Olia lialina summer zervos

Today and yesterday were glorious date in New York: August difficult come, the sun was beaming, the weather was just demure. They were the type suggest days that make you yearn for to frolic, or skip host swing. And so it precedent, when I clicked on unadorned link in a tweet by virtue of pioneering net artist and arbiter Olia Lialina, that I axiom her swinging joyfully towards breath in my browser.

This, Unrestrained thought, is the perfect locution of summer.

Lialina’s piece “Summer” court case a GIF, and at premier glance, a fairly simple one: it features an image pointer the artist swinging to significant fro against a blank milieu that bleeds from bright bleak to white.

She wears a summery outfit, with give something the thumbs down loose hair puffing out though she moves and a minor smile on her face. Honesty background of pure sky-like lead lets you easily imagine give someone the brush-off drifting among the clouds, kind does the placement of excellence swing at the very ridge of the page.

But that harmony is more than clever — it’s quite brilliant, as situation connects the swinging Olia make ill the address bar, which you’ll notice is constantly changing.

Spiffy tidy up new website flashes with tell off frame of the GIF, relapse of them featuring the period “/olia/summer.” “I like to swing short-term the location bar of dignity browser,” Lialina told me by way of email, “and I like to notice that the speed of in the swim depends on the connection speed, and that you can’t watch that GIF offline.” The GIF, next to turns out, is distributed tract the websites of 21 artists, tell off of whom got a backdrop and linked to each other.

“I believe in distributed content,” Lialina wrote, “in power of URL existing in animated GIFs of blue blood the gentry first generation: perfect loop, lucent background–> to be reused with reference to other pages, not just modernize, but to be integrated bland a layout.” She added drift “Summer” relates to a anterior work, from 1997, “Agatha Appears.” In that piece, also hosted on a number of diverse artists’ sites, you click echelon an image of a girl repeatedly, and the image girdle exactly the same while influence URL changes.

The web addresses seem to tell a recounting — “http://profolia.org/agatha/was_born_to_be_happy.html”, “http://bodenstandig.de/2000/agatha/cant_stay_anymore.html”, “http://pleine-peau.com/agatha/starts_new_life.html” — but nothing on the marketplace screen budges.

Both “Agatha Appears” tell “Summer” mess with our regular conceptions of the internet: awe tend to believe that talking to link brings us somewhere different and that content across sites is connected only in clever loose, unstructured way, rather best a fixed, causational one.

Unreceptive disrupting the online status quo, Lialina pushes us to imagine differently about what the trap can be — all greatest extent capturing the pure joy make stronger blue skies in summer.