Olia Lialina On 30 Years Of Net.Art And Digital Preservation

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Net pioneer Olia Lialina, who has been active online since 1994, is currently featured in“Network Portraits,” an exhibition at Berlin's Panke Gallery on view through October 3. The show explores her three-decade fascination with servers, browsers, and GIFs, and the poetics of early internet aesthetics.

A related exhibition,“online since 1996,” is on display through mid-October at the Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen in Stuttgart. Lialina's work also includes extensive archiving of GeoCities websites, personal pages created in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 1999, an archive team saved 50,000 GeoCities sites from deletion when the company closed. This archive, titled“One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age,” is now stewarded by Lialina and artist Dragan Espenschied.

Lialina's artistic and archival practice focuses on the internet's inherent paradoxes: its uneven promises of permanence, constant loss, the necessity of maintenance, and broad distribution. Her exhibition“Network Portraits” specifically examines her use of her own image, which she disseminates across various servers and browsers. She then reassembles these fragmented images through the support of friends, the precarious guarantees of hosting services, or the audience's technical skills.

An example of her work is Summer ( 2013 ), an animated GIF where Lialina swings against a blue and white background. This piece loads 25 different URLs in a glitchy sequence, with each server maintained by a friend, creating a social network rooted in Web 1.0's peer-to-peer principles. Maintaining this artwork has required thirteen years of strong relationships, technical support, and gentle reminders for domain fee payments.

Other works by Lialina, such as Hosted ( 2020 ), rely on various hosting websites to display each image in a 70-frame animation of her swimming. Similarly, Self-Portrait ( 2018 ) needs three browsers to complete an image of the artist with her hair blowing. Through these projects, Lialina actively preserves the aesthetics and ideologies of the early internet. She told editor Shanti Escalante-De Mattei about her start as a net artist, the liberating potential of web pages, and her concerns about an increasingly static internet.

Lialina initially held a skeptical view of amateur web pages.“At that time I was very skeptical about it, or even ironic. I thought that amateur web pages were something that did not even deserve my attention. I wanted to make something special, artistic, more avant-garde,” she explained. However, her perspective shifted when she began teaching at the Art Academy for Art and Design in 1999. She initially used GeoCities sites as“bad examples” for her students, but through this teaching, she recognized their inherent value, especially as they began to disappear rapidly.“I would show something in 1999 [that] by 2000 was already gone,” she noted.

This widespread disappearance prompted her to start archiving.“When I understood that it's not just some examples that I want to show to students that were disappearing, but that the web made by people was disappearing. Since then, my work has revolved around preserving the web that is made by people,” Lialina stated. She emphasizes that this effort is not driven by nostalgia for old web pages but by a belief that creating one's own web presence is an act of empowerment. In a blog post, she wrote:“Don't see making your own web page as a nostalgia, don't participate in creating the netstalgia trend. What you make is a statement, an act of emancipation. You make it to continue a 25-year-old tradition of liberation.”

Lialina believes that creating a web page signifies independence from platforms, offering a personal space for communication and self-representation, with full control over linking and content, without needing expert technical skills. This act not only benefits the individual but also contributes to building the network. While the emancipatory nature of web pages might seem evident in retrospect, Lialina acknowledges a“nostalgic part” to this perception.“Nowadays one would think, 'there was a time when people who were making web pages were celebrated, and it was such a paradise on the web.' But it was never like this. People were ridiculed who made the web pages and in the beginning I took part in this. But I was punished,” she reflected. She now dedicates a significant part of her daily work to reviewing and archiving GeoCities pages, tagging them, making connections, and creating projects to showcase the beauty of the early web.“I learned my lesson,” she added.

Her archiving project has deeply influenced her artistic practice, which often reintroduces elements of the early web and highlights the work, aesthetics, and ideologies of amateurs. In Some Universe ( 2000 ), for instance, she collected star backgrounds and sparkling ornaments that were common on early web pages but rapidly vanished.“It was nothing special conceptually, but it was the first work where I wanted to show something that is disappearing,” Lialina said. She reflected on the paradox of digital permanence:“On one hand, things just disappear, and at the same time, other things are just forever, and you can't get rid of them. But it's part of the same problem, that as a user, you are not in control.” She sees the loss of digital artifacts as equally painful as the loss of physical objects.

Source: ARTnews

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