GIVE ME TIME/THIS PAGE IS NO MORE

Olia Lialina (Russia)

WEST WARD WORKS - PART OF THE GROUP EXHIBITION MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY: EXCAVATIONS
Guthrie Street
DD1 5BR

“There are two types of homepages that break my heart on a daily basis. Ones that promise that soon—very soon, in two weeks, or till the end of the year, or when school starts or stops—the page will be built…Others are goodbye pages. Their masters say that they fail, or that they got real life or the real domain name, or that they are angry about Yahoo or rude comments. Both could be last updated on the same day and appear next to each other in the archives timeline.” Olia Lialina

This slide projection documents the lifecycle of GeoCities web pages, the now-defunct web hosting service. GeoCities was founded in July 1994 by “Beverly Hills Internet” and quickly became one of the most popular hosting services on the web. With the advent and professionalisation of web design, Geocities became synonymous with bad taste. As social media ascended, GeoCities users continued to dwindle, until October 26 2009 when GeoCities hosting services came to a grinding halt. Internet activists and archivists managed to download a terabyte worth of webpages hosted on GeoCities. Give me time/This page is no more presents Lialina’s archival study into this unprecedented cache of user culture.

About the Artist:

Moscow-born, Germany-based artist Olia Lialina (Russia/Germany) has, for the past two decades, produced many influential works of network-based art: My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996), Agatha Appears (1997), First Real Net Art Gallery (1998), and Last Real Net Art Museum (2000), Online Newspapers (2004-2017) Summer (2013). She is a professor at Merz Akademie in Germany. Lialina writes on digital culture, net art and web vernacular. Her work has been exhibited extensively online and at venues including the New Museum, New York; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Transmediale, Berlin; Havana Biennial, Cuba; ACAF, Alexandria; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; ABC Gallery, Moscow; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Madison Square Park, New York; Barbican, London; LEAP, Berlin; MOTI, Breda, HEK, Basel, The Kitchen, NY, Whitechapel, London among others.