Olia Lialina's Hosted: A Performance, One Stroke at a Time
Josephine Bosma
She always asks us to dive in deep. The work of Olia Lialina seldom simply opens up at the surface. This smart former film critic discovered the internet and found in it a new way to talk about structure, appearance and poetry. She became an artist almost instinctively, and makes moving, intelligent and witty Web art works since 1996. While some of her art works have become legendary, the critic in her never stopped working. Today Lialina is one of the leading voices about what it means to make art in the information age. Her art reflects, follows and precedes her thinking. With her new work Hosted Olia Lialina takes a new step in her reassessment of our presence in the Web.
The Bucket Metaphor
It really is a deconstruction. Compared to earlier work like Summer (2013), Hosted is at first glance a stripped down, basic affair. The poetry does not reveal itself instantly. The opening page gives a set of instructions we must follow. We are told which keyboard commands to use. Then a long list of Web addresses must be clicked. It seems endless. While clicking away almost automatically one cannot escape capturing the names of some of the websites. Every address leads to a completely different destination. Most addresses are nearly unreadable design nightmares, deep links so you will. Lialina makes our browser chase all over the Web, but it is a part of the Web that feels unfamiliar.
With Hosted Olia Lialina continues her exploration of the Web address as signifier of the culture, the economy and the politics underlying the Web. In each work she focuses on a different aspect of it. Hosted is a tour de force. It is a performance using "5 clouds, 70 free hosting services, and 7000 buckets". A cloud in this case refers to companies offering computer memory space through the internet. Hosting services are companies offering Web space to for example create a website on. A bucket is a container of data, and in Hosted it is the kind used as an infrastructural element of the Web. Here buckets are "units of large scale [data] object storage in cloud services like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Cloud, etc. (..) There are no directories. Data cannot be changed, only deleted, etc, they just map a URL to data. Buckets are optimized to serve data for huge web applications, like Vimeo, Youtube, Instagram, Tumblr, basically any larger web service. Users are not supposed to see these URLs typically."(1)
With each Web address we click in the Hosted list a new tab opens in our browser. Each tab shows a picture Lialina uploaded to a different hosting, social or publishing service. Each picture contains water. To move from picture to picture we need to push two keys on the keyboard. The pictures then show, in filmic sequence, Olia Lialina doing breaststroke in a swimming pool. If we click fast enough the browser turns into a kind of zoetrope. There are weird glitches though, errors in the sequence. They are caused by the way some of the hosts change or limit the data they receive. The odd jumps in picture size feel like an intrusion, a resistance from within the hosts towards the activities of their users. There is a strange discrepancy between the calming coolness of the swimmer in the blue water and the crude technological spams in the flow of images.
What is Performed
Olia Lialina calls Hosted a performance. It seems the first time she calls one of her works so, even if she appears in quite a few of them. She was a .gif model in Summer or Best Effort Network (2015), and an 'actor' in her famous first work My Boyfriend Came Back From The War (1996), an attempt to make something close to cinema for the Web. What makes Hosted different? Earlier works also included many jumps from server to server (when most Web artworks stay on one server), each time showing a different destination in the browser's toolbar. These jumps not just represent the different computers and server spaces each page in the work is located on, but also the logistical differences and vast space between them. These works are all in some way or another performances than, restaged slightly differently each time because of network protocols, which makes internet traffic always take the most efficient route. In Hosted part of this particular element of the work's performance is 'outsourced', placed in the hands of the audience.
In Hosted Olia Lialina is at the mercy of her public. It seems a risk she takes. To compare Hosted again to Summer: whereas in the latter her movement was in the hands of trusted friends that hosted part of her 'film' sequence (the .gif), in Hosted there is not a straightforward trust, but an entrusting. Where earlier works depended on hardware and software in terms of speed and performativity, now it is the audience, you and me, who control not just if, but also how fast Olia Lialina swims across the screen. And when we interact with the work our experience co-depends on the performance of the network and the individual hosts, who can decide at any time to delete one of the 'frames' in the sequence. This the artist expects. It is an intentional part of the work. Ultimately, therefore, this is a fragile and awkward performance. But does it move?
Remarkably, despite all the hurdles in terms of getting beyond the instructions and installing all tabs, it does. What makes Olia Lialina stand out is her remarkable balancing of narrative, of poetic visual language and technological skill. She is a master of emotions. In Hosted the balance is fragile, but there it is, your reward for installing all those tabs: the blue water that fills the screen, the mesmerizing sparkles of light dancing off it, and the swimmer, gliding through the water, slowly, endlessly. And part of you swims there too.
Olia Lialina in email interview.
Josephine Bosma is a critic and theorist living and working in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She specializes in art in the context of the Internet. Her writings on net art and net culture appear in numerous magazines, books and catalogues, both on- and offline, from Ars Electronica, Telepolis, Mute, and DU to Metropolis M and Frieze D/E. In 2011 her book Nettitudes - Let's Talk Net Art appeared. Since 2011 Josephine Bosma is an external PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. She regularly acts as advisor and jury member in the area of art, science and technology.