olia lialina

Hi fellow class mates. Heres some links that you might be interested in regarding the artist i presented to the class, Olia Lialina. you should definatly give these a look if you are interested in talking about subjects like the commodity of net.art, institutionalization of net.art, narritve net.art in your up coming essays. she is also very interested in .gif files and using retro internet interfaces. she also writes alot about the good ol' days on the net. and how she doesnt appreciate corporations making everything user friendly. She experiments with internet function and language and hopes to build on it and its history.

all her work can be found here http://www.artlebedev.ru/svalka/olialia
and here http://art.teleportacia.org
and here's some notes:

Olia Liolina was origonally trianed as a film director in moscow, russia. she discovered the internet in 1995 and thought about using it as a new way of telling her stories. As Lialina became increasingly immersed in the web, she began to realize the medium's potential as a storytelling tool:

"At first I thought how I could represent film on the net. After some time I understood that it's not necessary to represent film itself, but if you can put your filmic way of thinking in the net, in this environment, it is more useful, more interesting."

her first work, net. cult classic, My Boyfriend Came Back From The War, is a conversation between lovers reunited after an unspecified war. The conversation unfolds as the user clicks on photographs and texts that have been strategically arranged on the screen. Depending on what the user chooses to click at what point, a slightly different story unfolds. In a 1997 nettime interview, she commented about it:

"It's my most successful work, but it is not a real net project. The fact that it can exist on cd-rom, that you can put it on a floppy and go to any computer and show it offline makes a difference "

In recognising this Lialina decided to create a work that was "as close to the Internet environment as possible." she then made Anna Karenin Goes To Paradise. Billing itself as a "comedy in three acts and epilogue," it stars Tolstoy's famous character as well as three search engines and two web browsers. This peice being specific to the internet because it is inextricable from it. i must apologise to all the tolstoy fans in the class for calling it a cheesy novel, but hey, i read the wikipedia article. (joking?)
"It was a story again, but a story which contained sentences not written by me, but that existed already in the net."

1999, Lialina created Agatha Appears, which is not only web specific but is also about the web. The work is about the meeting between a "system administrator," who was fired from his job, and Agatha, a woman from a small village. A story in which one of the characters is "teleported" or uploaded onto the web takes place. In one part of the story, the system administrator says to Agatha: "Internet is not computers, applications, scripts… It's not a technology but new world, new world, new philosophy. New way of thinking, to understand the net u must be inside…"


here's a link to a good example of her writing about the internets language and tring to build on it and its history. http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/

"I think that many things from real life can exist in the net, many feelings, many thoughts. But they should speak the language of where they are. If something is in the net, it should speak net.language. "

her site art.teleportacia.org is her experiment in creating a net. art gallery. its aims are to show, sell and produce www.art. the site, as all good galleries do, has a current artisit in residence. she says that the museum is an experiment in selling www.art. that disregards the assertion by certain netartists and critics that it is beter for www art no to be profitable. exploiting the medium to its fullest capacity trying to create a compelling environment."

Olia also has a myspace account for her .gif files http://www.myspace.com/gifshow

so check her out.

ps you must look at this >>she and her colleges host a neato online webzine called contemporary home computing, which has a net article on gameboy camera. http://www.contemporary-home-computing.org/