My Boyfriend Came Back From The War by Christoph Merian Verlag

My Boyfriend Came Back From The War online since 1996 HeK, Merz Akademie (Ed. / Hg.) Christoph Merian Verlag

MBCBFTW

My Boyfriend Came Back From The War online since 1996 Olia Lialina Sabine Himmelsbach and / und Olia Lialina for / f端r HeK and / und Merz Akademie Christoph Merian Verlag

With texts by / mit Texten von Michael Connor, Sabine Himmelsbach, Roman Leibov, Joanne McNeil, Bruce Sterling With works by / mit Werken von Inbal Shirin Anlen, Freya Birren, Masha Boriskina, Alejandro Duque, Entropy8Zuper! (Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn), Vadim Epstein, Dragan Espenschied, Márton Fernezelyi, JODI, Mike Konstantinov, Roman Leibov, Olia Lialina, Abe Linkoln, Guthrie Lonergan, Armin Medosch, Ignacio Nieto, Anna Russett, santo file (santofile.org), Joachim Schlesinger, Michael Schuberthan, Mark Wirblich, Callista Womick Designed by / Gestaltet von Manuel Bürger

WORDS / TEXTE

A B C D E

Sabine Himmelsbach, My Boyfriend Never Came Back From The War. Introduction Bruce Sterling, My Boyfriend Never Came Back From the Web Michael Connor, Speaking in Net Language: My Boyfriend Came Back from the War Roman Leibov, MBCBFTW Twenty Years Later: Memories of the Context Joanna McNeil, A Story Inside a Browser

Works / WERKE

X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 1

Armin Medosch, Michael Schuberthan, Joachim Schlesinger Vadim Epstein Roman Leibov Dragan Espenschied Masha Boriskina Entropy8Zuper! (Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn) Márton Fernezelyi Mike Konstantinov JODI Mark Wirblich Abe Linkoln Ignacio Nieto santo file (santofile.org) Alejandro Duque Callista Womick Freya Birren Guthrie Lonergan Anna Russett Inbal Shirin Anlen Olia Lialina

I/I

INVENTORY / INVENTAR

2016

Exhibition at HeK Basel / AUSSTELLUNG im HeK Basel

TRANSLATION / ÜBERSETZUNGEN

Ü ÜW

Translations into German Texts A-E / Übersetzung ins Deutsche der Texte A-E Translation of Artwork Texts X1-X20 / Übersetzung der Werktexte X1-X20

I/B

IMAGE CREDITS / BILDNACHWEIS

c/I

COLOPHON / IMPRESSUM (Publication / Buch, Acknowledgments / Dank, Exhibition / Ausstellung)

TABLE OF CONTENT / INHALTSVERZEICHNIS

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Roth, Evan, Artist Hacker: From Free Software to Fine Art, Quaranta, Domenico / Juárez, Geraldine (Ed.): The F.A.T. Manual (Brescia: Link Editions, 2013) p. 19. In 1996 the term Net.Art was used by a group of artists at a conference in Triest. By 1999 Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic was already predicting the end of Net.Art. Peter Weibel, in the exhibition catalog of “net_condition. Kunst/Politik im Online-Universum” (Karlsruhe: ZKM | Center for Art and Media, 1999) p. 6. Mader, Rachel, Kommentare aus dem Offside – netzbasierte Kunst und das Kunstsystem, Schwander, Markus / Storz, Reinhard (Eds.): Owning Online Art (Basel: FHNW Academy of Art and Design, 2010) p. 15. Detailed info also available in Huszai, Villö, Basels ambulanter Salon, in du. Die Zeitschrift der Kultur, issue 711, 2000, p. 21. myboyfriendcamebackfromth.ewar.ru [accessed on 18.01.16]. Lialina, Olia, Die Kunst reisst aus, du. Die Zeitschrift für der Kultur, issue 711, 2000, p. XLIV.

My Boyfriend Came Back From The War. online since 1996 Introduction by Sabine Himmelsbach “The Internet has allowed more and more individuals to become makers, participants and viewers of art and presents artists with the opportunity to speak to the equivalent of a packed football stadium on a daily basis. Artists have never had such a large and immediate influence on culture, and it would seem a missed opportunity not to recognize, welcome and engage this new online audience.” Evan Roth, F.A.T. Lab1

which, in its ambivalence, is just as much about love and loss as it is about the influence and impact of war on the individual. The work’s historical significance lies in the formal aspects of the use of hypertext in a new form of narration, where the online public can play an active role. But another central aspect of the work’s effective power is in the universality of its story. And that is what has inspired artists for more than 20 years; they have confronted the work or remixed it. Olia Lialina has collected 27 versions so far and selected 13 of them for the exhibition at the HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel). The opportunity to create this exhibition at HeK also enabled me to address the central role played by Basel in Switzerland’s history of artistic exploration of the Internet. In the 1990s, this city was a central “hub” in Switzerland for artists wanting to access and critically explore the global network. Artist Barbara Strebel became a pioneer in 1994 when she opened a branch of the international computer network “The Thing” in Basel.5 She and Reinhard Storz ran a media lab, called L@den, where an interested public could surf the net. But Strebel also organized workshops there for artists and shared technical know-how. It was a place of exchange and dialog for Switzerland’s budding net culture. In 2000, Basel also founded the [plug.in] Forum for New Media, a predecessor of the HeK. The institution was dedicated to exploring digital culture. So it made sense for us in Basel to mount a retrospective, looking back at 20 years of Net Art, using a key work from 1996 as leitmotif.

This year, 2016, marks the 20th anniversary of “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War (MBCBFTW),” a work by Russian Internet artist Olia Lialina. “MBCBFTW” is a classic from the pioneer phase of so-called Internet art, aka Net.Art.2 Back when there was no general standard of access to the World Wide Web, artists already were using the global network as a new medium. They were testing innovative approaches to group work, to the Internet’s potential as a global means of communication and to new models of distribution. In 1999, Net Art crossed the museum threshold: In an exhibition entitled “net_condition,” chief curator Peter Weibel – then newly appointed as director of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe – presented and demonstrated artistic positions in Net Art that identified the World Wide Web as a „driving force behind a radical economic, social and cultural revolution.”3 Olia Lialina is among those artists who explored the Internet’s artistic possibilities early on. “MBCBFTW” broke new ground – both as a work of Net Art and as an interactive narrative. It focuses on the story of two people who are trying to talk with each other about a war that has just ended. “MBCBFTW” is an online, hypertext narrative, “animated poetry” that “elevates the search for words to a principle of content and design.”4 This work of Net Art invites the user to click through the story,

Not long after she created her groundbreaking work “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War” Olia Lialina began to collect and document all takeoffs or remixes of the work, storing them in an archive she set up for this purpose. She called this experiment the “Last Real Net Art Museum,”6 describing it herself as a pantheon for her first project, “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War.”7 Lialina said in the 2006 interview “Dearest progressive scan loading. On victims of broadband” – also reproduced in this volume

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Olia Lialina, in the interview, “Dearest progressive scan loading, on victim’s of Broadband,” in this publication. Baumgärtel, Tilman, The Net.The Art 1994, du. Die Zeitschrift für der Kultur, issue 711, 2000, p. 55.

– that she considered the changes to her work through these remixes and reinterpretations by other artists to be a “sign of life”; as she put it, “Without feedback online work is not really alive.”8 The first item in this collection was created that same year, when Armin Medosch generated a “copy” of the work for the online magazine Telepolis and made it accessible via a new link. Lialina considered this a radical gesture of appropriation, because the identity of a work on the Internet consists of its address on the World Wide Web; thus the Telepolis version is a “copy.” In the exhibition, and also in this publication, the reinterpretations and remixes of her work are listed in chronological order and reflect the development of the World Wide Web as medium and technology – from wondrous rarity then, to omnipresence today. The various stages of the Internet’s development are traced in the projects’ structure and technical constitution: from HTML to Flash, Dotcom to e-commerce, from the website to the app. Media scientist Tilman Baumgärtel, one of the most prominent connoisseurs of Net Art, provides an impressive description of the rapid development of Internet technologies and their influence on aesthetics and art: “The earliest works of Net Art look older than they actually are, almost prehistoric, like Stone Age cave drawings.”9 In order to do justice to the original “look and feel” and to illustrate the developments leading to today’s ubiquitous Network – accessible everywhere through mobile devices – the works in the exhibition will be presented on the equipment of their own day. One of the earliest reflections on the original work is Vadim Epstein’s version from 1998. “Nemoy Paren’ Vernulsia s Vojni” is a Russian wordplay using the term “friend” on one hand and “speechlessness” on the other. Epstein’s work thus refers to the central role of language and narration in the original, replacing them in his work with images that allude again to the inability or failure of communication. The work of Masha Boriskina delivers an analog image, drawing and preserving one frame from the website as a gouache painting. Two further versions are dedicated to technological innovations and their creative possibilities for art. Dragan Espenschied transposes “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War” into a 3D environment based on VRML (Virtual Reality

Markup Language), a software environment of the late 1990s that promised a new spatial dimension of the digital. The artistic duo Entropy8Zuper! turned the original work into a Flash-Animation, emphasizing new possibilities for the moving image. The Dutch artist duo JODI used the engine of the first-person shooter computer game “Wolfenstein” in their interpretation, turning the original, framebased narrative into an abstract experience in which only fragments of the original are recognizable. For his part, Mark Wirblich emphasizes the marketing aspect, printing and selling online t-shirts with the title of the work and the added line, “and all I got was this stupid t-shirt.” Chilean artist and curator Ignacio Nieto provides a reflection on the work’s structural level; in 2005, he used the form of Lialina’s original to tell the story of a national catastrophe in which soldiers died during a routine training mission in the mountains. Artist Freya Birren’s work, “M.B.C.B.F.T.W. (Redux, At Rest” (2012), is another contemporary adaption of form and content; her video-collage using Post-It notes refers back to the frames of Lialina’s original while protesting against the absurdity of a specific military campaign in the Iraq war. Breaking the mold is Guthrie Lonergan’s web application, “My Burger Came Back From the War” (2012), whose title refers to the original; the only other similarities are formal. Anna Russett’s “My boyfriend live-tweeted the war” from 2014 brings the story into the age of social networking, which now dominates the Internet. Scavenged Tweets create an imaginary dialogue as it might occur today. And Inbal Shirin Anlen’s replica, “My Place or Yours” (2015) brings the aspect of the relationship back to the foreground and refers to the universality of the theme in Lialina’s original.

The fourteen works shown at the HeK are from the collection of the aforementioned “Last Real Net Art Museum,” whose entire portfolio now comprises 27 versions. Under Lialina’s care, the archive has become a work in itself, transforming over the years, constantly recontextualizing and revitalizing the original. In the exhibition at HeK, all the information on the original is listed in a huge inventory across a wall: Biographical information, technical details, connecting links within the code, all of which open up new perspectives for the understanding of the work.

My thanks… About a year ago, Olia Lialina came to me with a proposal for an exhibition project and publication. I owe her my very special thanks. Her enthusiasm, expertise and dedication have made this project a reality. In the exhibition, the amazing trajectory of Lialina’s work, “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War” – which has been online since 1996 and continues to inspire and challenge artists – will illuminate the rapid development of Internet technologies and the accompanying radical changes in society. I want to thank the artists who have participated with great enthusiasm, helping us create a fascinating retrospective that traces the impact of a central work of 1990s Net Art, a work that lives on through new interpretations and versions and whose historical dimension offers insight into Net Art production and into the changes in the Internet itself. An important and heartfelt thanks goes to the Merz Academy, especially Markus Merz. The Merz Academy has made this publication possible with a substantial financial commitment and with great enthusiasm. For HeK the Merz Academy is a highly valued partner, as a place for scientific research and artistic experimentation that early on reflected the informational transformation in its curriculum. The pedagogy and publications of the Academy are informed by the changing cultural, aesthetic and technological conditions of the Information Age or Media Age, and the challenges and opportunities they present for art. Olia Lialina has been teaching there for several years as a professor, sharing her extensive knowledge about Net Art – from its inception to today – with a new generation of designers and artists. The publication designer, Manuel Bürger, also studied at the Merz Academy and is now a lecturer there.

with the new interpretations and reflections by other artists lining up in loose chronological order. For Olia Lialina, a central goal of the exhibition is to make hardware and software visible. We wish to thank the Department of Conservation and Restoration of the University of the Arts in Bern – and especially Agatha Jarzyk – for providing historical equipment. But to create the sense of authenticity, we also needed to reproduce the historical conditions of the Internet. In the early days, it took a long time to load an image; a click did not bring you to a new frame within fractions of a second. For the emulation software that mimics the Internet of the 1990s we owe our thanks to Dragan Espenschied, conservator for digital art at Rhizome in New York, as well as to the bwFLA research team of Professor Klaus Rechert at the University of Freiburg, which did the groundwork for obtaining net-based art. Thanks to their software emulation, we can appreciate the poetry of the original 1990s works; the tension and silences between the two protagonists of this Net Art – their waiting, their love and their loss – take on a creative dimension. Lastly, I also want to thank my team at HeK. Only with their committed and active participation and readiness to assist could this exhibition, “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War. online since 1996,” become a reality.

A big thank you also goes to Andreas Wenger, director of the Institute of Interior Design and Scenography at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, who developed the scenography for the exhibition. Both sensitive and precise, Wenger created a space that does justice to the works and creates a linking thematic framework. Olia Lialina’s original work from 1996 is placed center stage, as if in a laboratory,

My Boyfriend Never Came Back From the Web Bruce Sterling It’s my pleasure to explain “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War,” because there has never been a time when this important work of art didn’t need plenty of critical explanation. Somebody else explained this work to me once, on a mailing list, as I recall. That explanation was all about the use of “frames.” At that time (since I was and am a mere novelist), I had no understanding of “frames” as Internet technology. Better yet, frames as Internet technology are almost extinct nowadays, so there’s little practical need to explain frames to anybody any more. However, “frames” are a feature that cinema has always possessed, and this fact was a key to understanding. “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War” is an artist’s struggle to get the haywire, newfangled web to speak a classic, cinematic language. The work was black and white and silent, much like early European cinema. It also had a distinct atmosphere of struggle, of someone diligently pressing a primitive technology to do more than its hardware could properly achieve. Watching Olia fight with those frames was like witnessing a silent-film pioneer trying to invent close-ups, tracking shots, or montages. For, you see, the network could be net.art. The net could have its own language. The Internet could be expressive. “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War” was, in short, a propaganda of the deed. In its modest fashion, it was a Russian’s digitalrevolutionary gesture. Not many witnessed it or understood its promise of transformation, but those who grasped that didn’t forget it. Various people were always tinkering with web code, and as a sometime technology journalist I was aware of that activity. The early web was many things to many interest groups: It was scientific, it was military, it was fiber-optic engineering and computer science, and it was rapidly

becoming a commercialized design field. However, “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War” was radically different. It was difficult, a natural reference point for the cognoscenti. It was a proof that the web was a medium of art expression, and not just any kind of art expression but one of a new kind. It was strange, because it was Russian, and yet it was free. It had no credits, no promotional budget, it demanded nothing from the viewer. Also – and this part of its appeal may have been underestimated – it was sad. It was a melancholy work, unlike the standard 1990s enthusiasms of Silicon Valley, with their boisterous narratives full of upbeat promise about booming digital prosperity. “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War” was a soulful confession, really, concerning a young woman and her young man. Since it was composed of fragmentary frames, the viewer had to infer most of the situation. He’d been called away from their romance to do his military duty, and he’d come back to the narrator girlfriend, more or less in one piece – and yet he just wasn’t the same. The fragmented bits of dialogue were exclusively from her point of view; the ruined male veteran didn’t seem to have much to offer her, or to us. “Do you like my new dress?” was one of her plaintive gestures at emotional reconnection. Unconvincing hints suggested that maybe they’d get married, as they had once clearly wanted to do. But since the work never concluded – it just wandered the Internet’s screens in its traumatic little wilderness of broken frames – one had the strong intuition that all was not well with them as a couple. Worse yet, all would never be well. It felt like a tale told in retrospect, maybe a drowsing, aging woman staring at her ceiling and recalling moments that had gone wrong with her dream romance, in an empty series of fruitless regrets. It was a simple artwork, but it had an outsized impact. It was strong, yet it was hard to understand why such an artwork would even exist. The natural response of most Western-based artists to an advent of this kind would be: “Who would ever pay for a strange thing like that?” Olia Lialina hadn’t asked anyone for payment. She wasn’t even jealous for fame. This young Moscow film scholar had such a modest profile

that she was commonly mistaken for “Lia,” a female Viennese code artist whose work in computer graphics, although admirable, was nothing at all like the filmic work of “Olia Lialina.” Finding this artwork on the web was like haunting a commercial bookstore and discovering that a woman had hidden her diary on the shelves. Instead of buying it, one felt a vague urge to track her down and give it back to her, somehow. Many artists, in many corners of the world, were inspired by this gesture. Net.art was always about giving back. At the time of “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War,” somewhat well-known artists were paid rather large sums to dabble in CD-ROM properties. CD-ROMs were plastic disks resembling vinyl records, so they had a clear business model. They could be sold in shrink-wrapped boxes and they made sense as commercial properties. Uncounted millions of CD-ROMs were indeed sold, into the vanished period culture of stand-alone desktop computers. Alas, they’re all forgotten. “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War” is almost as archaic, technically, as a CD-ROM. However, as an artistic intervention in the frontier of net.art, it’s never been forgotten. On the contrary, it’s much respected, even by people who’ve never interacted with it. It was indeed a revolutionary gesture, but one from a kind-hearted woman, a technical innovator who has always seemed haunted by a sense of loss. This artist’s cultural situation is one of struggle for an intimate, lasting and sincere connection, but the ground is broken by severe upheavals. Because the boyfriend’s back, you see. But: He’s not what he was when you were both young, and so happy to be connected. You don’t love him any less for that, though; on the contrary, a pity, an anguish has deepened your teenage romance. He’s damaged goods now, as creaky as some outdated desktop Windows machine. Suppose you accept him as his war has left him to you. If you’re going to make a go of life as the wife of this guy, you’re clearly facing posttraumatic decades of tender nursemaid labor. That life won’t be easy, and the best public response to your selfless dedication will be maybe some quiet praise or a bemused moral admiration.

Or you could dump him, the way one swiftly abandons the useless likes of MySpace, GeoCities or Hyves. Those platforms of connection meant everything to you once, but times change, don’t they? So why commemorate the wounded boyfriend? Wouldn’t it be cagier to dump him and head for the bright lights of Saint Petersburg, and maybe get a plum job there as some mogul’s social-media campaigner? But that’s like pretending that you never loved him, while, in fact, you did. You did love him, before what they did to him and what he became, and to know that, and to live by that, is to keep your integrity. So it’s a rather soulful Russian tale, with something tart, painful and Chekhovian about it. It’s also Olia’s own story. She has never abandoned her allegiance to the revolutionary era of the early web. She has become an archivist of net.art’s lost possibilities, a champion of the independent user against our huge and paranoid modern world of surveillance-marketing through vast social media empires. “Those who worship the muses end up running a museum,” and few people have ever lived that wry aphorism as much as Olia Lialina does. Since I’m a cyberpunk novelist, I may be penning Olia here as a rather somber and imposing figure, but then there’s the actual, living person who is Olia Lialina. Olia Lialina is full of charm. She’s a globetrotting mother of three with a remarkably productive marriage and a relatively steady job (at least by new-media standards). Olia is witty, acerbic, even earthy at times, but also frank and intelligent, a clear-eyed artist who stands undaunted by the tragic dimension of our human condition. Also, time is on her side. Her work always seems arcane to her contemporaries, and yet it makes more and more sense as the years pass.

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Josephine Bosma, “Olia Lialina interview Ljubljana,” <nettime>, 5 Aug 1997. http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9708/msg00009.html Walker Art Center, http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/my-boyfriend-came-back-from-the-war Marina Grzinic, “An Insider’s Report from the Nettime Squad Meeting in Ljubljana, 22 & 23 June 1997,” Telepolis, 6/19/97, web. (The title is apparently an error, as the meeting took place in May). http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/4/4071/1.html Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 3. Josephine Bosma, “Vuk Cosic interview: net.art per se,” <nettime>, 27 September 1997. http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9709/msg00053.html

Speaking in Net Language: My Boyfriend Came Back from the War Michael Connor “If something is in the net, it should speak in net. language,” net artist Olia Lialina told critic Josephine Bosma during an interview at Ljudmila Media Lab in Ljubljana in May 1997.1 Eight months earlier, Lialina had created and published her first work of net art, My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (MBCBFTW). Through hypertext, black-and-white bitmap images and the frames of a web browser, the work tells the story of an awkward reunion between a young woman and her boyfriend.2 They sit together without making eye contact and their conversation is at cross-purposes: an affair is alluded to; the trauma of war looms over the encounter; a marriage proposal is made and deferred. With its use of browser frames, hypertext and images (both animated and still) to share a personal story, My Boyfriend Came Back from the War quickly earned critical attention and today is one of the most widely cited examples of the artistic use of HTML on the early web. Despite the novelty of its approach and the euphoria surrounding its then-futuristic medium, it evokes a somber, melancholic mood. The medium of the web promised connection, but the story the work tells is one of estrangement, of the impossibility of relationships under conditions of geopolitical conflict. Nevertheless, the melancholic tone of My Boyfriend Came Back from the War reflects a core function of net.language, as articulated in Lialina‘s body of work as a whole: the elaboration of memory. Web Language Bosma’s interview with Lialina took place against the backdrop of a conference, organized by the nettime mailing list, that convened a network of artists, thinkers and activists who shared an interest in the creative and political possibilities of the internet. They had escaped to a back room while “an American history lesson of the internet” went on in the front; the headlined topics included “What is net-art?” and “on/offline publishing,” “media activism,” and “The Beast – the East.” Some discussions focused on the role of the Soros Foundation in the region – “our dear Uncle from America,” as participants facetiously

called its founder, in an attempt to “discuss his almost obscene power position in Eastern Europe.”3 It was a time in which the web “was a novel and astonishing thing and its very existence seemed problematical,” to borrow from Christian Metz’ description of early cinema.4 Everything needed to be theorized and the nettime conference was an important context for this. During their conversation, Lialina told Bosma that her approach to My Boyfriend Came Back from the War reflected her interest in applying a cinematic language to the net. After making it, though, she became more interested in “net.language itself” and questioned whether it was specific enough to the context of the net. “This story can exist on cd-rom or you can make a video out of it,” she told Bosma. The dot between net and language, presumably inserted by Bosma during transcription, mirrored the punctuation of “net.art,” the term coined by Pit Schultz for a 1995 exhibition and later popularized by Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic to describe artists who embraced the web as medium and context. In particular, the term has been associated with Cosic’s May 1996 conference “Net.Art Per Se,” an important meeting of artists associated with the early web. (Lialina was not involved; her first work of net art appeared several months later.) Net.art at that time often took the form of web pages or websites, but it also involved other internet-based applications such as email, as well as more tangible materials and practices such as chalk graffiti or live performance. (Cosic even told Bosma that the nettime conference itself, as a convening of a network, could be considered net.art.)5 Thus, the term should be understood in a very broad sense. However, Lialina’s discussion of it with Bosma focuses in particular on the context of the web and My Boyfriend Came Back from the War was created specifically to be experienced in a web browser (given, for example, the use of frames.) Thus, the language at stake in her work can be understood as the language of the web specifically. Lialina’s focus on language makes it hard not to think of the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who wrote (in 1934) of cinema’s emergence from theater: In the early 1920s we all came to the Soviet cinema as something not yet existent. We came upon no ready-built city; there were no squares, no streets laid

6 Sergei Eisenstein, “Through Theater to Cinema” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 3. 7 Olia Lialina, “Prof. Dr. Style: Top 10 Web Design Styles of 1993 (Vernacular Web 3),” Contemporary Home Computing, July 2010. http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/

The browser was also an editor and users were given latitude to display web pages in the way

they preferred. This was a marked departure from print-based publishing, in which the typeface was determined at the time of publication, not reading, but it was common practice only for a short time. Lialina goes on to describe the transition, over the next several years, to a vernacular web in which the creators of pages began to play with decorative formatting, often by changing the color of text. By the time of My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, this more decorative approach to text styling would have been the norm. The text in My Boyfriend Came Back from the War still allows plenty of latitude for style to be dictated by the user, but defines a specific color. It also assigns the same color to the text no matter what state of usage it is in – a departure from convention. The typical approach was to change the color of linked text when clicked by the user and to display previously followed links in a different color as well. Lialina chose to restrict her typeface (in any state) to white, rather than giving this kind of responsive feedback to the user. This color is clearly of great importance – it sets up a color scheme that continues on the next page. Clicking on the linked text opens a page with bitmapped black-and-white images. On the upper right is a window looking out to some vegetation, and on the lower left a man and a woman sit awkwardly, looking away from one another. The sizes of these images are determined as a percentage of the browser window’s width, always taking up the same proportion of the screen. They are positioned with the aid of a third, invisible image that sits between them, acting as a spacer. At any scale, the seated couple is isolated within a much larger expanse of black. The window above them seems to admit no light and the foliage outside harbors secrets. It seems to be a negative image, with the whites and blacks reversed. The stark contrast and jagged contours of the images gives them the appearance of high-contrast early film stock or newspaper photographs while keeping the file sizes very small: These are one-bit images in which each pixel can be only black or white. The binary color scheme thus reflects the underlying logic of the computer itself, while contributing to a sense of stark choices and engulfing darkness. Despite the small file sizes, these images would load somewhat slowly on a dial-up internet

out; not even little crooked lanes and blind alleys, such as we may find in the cinemetropolis of our day. We came like bedouins or goldseekers to a place with unimaginably great possibilities, only a small section of which has even now been developed.6 What was at stake for Eisenstein in creating this new language begins to become clear later in the essay, when he describes film-language of the revolutionary period “as an expression of cinema thinking, when the cinema was called upon to embody the philosophy and ideology of the victorious proletariat.” “Film-language” was needed in order to express broader societal ideas that perhaps could not have been fully expressed by other means. To understand what societal ideas are at stake in the net.language advanced by Lialina, it is necessary to begin with a consideration of formal aspects of her first artwork for the web. Spatial Montage “My boyfriend came back from the war. After dinner they left us alone.” Underlined white text appears in the upper righthand corner of a black browser window. No typeface is specified, so the text renders in the browser’s default font. The text remains white when clicked, and on return visits. Today, few websites would leave typeface unspecified, but this practice was the standard in the very early days of the web, circa 1993. According to Lialina, this early style reflected: the belief of the early 1990s that any visual design should be left at the discretion of the user. Page authors wouldn‘t define colors, fonts margins and line-lengths. In turn end users set their preferences for colors, fonts, links, graphics in their browsers, according to their needs or taste. Not a big deal, one can say, to decide if to see all the pages of the internet on a white or a gray background. But don‘t think about colors, think about the concept – each user was defining the look of the whole WWW for themselves.7

8 In 1994, Netscape Navigator became the first browser to display web pages as they loaded on the fly, with text and images appearing as they downloaded. With other browsers, a page would remain blank until all elements were loaded. 9 Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 32 10 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), p. 158.

For Pudovkin, cinema is created when one image (or intertitle) is joined to the next. In early cinema, this joining happened in space – with one frame of

film attached along its edge, with splicing cement, to another – but it was experienced in time: An image appeared onscreen, followed by another. In cinema, this point where one image is sutured to the next is, perhaps incongruously, referred to as a cut, although it seems defined more by conjoinment than disjunction. In My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, separate frames are joined together by HTML code and the browser itself and experienced in both space and in time, employing what Lev Manovich has characterized as spatial and temporal montage.10 The first transition in the piece resembles a cut in cinema quite directly. An intertitle appears and then is replaced by an image that fills the window; the only difference is that here, the user chooses when to make the “cut.” This is temporal montage.10 Spatial montage is introduced in the second transition. The window is divided, with the initial image of the couple on the left, slightly transformed, and a close-up image of the young woman on the right. Instead of each image being replaced by the next onscreen, here the initial image remains as further frames appear alongside it. As the user continues to explore the frame on the right-hand side, the page is divided into smaller and smaller sections in which sequences of image and text are interwoven. At no point is it necessary to scroll. This allows for images and texts to be “joined” to one another not only in time but also in the twodimensional space of the browser window. The strategy of subdividing the frame into smaller windows was present in cinema, too. Lev Manovich has discussed the use of this kind of “spatial montage” in cinema in his book The Language of New Media. Edward Porter’s The Life of an American Fireman (1903) used the technique to show a firefighter’s daydream above him as he sits in the firehouse; Abel Gance used the technique in his epic three-screen drama Napoleon (1927). Lialina’s narrative use of spatial montage differs from these examples in the way it denotes the passage of time. In cinema, the split screen is often used to show two scenes progressing in lock step. When the screen splits in Lialina‘s work, it also divides the temporal flow of the story; the frame on the left remains the same while the one on the right continues to move forward. Different temporalities begin to

connection; Lialina has spoken about the importance of the pacing afforded by this characteristic of internet infrastructure in 1996 – a unique material affordance of the web, mobilized in the creation of an emotional universe.8 With the next click, a single vertical divider splits the page. The image of the man and the woman from the previous screen reappears at smaller scale in the frame on the left, where it will remain until the end of the work. Likewise, the image of the window reappears but now it has been transformed from a still to a four-frame animation, displayed as an animated GIF. The image has been reversed – white areas are now black, as if the prior image had been a camera negative for this one – and the image flickers as if being shown on an old film projector. These very direct allusions to film stock and early cinema suggest that other possible parallels could also be drawn. The texts can be thought of as intertitles setting up narrative scenes; the images can be read cinematically as establishing shots, close-ups and so forth. These parallels bring special attention to those aspects of the work that are quite foreign to cinema. One point of departure, though, is the way in which the work adapts ideas of cinematic montage to the web. Christian Metz placed special emphasis on the role of montage in defining early cinematic language in the landmark work Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. [M]ontage, through the enthusiastic and ingenious exploitation of all its combinations, through the pages and pages of panegyric in books and reviews, became practically synonymous with the cinema itself. More direct than his fellows, Pudovkin was unwittingly close to the truth when he declared with aplomb that the notion of montage, above and beyond all the specific meanings it is sometimes given (endto-end joining, accelerated montage, purely rhythmic principle, etc.), is in reality the sum of filmic creation: The isolated shot is not even a small fragment of cinema; it is only raw material, a photograph of the real world. 9

11 George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 3. 12 Laura L. Sullivan, “Wired Women Writing,” Computers and Composition (16:1, 1999), p. 33. 13 Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” from Film Form 1949, p. 45–63.

coexist, all of them framed by the image of the young man and woman beneath the window, which is left unchanged. Time moves forward, but the larger scene remains unaffected, and various elements progress independently of one another. The strategy of montage in Lialina’s work also differs materially from that in cinema. In cinema, temporal montage involves splicing distinct image sequences together at the boundary of a frame; spatial montage involves optically compositing distinct sequences within the frame. The montage in Lialina’s work is described in HTML code. While web pages are often generated with the aid of software, Lialina’s code appears to have been written by hand. For example, when the close-up image of the young woman appears, it is set to take up 70% of the width of the frame. The html code for this image includes the misspelled and therefore unused attribute “hight=’70%’”, which suggests that the HTML code was written by hand and serves as a reminder that the code is based on the English language. Multilinearity While spatial montage in cinema takes place within a linear temporal structure, My Boyfriend Came Back from the War is what George Landow calls “multilinear.” 11 Its …multilinearity allows contradictions in the text to be foregrounded, instead of smoothed out and eliminated as is often the case within a paradigm that carves the world up into simple oppositions of male and female, black and white.12

composition that allows many possible points of connection between individual frames. The multilinearity of Lialina’s use of multiple windows reflects the specific affordances of HTML frames, introduced by Netscape in 1995 as a feature of the Navigator 2.0 browser, which supported multiple documents loading in discrete areas of any given page. Thus they allowed the user to move dynamically through certain parts of a page, updating or interacting with individual elements while other parts remained static. Up to this point, I have described only the first two frames of My Boyfriend Came Back from the War; there are seventy-six in total. From the second frame, a click on the close-up portrait on the right-hand side divides that frame in half. Now there are three frames arranged vertically across the screen. The portrait shifts to the right, reduced in scale, while the text “Where are you? I can’t see you” appears in the middle. When clicked, the text cuts to an intertitle that reads: “FORGET IT.” Clicking again divides the frame into an upper and a lower section. The upper displays another negative image of soldiers under a helicopter, while the lower reads “you don’t trust me. i see.” Then: But... it was only once... Last summer... And if you think... Why I should explain?... Don‘t you see?

This description, drawn from a text about the feminist potential of hypertext as a narrative form, illuminates a key dimension of the departure from montage in the work. Montage was notably defined in terms of a dialectic opposition reaching a synthesis, a structure that Eisenstein argued was crucial to cinema’s status as a revolutionary form.13 One image plus a second, contrasting image would result in a synthesis, a new, third meaning. In the linear montage of early Soviet cinema, binaries were set up only to be subsumed into a larger coherent whole. In the case of My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, binary oppositions fracture into a prismatic

The intertitles relay a dialogue between the estranged lovers, although the speaker of any given line is not identified. There are further allusions to possible infidelity, discussions about an act of violence, and a marriage proposal, deferred. The images serve a wider range of roles. At times, they seem to reflect the boyfriend’s memory – such as the helicopter, which is replaced with a negative version of the same image when clicked. At other times, the images seem to illustrate the dialogue – for example, “I keep your photo here” leads to an image of what seems to be a head-and-shoulders photograph of the boyfriend. Clicking again, though, reveals the same man in slightly different poses, as if each new frame is the frame of a kind of animation, showing the man turning to his left, toward

14 Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1945), online.

his girlfriend, an opening for a possible connection. There’s also an image of the logo for 20th Century Fox, the film studio. This appears in a sequence that plays out in the upper part of the section on the right side of the screen, following the close-up portrait. It is preceded by intertitles reading: So, last time we met when… And you promised. Then: Me too. DO YOU Then the section divides into four small frames, which read, “LIKE / MY / NEW / DRESS?” In turn, these lead to “Who asks you? / TOGETHER FOREVER / We’ll start a new life.” At this point, the logo appears. It’s easy to read this image, forever associated with Hollywood moving image credits, as the intended endpoint of the work as a whole. However, because the user is given the option to advance through different frames at different rates, many users would not encounter it as the final frame of the work. Instead, it could be read as a kind of aside. If the adjacent frames suggest a kind of romantic, youthful optimism (“TOGETHER FOREVER”), then the inclusion of this logo could be taken as a sort of wink at the typical Hollywood ending. The frame immediately below the image supports this reading: will you marry me Then TOMORROW Then, in a great rush

In other words, no. Through all of this, the couple in the left-hand frame sit unmoving. The window still flickers above them, on an endless loop. It is the opening image of the piece, and time has passed but it is uncertain as to whether the image is meant to refer back to the moment at the beginning of this conversation or if it is intended to convey the sense that time is passing and nothing has changed. The use of frames in My Boyfriend Came Back from the War thus creates a spatial and temporal montage in which images and texts are juxtaposed in both time (by loading new frames in sequence) and space (by loading frames adjacent to one another in a split screen formation), partly under the user’s control. In Austin, Texas, I saw the filmmaker Jean-Paul Gorin give a talk in which he said, “In France, we think of everything in terms of time. We have before and after heartbreak. In the US, you think of everything in terms of space. You have south and west of heartbreak.” My Boyfriend Came Back from the War marries these two types of memory, the temporal and the spatial. Hypertext The problem of memory is at the origin of the development of hypertext: the fear of losing knowledge and the urge to organize the world. After coming back from World War II, scientist Vannevar Bush articulated the sense of uncertainty and aimlessness that came along with the end of a campaign, in this case, the Manhattan Project: This has not been a scientists’ war; it has been a war in which all have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective partnership. What are the scientists to do next?14

No, better next month after holidays and the weather must be better. Yes next month. I’m happy now.

To be a part of the scientific wartime effort was to be a part of something meaningful, after which the ordinary contours of everyday life might understandably have been hard to accept. Luckily, Bush glimpsed the possibility of another great challenge on the