Summer

Summer

2013
Installation View Summer by Olia Lialina. Photo Luca Girardini, CC NC-SA 4.0
Installation View Summer by Olia Lialina. Photo Luca Girardini, CC NC-SA 4.0

"I like to swing on the location bar of the browser, and I like to know that the speed of swinging depends on the connection speed, and that you can’t watch this GIF offline."

In this animated piece, we see the artist swinging back and forth, infinitely looped, basking in bright sunlight. Cut out against a gradient background of blue and white, the swing is hung from the browser’s location bar. The animation’s eighteen still images are located on twenty-six different websites, with each site redirecting the browser from one server to the next, displaying the images in sequence, thus creating a cross-domain animation. The work is literally scattered across the internet, making it impossible to watch offline. The speed and rhythm of the image sequence, the animation itself, depends on internet infrastructure. It is the most fragile GIF on the internet. Just one node down will result in breaking the work.

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