A virtual flip book imbued with all of the hiccups that web browsing affords— broken links, loading speeds and errors, user attention deficits to name a few — Olia Lialina’s work Hosted (2020) shows us the materiality of the web address, the digital artifact. The visitor manually opens a space for each image frame, and constructs the work mechanically, through hand-driven information, highlighting the strange way we are connected in an embodied way to images across the web of data. The still image Outtake (2020) shown in this virtual exhibition is simply one frame of the whole distributed work, posted and processed on the GYPHY site. It’s a snapshot in time that forces us to deconstruct our notions of technological representation on a fundamental level, for the degraded and shrunken GIF file was altered so irrevocably that it wasn’t suitable for Hosted, and wound up on the cutting room floor — and then in this exhibit.
A virtual flip book imbued with all of the hiccups that web browsing affords— broken links, loading speeds and errors, user attention deficits to name a few — Olia Lialina’s work Hosted (2020) shows us the materiality of the web address, the digital artifact. The visitor manually opens a space for each image frame, and constructs the work mechanically, through hand-driven information, highlighting the strange way we are connected in an embodied way to images across the web of data. The still image Outtake (2020) shown in this virtual exhibition is simply one frame of the whole distributed work, posted and processed on the GYPHY site. It’s a snapshot in time that forces us to deconstruct our notions of technological representation on a fundamental level, for the degraded and shrunken GIF file was altered so irrevocably that it wasn’t suitable for Hosted, and wound up on the cutting room floor — and then in this exhibit.
Thank you, Mary!
Thank you, Nick!