Olia Lialina
Her Majesty, URL

(an online lecture from 30th April 2020)

Dear online people,

In this lecture organised by arebyte Gallery, I’d like to tell you about my works, old and new, and about Universal Resource Locator (URL), which quite early became an important part of my stories and portraits, professional and personal life. And it still is.
URL is the address of a website or file you see in the location bar of your browser, but it is more than technical information, and it is not only for servers to be read. Location bar is an input field and a battlefield, so let’s look at it closer.

Olia Lialina

This lecture was part of Best Effort Network, a solo exhibition by Olia Lialina at arebyte Gallery. More information on the exhibition can be found here.

Olia Lialina was 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).

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.