August 25, 2021 @12PM
For decades, net art forerunners had explored the internet, a space like no other, where gravity is irrelevant, and references such as vertical/horizontal, bidimentional and three-dimensional are outdated. Olia Lialina, a Moscow-born and Germany-based net artist, digital explorer, archivist and GIF model is among them. Her early work had a great impact on recognizing the Internet as a medium for artistic expression and storytelling. This century, her continuous and close attention to Internet architecture, “net.language” and vernacular web has made her an important voice in contemporary art and new media theory. For the past two decades, she has produced many influential works of network-based art: My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996), Agatha Appears (1997), First Real Net Art Gallery (1998), Last Real Net Art Museum (2000), Online Newspapers (2004-2018), Summer (2013), Self-Portrait (2018), Hosted (2020). Clicking one of Lialina’s works lead users to the darkest corners of internet folklore and history, so a little more than a year from the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, we ask her to guide us through her work, and give us a hint of where to go from here.
We invite you to delve into Lialina’s work and join us for the talk on Wednesday August 25th! The talk will be followed by a Q&A with Erandy Vergara-Vargas, curator of the show Some Universe: Internet Spaces in a Postdigital World.
BIO
Born in Moscow in 1971 and now based in Germany, Olia Lialina is among the best-known participants in the 1990s net.art scene – an early-days, network-based art pioneer. Her early work had a great impact on recognizing the Internet as a medium for artistic expression and storytelling. This century, her continuous and close attention to Internet architecture, “net.language” and vernacular web has made her an important voice in contemporary art and new media theory.
Lialina has, for the past two decades, produced many influential works of network-based art: My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996), Agatha Appears (1997), First Real Net Art Gallery (1998), Last Real Net Art Museum (2000), Online Newspapers (2004-2018), Summer (2013), Self-Portrait (2018) and Hosted (2020).
Lialina is also known for using herself as a GIF model, and is credited with founding one of the earliest web galleries, Art Teleportacia. She is cofounder and keeper of One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive and a professor at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany.