Olia Lialina

Olia Lialina (b. 1971) is a Russian net artist, theorist, and archivist whose practice has been central to net art as a field since the mid-1990s. Her work My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996) remains one of the most cited works of early net art — a nonlinear narrative told through browser frames and hyperlinks demonstrating how web environments could function as expressive material. Her later practice engages amateur web aesthetics, digital folklore, and preserving early internet culture, including the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive of rescued GeoCities pages. Her essay "A Vernacular Web" (2005) remains foundational, and since 1999 she has taught at Merz Akademie Stuttgart.