Digital Folklore, (Book) Presentation by Olia Lialina

Date: November 9th, 2010
Start: 20.00 (door open 19.30 hrs)
Admittance: 2,50
Language: English

Glittering star screen savers, images of cute kittens and rainbow gradients, we all know and either love or hate them for their kitsch qualities. Some might even say they represent the demise of culture and taste itself and even if you do like them, you probably do so because of their shallow aesthetics.

Moscow born artist Olia Lialina (1971), however, describes them as digital folklore, created by users for users and as the most important, beautiful and misunderstood language of new media. Digital Folklore encompasses the customs, traditions and elements of visual, textual and audio culture that emerged from users' engagement with personal computer applications during the last decade of the 20th and the first decade of the 21st century. So it doesn't matter who invented the computer, the mouse or the world wide web, what matters is that people started using them to express themselves. Only then did these technical innovations become relevant to culture at large.

During a presentation which will take place on the 9th of November at the Netherlands Media Art Institute Lialina will discuss in depth the subject of Digital Folklore and the book on this subject which she developed and edited in collaboration with artist and musician Dragan Espenschied. http://digital-folklore.org/

Lialina graduated as a journalist and a filmcritic at Moscow state university in 1993 and has produced many influential works of network-based art in the last decade. Her web projects include My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996) which won 3rd prize in the Sao Paulo web art contest in 1997, Agatha Appears (1997) and First Real Net Art Gallery (1998). Currently she is affiliated with the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany as professor at the department of New Media. She has curated several exhibitions and festivals in Germany and Russia and has participated in many exhibitions, talks and presentations. She writes on digital culture, net art and web vernacular and is the author of Last Real Net Art Museum, Newspapers Online and the Most beautiful webpage. Digital Folklore is not Espenschied and Lialina's first collaborative project, they have worked together on several artistic projects like Zombie & Mummy, Newspapers Online and Midnight.

She will be introduced by Josephine Bosma, an Amsterdam based writer and critic on net art.