Olia Lialina

Olia Lialina is a philosopher and former net artist. Described as "a survivor of web 1.0", her essays have been widely received. She is currently the head of the Geocities Archival Project, a project designed to preserve and study the early culture of the internet.

Selected artistic work

• My Boyfriend Came Back From The War is one of her most famous works. In this particular piece Olia Lialina tells a story with gifs about a couple and what occurred when the male came back from a war. The female talks about cheating, and there is some talk about marriage. The whole piece is in black and white and the story progresses as one clicks on the different words. This piece has been remixed and redone in different ways, you can find the links to these new pieces here

• The first real net art gallery is a web page that features what appears to be a creator in the lower right hand side of the page and eleven bars at the top left hand side, the website pictures evergreen trees throughout. The link on this page is over the creator, when clicked on the page moves towards the top left, finally stopping and revealing links.

• The most beautiful web page is a web page which appears to be as the link states "some universe". The link to the page is in the words which appear in the middle of the page and read "SOME UNIVERSE for heike, dragan and your browser" when clicked on, a new web page appears in which one must scroll using the page down on your keyboard. While doing this the various spots of color on the black background appear to twinkle and move. Throughout the scrolling there are different images that appear, at times there are stripes of color which look as if they are moving in the opposite direction of the rest of the site. Finally at the bottom of the page five images can be seen, including a horizontal stripe of sparkling purple lights.

• News paper online is a web page that features newspaper with different Gifs throughout the newspapers. There are five different newspapers from different parts of the world in order from left to right.

• The first newspaper is of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung a German news paper from August 2, 2004. Olia has added a GIF of roses.

• The second newspaper is of Daily Jang. The date of this paper is August 6, 2004 the animations added to it are colored spheres.

• The third newspaper is of USA TODAY, this page includes GIF of American flags and of The Statue of Liberty. The date for this newspaper is August 9, 2004 and when scrolled over the part entitled "Election Officials Act to Stop Snags" the same newspaper is revealed without the GIF and in black and white.

• The fourth newspaper is of The Wall Street Journal Europe this page contains a GIF of animals. The date on the newspaper is August 4, 2004.

• The fifth newspaper is of Dajiyuan. In this newspaper there are GIFs of Street Fighter. The date on the newspaper is August 4, 2004.

• From 2001 to 2003, Olia managed a web comic named Zombie and Mummy with Dragan Espenschied. The comic contained the characters Zombie, a zombie, and Mummy, a mummy. Each comic was created on a Palm Pilot, and was designed to be mediocre on purpose. Comics consisted of usually 4 panels each, beginning with ″Zombie and Mummy...″ followed by the comic title. The story would then progress, until (usually) a simple conclusion would be reached, and ″The End″ would be displayed in bubble letters dripping with blood. Each comic was embedded into a webpage, some Olia's own creation, some taken from other sources. The webpages were usually styled after typical GeoCities-like websites that were commonplace at the time.

• Agatha Appears is a website created in 1997. A story told through the title elements of hyperlinks, Man.gif meets woman.jpeg and introduces her to the Internet where she is teleported into and never is alone again.

Selected bibliography

See also: RUE

• Rich User Experience, UX and Desktopization of War, an article describing the fundamental changes for the web, how we got here, the snakeoil of Web 2.0, and how to fix the web.

• Turing Complete User What has the modern computer user become?

External links

"Offical" Homepage

another "Offical" Homepage

back-up "Official" Homepage

A site run with her longtime partner, Dragan Espenschied, hosting many philisophical articles

Her YouTube