Montage: Unmonumental Online
Digital material is never natural. It iseither generated or repurposed, and
always pre-inscribed with meaning. It settles in sediments, turning the Web
into a veritable billboard land: a frenetic free market in which corporations, private citizens, and fictional conglomerates all wave their own signs. It is a landscape rich with fiction, contradictions, and disjuncture. The new quickly becomes obsolete, and the old is continually revived. Internet-based montage, the assemblage of distinct materials into a new whole, is therefore both an inevitable and perpetual accident and an emerging, illuminating art form....
Montage is the final exhibition in Unmonumental: the Object in the
21st Century at the New Museum
of Contemporary Art.
Launch Project 
Some Universe (2002)
Some Universe is a picture of an expansive cosmos, a seamless Web page that appears to scroll infinitely, but is, in fact, bounded and constructed of many different images Lialina culled from personal Websites. A seminal Internet artist, Lialina's work is interested in the evolution of Web imagery, the use and disuse of icons, and their underlying cultural resonance. Some Universe is a snapshot of a collective habit: the rampant use of stars online. The piece calls attention to the conception of the Internet as an alternate universe, uncharted and never-ending, and also to the fact that this conception is tied to a particular moment when users gravitated towards the now-outdated gif file format. Some Universe speaks critically to notions of "cyberspace" and "utopia" online, while simultaneously pushing forth an esthetic of beauty for the Web.
Born 1971, Moscow / Lives and works in Stuttgart, Germany. A pioneer Internet artist and theorist as well as an experimental film and video critic and curator. Lialina studied film criticism at Moscow State University from where she graduated in 1993. She was one of the organisers and later, director of Cine Fantom, an experimental cinema club in Moscow founded in 1995 by Gleb Aleinikovm. Since 1999, she has worked and taught at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart.
PROJECT URL:
rhizome.org/lialina
MAIN URL:
art.teleportacia.org
PROJECT URL:
rhizome.org/lialina
MAIN URL:
art.teleportacia.org