MY BOYFRIEND CAME BACK FROM THE WAR by Olia Lialina 1996

MY BOYFRIEND CAME BACK FROM THE WAR by Olia Lialina1996

Olia Lianlina's website, MY BOYFRIEND CAME BACK FROM THE WAR, is a fun interactive website. It is totally in black and white, but it holds my attention because I cannot stop clicking on the messages that appear. I have to know what is going to be said next.
I think that it is important to net.art history because it shows a different way of telling a story or an event in a person's life. It is about 50% words and 50% pictures. When you click on some of the pictures and all of the words, you are guided through some sort of conversation between a girl and her boyfriend. He ends up wanting to get married right away, but they decide that it would be better to wait.

"The Russian artist Olia Lialina launched the first gallery for internet art, which is actually aiming at selling the pieces, "Art.Teleportacia"."

"Olia Lialina (born May 4, 1971 in Moscow) is a pioneer Internet artist and theorist as well as an experimental film and video critic and curator. Lialina studied film criticism and journalism at Moscow State University, graduating in 1993, then followed with art residencies at C3 (Budapest, 1997) and Villa Walderta (Munich, 1998).^[1]

She founded Art Teleportacia, a web gallery of her work, which also features links to remakes of her most famous work "My boyfriend came back from the war" ^[2] and was one of the organisers and later, director of Cine Fantom, an experimental cinema club in Moscow co-founded in 1995 by Lialina with Gleb Aleinikov, Andrej Silvestrov, Boris Ukhananov, Inna Kolosova and others."

In developing my character in Project II, I am somewhat influenced by My Boyfriend Came Back From the War by Olia Lialina. I like the use of the black background, plus I want to give tidbits of information about my character, the Wicked Witch of the West. Instead of her having conversations with someone else, she is kind of having a conversation with herself to try to tell her side of the events. I want to try to explain why she is showing up at the same place the other characters are, especially since she is definitely not a friend of theirs.

When I start to develop the place for my character, I would like to use some aspects of Heath Bunting's A Visitor's Guide to London. I like how it is in black and white and how the buttons that take you to different places, are not in the same place on the different pages that they take you to. I may and may not have the places that I put in Project II in black and white. I have not decided yet, but I may do similar things with some of my buttons like Heath Bunting does in A Visitor's Guide to London. Out of all of the websites that showed places, this is the one that I liked the most.

Siberian Deal by Kathy Rae Huffman and Eva Wohlgemuth, 1995

In the "Siberian Deal" website, places are shown in snapshots taken of people and places where they went to buy items for trade with people in Siberia. "My idea was to buy things not for myself, but to trade them in Siberia. Thus it was actually more fun to shop - I was completly free to choose, it was just the appeal of the object, I could follow - I didn`t have to matter about sizes or how things would match with others. I bought 10 objects in 2 hours - and felt really good after that -" In the snapshot above, the woman on the left is holding two porcelain figurines that she took in trade for her straw broom. They about the person that they traded with and their experiences that they had with the person that they traded with. The way that they represent the different countries, to me, feels more like a log or record taken of their experiences and who they experienced them with. On one page they show a few movies of the item that they bought morphing into the one that they traded for. I believe that the Quicktime movies of the one object morphing into another is very specific to the medium of the Internet. Except for the morphing objects, the website is not all that technically fancy or difficult to make, but the information that they gathered and put on their website is strangely interesting.

Visitor's Guide to London by Heath Bunting

Visitor's Guide to London by Heath Bunting 1995

Heath Bunting represents London or different well known areas of London with black and white drawings. He uses different directional signs as buttons in the bottom right hand corner of the page to lead you to different places in London. The use of buttons is a characteristic that is specific to the medium of the Internet. By being able to use buttons, Heath Bunting is able to bounce the viewer from place to place depending on which button the viewer chooses to use. This would not be possible if the viewer was viewing his Visitor's Guide to London in book or magazine form. The total control of the viewing would be in the hands of the viewer instead of by some manipulation of Heath Bunting. I feel that by viewing it on the Internet and having Heath Bunting take you to different places according to which button you choose, gives it some fun element of surprise.

"Heath Bunting emerged from the 1980s committed to building open/ democratic communication systems and social contexts. He came from the street up, passing through and often revisiting graphity, performance, intervention, pirate radio, fax/ mail art and BBS systems to become an active participant in the explosion of the Internet.
Between 1994 and 1997 Bunting produced many Internet projects, which can be accessed at the server «www.irational.org» set-up by himself. Recently, he has moved into the field of genetics proclaiming it to be the next ‹new media›, and is also developing work in the area of physical network performance."