My Boyfriend Came Back From the War
Olia Lialina
1996
Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War uses basic elements of HTML to relay an evocative, cinematic narrative.
The work tells the story of a young woman reuniting with her sweetheart after his return from a faraway conflict. With its use of browser frames, hypertext, and images (both animated and still), My Boyfriend Came Back from the War highlights the parallels and divergences between cinema and the web as artistic and mass mediums, and explores the then-emerging language of the net.
Lialina aptly uses the web to interrogate our understandings of the production and organization of memory, a question that structures her practice to this day. In keeping with this, she considers the numerous artistic remakes and remixes of the piece an extension of her initial investigation.
Olia Lialina, My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, 1996. Photo: Franz Wamhof.
“If something is in the net, it should speak in net.language.”
- Olia Lialina, 1997
Olia Lialina came to net art through an interest in cinema. An organizer of Moscow experimental cinema club Cine Fantom, Lialina’s first contact with the net was in 1995, when the group received a computer through a grant from the Soros foundation. She soon started to make an experimental film archive on the web.
Read "Speaking in Net Language" by Michael Connor on Rhizome, republished from Lialina's recent catalog.
Olia Lialina and fellow artist Alexei Shulgin with Cine Fantom’s computer.
The following year, she created her first online artwork, My Boyfriend Came Back from the War. The work brought filmic motifs such as intertitles, flickering imagery, and close-up shots of actors into the interactive, multilinear format of hypertext.
The user advances the story by clicking on hyperlinked, fragmentary phrases and images. With each click,the browser viewport subdivides into smaller and smaller frames.
Detail of Abe Linkoln, MY BOYFRIEND CAME BACK FROM THE WAR (2004).
The work inspired many remakes and remixes, some made by friends, and some by strangers, which Lialina has featured on her website and in her recent solo touring exhibition "My Boyfriend Came Back from the War. online since 1996." These include artist Abe Linkoln's version, which translated the work to the Blogspot platform.
Ignacio Nieto, Mi pololo volvió de Antuca (2005).
Artist and curator Ignacio Nieto adapted the work to tell the story of 44 young Chilean soldiers who tragically died in the Andes in 2005.
Detail of Anna Russett, My Boyfriend Live-Tweeted the War (2014).
Collected Twitter messages whose contents correspond to the original text in Lialina's work form the basis for Anna Russett's 2014 adaptation.
Fragmentary and open to user navigation and reinterpretation, My Boyfriend Came Back from the War exemplifies Lialina's use of the net as a way to remember, together.
Olia Lialina was born in Moscow in 1971 and graduated from Moscow State University as a journalist and film critic in 1993. She is an early net artist, founder of The First Real Net Art Gallery and The Last Real Net Art Museum, and an animated GIF model. She currently is a professor at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany.
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