Courtesy of the Artist and/or gallery.
This piece by Olia Lialina is part of her Online Newspaper series, a body of work that imagines how major media outlets such as The New York Times, Daily News, and New York Post might appear today if developed by lay journalists whose aesthetic choices defined web culture before the dot-com boom. Such institutions, including The Wall Street Journal (as seen in this 2008 piece), changed dramatically during the Web 2.0 era as they negotiated the transition from print to digital media. Online Newspapers New York Edition (WSJ) comprises the publication’s original articles and layout, as well as numerous animal GIF images that are collected and added by the artist. The interspersed GIF images create a humorous quality that contradicts the didactic and sociopolitical nature of “front page news.” Yet, amid this seemingly jocular approach, Lialina underscores the Internet’s subtle and pervasive disruption of traditional journalism amidst growing media literacy and the development of digital technology languages. –Courtesy of The Kitchen
Unframed
Image rights: Courtesy of the Kitchen and the Artist.
About Olia Lialina
A pioneer of net art, artist and film and new media critic Olia Lialina is well known for her famous browser-art piece, My Boyfriend Came Back From The War (1996). The work comprises multiple black-and-white hyperlinked frames of images and text through which viewers can navigate different narrative pathways. “If something is in the net,” Lialina has said, “it should speak in net language.” The piece has inspired numerous tribute artworks and remixes, including one from the notorious duo JODI. Lialina is also known for using herself as a model in experimentations with animated GIFs, and is credited with founding one of the earliest web galleries, Art Teleportacia, which she uses to exhibit her own work.
Russian, b. 1971, Moscow, Russia
