Olia Lialina — My Boyfriend Came Back From The War

1996

Artists: Olia Lialina · Year: 1996 · Medium: HTML frameset narrative · Substrate: HTML, black-and-white photographs, framesets that subdivide on click · Place: Moscow, Russia / later Stuttgart, Germany · Institution: Independent The work opens with a black-and-white photograph and a caption: "My boyfriend came back from the war. After dinner they left us alone." Click the photograph. The frame divides. A second photograph appears in the new frame. Click again. The frame divides further. By the time you have clicked a dozen times you are looking at a grid of small frames, each containing a fragment of a photograph or a phrase, the whole page subdivided into a dense mosaic of black-and-white silence. The structure is the work. Lialina chose HTML framesets — a technical feature of Netscape Navigator 2.0 from 1996 that allowed a page to be recursively subdivided into nested sub-pages — as the narrative substrate for a story about a relationship fragmenting after the return of a traumatized soldier. The framesets become smaller; the fragments of photograph and text become less complete; the negative space between the frames grows. The fragmentation of the page is the fragmentation of the relationship. The medium and the subject are the same thing. This is not obvious, in 1996, as a way to make art. HTML framesets were considered, by web developers, an ugly technical compromise; they were actively deprecated within a few years of the work's release. Lialina took the ugliest and most temporary feature of the 1996 web and used it to make the most durable piece of net art anyone had made. The work is still live at teleportacia.org/war, at the original 1996 URL, in a browser that no longer natively supports most of what Netscape 2.0 could do. It has been remade in PowerPoint, in Flash, in VR, in emoji — an informal canon of remakes now exists, and each one is a kind of homage. No other piece of net art has been remade so many times. Lialina runs the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age project, which documents the GeoCities-era web as a cultural stratum. She teaches at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart. She moved from Moscow in the late 1990s. My Boyfriend Came Back From The War is her first canonical work and, still, her most-cited one. Lore The page opens with a single image and a caption. Click, and the frame subdivides; click again, it subdivides further — a relationship fragmenting into smaller and smaller silences. It works perfectly in 2026 browsers on the original 1996 URL. It has been remade in PowerPoint, in emoji, in Flash, in VR. It may be the most-remade work of net.art in existence. Lialina trained as a film journalist in Moscow, moved to Germany, and built the most-cited non-English-language net-art archive: 'One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age,' documenting the GeoCities era. She still teaches new media design at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart. Sources • Rhizome — Net Art Anthology • teleportacia.org (Lialina's gallery, live since 1998) • Lialina, Olia — 'A Vernacular Web' (2005)