German-based net artists and collaborators, Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied will be appearing at The Photographer’s Gallery in London to discuss web culture in the 90s, digital vernacular and performative archiving. It’s happening on Friday, May 10, and runs in conjunction with their current exhibition One Terabyte Of Kilobyte Age, which focusses on the now-defunct and largely lost digital ruins of free web-hosting service geocities.com -founded in 1995, bought by Yahoo! in 1999 and then killed by social media platforms a decade later. Taken from the terabyte of data that the rogue collective Archive Team managed to salvage from the wreckage, 16,000 personal homepages are on display.
Lialina‘s influential work includes ‘My boyfriend came back from the war‘ (1996) and has become synonymous with the advocacy of freedom of information and Chuck Poynter’s dancing girl, while she and Espenschied’s past collaborations include ‘Zombie & Mummy‘ (2002). Incidentally, the latter 8bit musician and media artist has experimented with teletext art in the past. Also appearing alongside the exhibition is Brooklyn-based computer artist and musician Jeremiah Johnson‘s ‘Watching the Heavens‘. Not to be missed.**