Digital Conservation program. Espenschied, who will relocate from Germany to New York for the position, will bring the program to its next phase and steward the ArtBase, Rhizome’s collection of over 2,000 born-digital artworks. Espenschied is well known in the academic research field for projects such as bwFLA: Emulation as a Service, which allows legacy computer systems to run in a standard web browser. With Olia Lialina, he has also undertaken user-centered projects like One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, an automatically-generated archive of screen captures of 1990s Geocities webpages; and Once Upon, an enactment of contemporary websites in a historic network environment. He has also published and spoken widely on vernacular uses of the web, such as in the book Digital Folklore, edited with Lialina. Welcome, Dragan!
Interview with Olia Lialina | Josephine Bosma Olia Lialina is a net.artist. She lives and works in Moscow. She is also a filmcritic and filmcurator. "They must feel like strangers, those people who make their homepages representing their products." Olia Lialina: It is complicated to be a net.artist in Moscow, because there is no context where you can appear as such. Q: Isn't that normal with 'net.personalities', that you are more of a personality far away then close by? Olia Lialina: Yes, but also it is difficult to understand who is the nearest neighbour, because when you communicate a lot through the net, it seems that your nearest friends and nearest neighbours from abroad are much closer. Q: A reality can also be a problem. Olia Lialina: Its pleasant. Q: I understand you are exploring what net.language is. Olia Lialina: It seems to me that I am a person who develops this language. Q: How do you work on developing this language? Olia Lialina: Difficult question. Q: Can you give examples of projects you did on the net?
Notes on Being Net Artist 18 years of being net artist were 18 years of explaining difference in between net art and web art explaining difference in between net.art and net art removing the dot from net.artist being called media artist being mixed up with the austrian artist Lia being called cyberfeminist getting to know that i'm in a show from vanity search getting requests to send screenshots in 300 DPI refusing to show the work offline refusing to show the work without address bar rejecting Internet Explorer (and later Safari) being told that there is no fee for online works being interviewed about net art economic models praying that it works in the next browser version updating for the next browser version making no back ups editing files directly on server ignoring the rumors that net art is dead learning HTML teaching web design these are not the only things that happened to me,but the ones that were there from the very beginning and never went away Olia Lialina is a pioneering internet artist and theorist.
Olia Lialina - Sex Magazine Olia Lialina is a Russian-born net artist and Professor of New Media at Merz Akademie Stuttgart. Her works are archived and available to view online at Art Teleportacia, Olia's web gallery. Her first seminal project, "My boyfriend came back from the war" is a cinematic, text and .gif-based choose-your-own adventure experience. "Animated GIF Model", 2005 What kinds of experiences did you have with computers before the advent of the Internet? "Anna Karenina Goes to Paradise", 1996 What kinds of films did you show at the film club? "My boyfriend came back from the war", 1996 When I look at My boyfriend came back from the war, your GIFs and etc., I see that it's sort of a textual storytelling experience, but especially with that flickering window, it's also a cinematic experience. "Summer", 2013 It's dependent on a whole community. "Online Newspapers: French Edition", 2013 For all of the “professionals”, they summarized the amateur culture at the time. "Once Upon", 2011-2012 "Midnight", 2006
Rich User Experience, UX and Desktopization of War This essay is based on my lecture given at Interface Critique, Berlin University of the Arts, November 7th 2014. Thank you for hosting me. Today I’m talking as the Geocities Institute’s Head of Research, an advocate for computer users’ rights, and interface design teacher. I’m making web pages since 1995, since 2000 I’m collecting old web pages, since 2004 I’m writing about native web culture (digital folklore) and the significance of personal home pages for the web’s growth, personal growth and development of HCI. So I remember very well the moment when Tim O’Reilly promoted the term Web 2.0 and announced that the time of Rich User Experience has begun. The web was supposed to become more dynamic, fast and “automagic,” because many processes that users would have to consciously trigger before started to run in the background. As Tim O’Reilly states in September 2005 in blogpost What is Web 2.0? But Web 2.0 was not only about a new way of scripting interactions. “Guess what?! In 2013, Dr.
My Boyfriend Came Back From The War. online since 1996 Russian artist Olia Lialina's "My Boyfriend Came Back From The War" (MBCBFTW) is a key work of 1990s artistic practice on the web, marking its 20th anniversary in 2016. It has a pioneering character, as an interactive narrative and a work of net art. MBCBFTW presents two people who are trying to talk to each other about a war, after the fact. "My Boyfriend Came Back From the War" is a unique case and a fascinating example of a work that has inspired artists for 20 years; they cite it time and again, they focus on it or reinterpret it through remixing. Those shown here will be presented on historical equipment, in order to capture their original "look and feel" and demonstrate changes within the communications technologies, up to and including today’s all-encompassing Internet, accessible anytime and anywhere thanks to mobile devices. A publication linked to the exhibition will present both the works themselves and key essays on the development of Internet culture. Artists:
MU | Twintig Jaar Op Het Web: My Boyfriend Came Back From The War Educated as a journalist and film critic, and curating experimental film programmes in Moscow, in the mid-1990s Olia Lialina quickly embraced the Web and started experimenting with its unique qualities. She made her first net art piece, My Boyfriend Came Back From The War in 1996. Four years later she set up the Last Real Net Art Museum – an initiative to oppose museums that were presenting the first ‘Internet art exhibitions’, and a place on the Web where she could collect and exhibit the projects that responded to MBCBFTW. Ten years after she made her first net artwork, in 2006, in their popular book New Media Art (Taschen) Mark Tribe and Reena Jana wrote about MBCFTW: ‘One indicator of the historical significance of Olia Lialina’s 1996 Net art project, My Boyfriend Came Back From the War, is the numerous times it has been appropriated and remixed by other New Media artists. (...) Can you tell me something about your background, how did you end up being an artist and a professor?