Olia Lialina

Who is Olia Lialina?

Olia Lialina 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, then followed with art residencies at C3 and Villa Walderta.

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" and was one of the organizers 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. "[My boyfriend came back from the war" is a site where there are many frames consisting of sentences and pictures. The user has a choice of clicking what frame they want. This relates to the Borgesian view because the user is allowed to choose their own path. In the sense that the frames are trying to formulate a sentence, but it doesn't really come out that way, this relates to Vannevar Bush's views. There hypertext creates different phrases in different frames, and the reader has to make sense of it on their own.