Artist Focus: Olia Lialina

Olia Lialina studied film and film criticism before extending her hand to new media art production, which culminated in the project “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War” (1996). In terms of technological prowess, “My Boyfriend” is relatively low, utilizing techniques very similar to those we have already learned in HTML involving tables and links. The viewer enters the production with the simple white text “my boyfriend came back from the war. after dinner they left us alone.” on a black background. If one clicks the text, one is led to a new, compound image of two pictures, a window and two figures in opposite ends of the screen, both in cruddy quality and black and white against the black background. If one clicks the image of the two seated figures, one is led to a string of links involving text and image (beginning with a close-up of a woman’s face) which exist in a table with now-visible bars separating cells. As the links are clicked, new images and text—which seems to be snippits of dialogue—appear in new boxes or replace them with new cells within the original cell. This growth of cells and change of dialogue text and images creates something of a fractal pattern, leading the viewer forward until all the clicking leaves the majority of the cells blank, with only the original cells (with the window and seated figures) and the last cell with the artist’s information in the bottom right remain.

“My Boyfriend” has become a wildly popular work, with multiple imitations in multiple new media (and even “old” media, like gouache), and for a clear reason: this artwork is not like other works comprising the field of new media art. Not only does it store the majority of its apparent worth and meaning in its visual elements (unlike works like “Telegarden” and “BorderXing”), but it appears to be art-like instead of a potential error or mess of color, like “Jodi.org” might be perceived to be. For a quotidian, non-art-based viewer, “My Boyfriend” is a welcome, organically-artlike change from the I Can’t Believe It’s Really Considered Art! material the contemporary field has been producing. That it is visually appealing certainly doesn’t imply, at least for this viewer, that the work suffers from a lack of deeper thought of which more overtly conceptual work may boast. Lialina outlines something that is far from a linear conversation, far from the soap-opera-esque material the subject matter may otherwise produce. It involves temporal and spatial change in the process of clicking through the links and reading the images and dialogue clips, much in the same way a typical conversation may progress; but since the information that is clicked into is so obviously disjointed, the viewer is gently but firmly advised to read the conversation as something greater than literal. To me, the conversation being outlined is very psychological, the run-through of a very fresh memory and the things seen or focused upon when each phrase was uttered. They change in size related to proportion of importance; they progress not based on when they were said or whom they were said by, but as the situation was experienced mentally later. Once the thought of a phrase has been considered, it is left blank instead of dangling. To me, this implies that the conversation has ended—there is nothing left to be said, nothing overtly undecided about the situation for the characters that experienced it. It is only the viewer left to decide what the result of the conversation was, which keeps the experience compelling. It is specifically through the devices of expansion, of disappearance and the act of clicking, accessible only through the medium of HTML and the internet, that the story gets the meat of its importance.