303 East 8th Avenue Tuesday to Saturday Vancouver, British Columbia Noon to 5:00 pm PST V5T 1S1 Canada September 9th - October 22nd 2016 Asymmetrical Response Cory Arcangel Olia Lialina In military parlance the terms have been active throughout. With this asymmetrical and symmetrical are transition to mass medium, digitality employed to refer to political provocations has become a normative experience. and diplomatic démarches, escalation Omnipresent and increasingly invisible and tension, and power dynamics of the technology has focused attention on the highest order. Not specific to war, these content of our digital lives, the outputs of terms also refer more generally to a set technology. Lialina and Arcangel remain of conditions that define our relationship adamantly preoccupied with the medium to power. specificity—hardware, software and networks—that generates this content, Since their first meeting on the eve of Y2K, and most significantly, the diminishing Russian -born Olia Lialina, one of the best status of the computer user within. known participants in the 1990s net.art scene, and American artist Cory Arcangel In the early years of the world wide web have been involved in a deeply symmetrical users created content for their personal relationship. Uniting them is an abiding web pages through html code, the preoccupation with the relationship technological frame in which the content between people and their computers, appeared, affording them a degree of in particular computers connected to agency over their online presence. In the the internet. Their awareness of the era of social media and template-based cultural implications of the internet’s web pages, it is nearly impossible to use technical context—as it has shifted from our computers, or express ourselves a tool for military communications, to on the web in ways other than what is the “information superhighway” that dictated to us by Apple or Facebook. A promised open and equal exchange, to prolific writer and historian of internet the increasingly asymmetric “content vernaculars, Lialina maps this broad delivery system” it has become today— shift in the user/computer relationship to has resulted in two complex bodies of a number of important, industry driven work in constant conversation with each linguistic translations. other, seen here together for the first time. Computers become Technology The evolution of the internet has been Interface becomes Experience mirrored by a generational progression of Users become People artists using it as a medium for expression. From the early net.artists (of which Olia According to her line of thinking, Lialina was a prominent participant) who computers can be programmed and were experimenting with the internet reprogrammed at any instant. Users are as an entirely new platform, through in control of their computers, whereas the subsequent generations for whom the more generic people are unable to exert web shifted from a new medium to a the same control over their technology. mass medium, Lialina and Arcangel Instead technology becomes something intuitively experienced, causing users to media environment Online Newspapers forget that their devices are computers refl ects a multitude of confl icts: the that can be creatively used, programmed, perpetual obsolescence of technology, the and played with in ways other than what broad disruption of traditional journalism is prescribed. This shift in language engendered by the web, and the demotion reveals the ideological biases on which of user to “commenter” in our current contemporary technology, both software mainstream media landscape. and hardware, is built. The work Asymmetrical Response Lialina has made serious study of early illustrates a more overt confl ict. A clear web culture and aesthetics, charting gif is an early web convention used by signifi cant typologies, developments and designers to layout their pages. This confl icts. Earlier DIY approaches to web 1x1 transparent pixel is also a simple page making included infi nite variations form of analytics and surveillance that on “starry night” backgrounds, bulleted can be used by web developers to track lists of “things I like” and animated users to any web page. Blingee.com is gifs borrowed through the “view a popular image generator and online source” function of your web browser. community that allows users to create Standardized online interfaces like and share sparkling, blinged out images. Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat limit Controversially, this miniscule 1x1 pixel users to content sharing, likes and now , lurks behind Blingee’s code and prevents , or . The custom wallpapers covering its users from sharing their custom bling- the gallery, MeetMyDog, PersonalPageBlue making elements as freely as they would and CelebrityBckgd3 were a direct attempt want. In an asymmetric response, Blingee by Yahoo.com to “clean up” its amateur users created and distributed a 400x400 user’s web pages with prefab templates. transparent gif that rendered Blingee’s Lialina considers these early templates an clear gif irrelevant. These pixels, displayed opening salvo in the asymmetrical confl ict here, are invisible but powerful weapons between corporate led technologies and in the war between users and technology computer users. providers. For Online Newspapers, French Edition, The free web hosting service Geocities.com Liberation Lialina revives a 90s amateur was founded by “Beverly Hills Internet” aesthetic, pairing it with content from the in July 1995 and soon became one of the mainstream press. It imagines how major most popular hosting services on the web. media outlets, that grew in dominance With the advent and professionalization during the Web 2.0 era, might appear of Web 2.0 Geocities became synonymous were they developed by the lay journalists for bad taste. As “social media” ascended, whose aesthetic choices defi ned web Geocites users continued to dwindle, culture before the dot-com boom. By until the 26th of October 2009 when creating a faux precedent to today’s online Geocities was extinguished. Archive Team, a group of internet activists/ youth which composed a significant user archivists, managed to download almost base, identifying trends, basic technical a terabyte of Geocities pages and on the patterns and typologies. This research 1st of November 2010 Lialina and her became the work Body Class Pimp a series partner Dragan Espenschied embarked of images which highlights how users on a massive archival project to study this like “damlos” and “halim71” masterfully unprecedented cache of user culture. Of matched backgrounds and profile images her ongoing research into this archive to create nuanced self-portraits that made Lialina has said, “There are two types of themselves visible online. homepages that break my heart on the (Nothing You Can Compare to Your daily basis. Ones that promise that soon Neighborhood Hoe) distills multiple eras of — very soon, in two weeks, or till the internet user culture: a readymade in the end of the year, or when school starts or form of a Tumblr page featuring Lialina’s stops — the page will be built...Others are infamous 2005 work, Animated Gif Model. goodbye pages. Their masters say that Designed to be shared on the web, her hula they fail, or that they got real life or the hooping avatar has appeared on countless real domain name, or that they are angry websites, in various resolutions and about Yahoo or rude comments. Both contexts. Neighborhood Hoe, which takes could be last updated on the same day and its title from a line in the David Guetta appear next to each other in the archives song is a radical rejection of template- timeline. that makes my experience even based social media. User ursulagaiofatto. more dramatic.“ The slide projection Give tumblr.com’s page stands as a testament to me time/This page is no more juxtaposes the abiding appeal of early web principles: more than 200 of these pages, poignantly tiled backdrops, pixelated animated gifs, documenting the life-cycle and pathos of poor quality audio files, and images the Geocities community. borrowed and recontextualized without Similarly extinct is Hyves, once the attribution. number one social network in the Watching Neighborhood Hoe is a work from Netherlands from 2004 until it finally Cory Arcangel’s sculpture series Screen- succumbed to Facebook in 2011. Unlike Agers, Tall Boys, and Whales. Made from Facebook with its standardized blue ubiquitous colourful flotation devices, and white template, Hyves allowed for these “dressed up pool noodles” appear as a “pimp my profile” approach which bodies adorned with brands and devices. allowed users a high degree of control Representing typologies of youth culture over the appearance of their profile the “tween” sculpture Frozen, with its pages. Upon learning of Hyves’ imminent Elsa branded headphones and iPod nano shutdown Lialina, the digital folklorist, playing “Let it Go” points to another shift scrolled through thousands of Hyves user in the vernacular use of technology. Our profiles, in particular the immigrant interface and outputs are no longer simply screen-based, but have rematerialized as performance that tease out the difficulty products. of preserving an experience through its related objects. AUDMCRS, and the genre The consumer nature of the tech object is of music it represents, also interrogates an increasingly central point for Arcangel. the role of users, populism and personal Diamond Plate is both a reference to preference in the assignment of historic 90s web culture (and the background and cultural value. image of his first ever website) but also how the internet, art and internet art In Lakes the problem of objects, vis-à-vis function as product. This wall to wall digital technology, is expressed through carpet transforms the gallery into a a conflation of consumer technology, showroom for the display of objects, a nod pop culture and web aesthetics. Images to the art market’s historical reluctance to of a Seinfeld DVD, Hillary Clinton’s embrace internet art and the artist’s own 2014 autobiography and a smoking, dog strategies to overcome it.