Location, location, location!
Published on August 1st, 2020
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New essay in: Olia Lialina Net Artist, edited by Valérie Perrin, Bourogne: Espace Multimédia Gantner / Les Presses du Réel, 2020, pp. 95-115. Also translated in French: Vous êtes ici
Location, location, location!
“to understand the net u must be inside”
I still remember it vividly. The summer of 2013 was bright and warm, not overly so but comfortable, and I had decided to stay at home to finish the final chapter of my thesis instead of going on holiday. All went well, I would get up, put on the same clothes as the day before (and the one before that), eat something, sit down to write in the cool basement, and then go outside after a few hours to warm up in the sun before returning to my desk. Besides the few words I exchanged while buying food, I didn’t see or speak to anyone. Time passed, hours became days, days turned into weeks, and slowly words started to form sentences. Suddenly the rhythm was interrupted: while looking for a reference online, I stumbled upon a link sent by Jan Robert Leegte announcing a new work he was part of. Clicking the link loaded an image, and in staccato it started to move, to swing. It was an image of Olia Lialina against a blue-bleedingto- white background, wearing a summer frock and sitting on a swing smiling, her hair loosely swaying in the breeze as she moved slowly to and fro and gradually gained speed. This was everything that I wanted to do at that moment. After watching for a while in a state of near-hypnosis, I noticed how the swing was connected to the top of the browser window, hanging from the browser bar, and at the same time I saw the rapidly changing location bar: a stream of unique location identifiers that sped up until they whizzed by. I recognised some of the locations, artists names, acronyms, half sentences, but I was unable to stop the continuous cascade: the location bar was looping at increasing speed, while Olia just kept on peacefully swinging along, smiling at me. Or was it a smirk? Was she making fun of me, the user trying to figure out the tension between the soothing calmness of the figure and the frenzied location bar? It kept me busy: pausing wasn’t an option, and the history—a list of twenty-four participants, a connected network of URLs—made my day.
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Some quotes from the article were also selected for Olia Lialina, Best Effort Network, a solo exhibition @arebyte London, 27 March – 30 May 2020.
image: Olia Lialina, Self-Portrait, 2018 (screenshot 21/12/2019)
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