Digital Societies Prof. Olia Lialina Thursday, October 24, 2019, 6:15–8:00 pm They may call it home The lecture is part of the main topic “Digital Societies” of the fellow period 2016–2020 at Collegium Helveticum. The title is borrowed from Tim Berners-Lee’s sarcastic remark on people’s first home pages, which he saw rather as garden gnomes than gardens. This attitude is as old as the WWW itself. While early web users were building their online worlds (realms, lairs and retreats), evangelists, IT and design worlds were making fun of these visions. The talk suggests to revisit old home pages to see what kind of digital society was in construction and what got unnoticed behind chaotic GIFs and loud MIDIs. Prof. Olia Lialina is born in Moscow and now based in Germany, Olia Lialina is among the best-known participants in the 1990s net.art scene – an early-days, network-based art pioneer. Her early work had a great impact on recognizing the Internet as a medium for artistic expression and storytelling. This century, her continuous and close attention to Internet architecture, “net.language” and vernacular web – in both artistic and publishing projects – has made her an im- portant voice in contemporary art and new media theory. Lialina is also known for using herself as a GIF model, and is credited with founding one of the earliest web galleries, Art Teleportacia. She is cofounder and keeper of One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive and a professor at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany. When Speaker Thursday, October 24, 2019 Prof. Olia Lialina 6:15 – 8:00 pm (Merz Akademie Stuttgart) Where Collegium Helveticum Schmelzbergstrasse 25 8006 Zurich www.collegium.ethz.ch.