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—in both artistic and publishing projects—has made her an important voice in contemporary art and new media theory.
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.
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.
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Short animated loop of the artist swinging from a playground swing that is seemingly fixed to the top of the browser window.
This lack of smooth movement is a part of the piece: each frame of the animation is played back from a different website. The browser is re-directed from one server to the next, the speed and smoothness of the animation dependent on the functioning of the internet infrastructure that supports it. There are 21 frames in the piece, distributed across 21 different websites.
This lack of smooth movement is a part of the piece: each frame of the animation is played back from a different website. The browser is re-directed from one server to the next, the speed and smoothness of the animation dependent on the functioning of the internet infrastructure that supports it. There are 21 frames in the piece, distributed across 21 different websites.
"I like to swing on the location bar of the browser, and I like to know that the speed of swinging depends on the connection speed, and that you can’t watch this GIF offline." —OL
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One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age is a project by artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied that is centered around the preservation and restoration of websites from GeoCities, the early internet's agora of vernacular design.
“Lialina monumentalizes and pays respect to the vernacular of today’s online culture while also trying to prevent their disappearance by acting as its archivist.”
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