With Elements of Web 2.0

New work by Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied

«With Elements of Web 2.0» is a series of five 594mm × 841mm silkscreen over digital prints on aluminium.

The triptych Constellations foregrounds today’s key figures over yesterday’s outerspace wallpapers while the diptych Dimension presents painful relations of old habits and new cults.

Fredrik Madre writes:

«Further or closer to the ever expanding marketability of the web’s functions and iconic accoutrements, embracing it as well as questioning its inbred futility, our pioneering couple now venture to lead the way in representation of:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as co-developers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, and business models

The resulting imagery of “With elements of Web 2.0” is chilling and familiar in its re-enactment of primeval spiritual representation. In “Constellations” the starry night backdrop seems belittled by the gigantic figures of Holy Mother and Son as they blankly stare beyond us sided by the duality of the micro-market and the ominous reaper figure of the rating stars, all so big and anodized gold as in a new age trinity of blind faith and ruthless democratic order. The vision of “Dimension” is even more repulsive as all life as now evicted our space, the white evil layout of the faked notebook looks scarred and empty like a corpse sucked out of its blood, besides it the spiked techno skeleton of the ominous zoom slider is a cross without a prophet. This map is our cemetery: Only Zombie and Mummy can dig us out of the web’s fresh new grave.»

See also:

• Midnight, awakening of the Google Maps Cross
• Rounded Corners, smoothing the user experience

Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied