The net artist who has kept one animation alive across 25 servers for 13 years sat for a long interview published yesterday at Right Click Save, and her verdict on the NFT boom deserves a wider reading than it will get on the timeline.

Olia Lialina, interviewed by curator Anika Meier, on watching the 2021 hype from the net art generation’s side:

“I actually didn’t want to participate or even talk about it because everything would just become advertising. Even if you are negative, you are contributing to the hype.”

Her biggest disappointment was structural:

“There was a strong return to the rhetoric of the traditional art world and this huge piety of the original.”

To understand why that stings, you have to look at what her work has been doing since 1996.

The relay

Start in Moscow, 1995. Lialina owned no computer and no internet access. Alexei Shulgin showed her the web at a library — one of the first sites was jodi.org. A year later she traveled to a Dutch festival to present her film club’s website and showed My Boyfriend Came Back From the War instead. “Writing the code and writing the story became the same process.”

Summer (2013) looks like an 18-frame animation of her on a swing. It is a relay: each frame lives on a different artist’s own server, and old HTML refresh code hops your browser across 25 servers around the globe while you watch. The script learned to skip servers that go down. Some people gave up their servers and left; new people joined; someone writes when a file moves domains. Thirteen years in, her words: “I call it my social network… It’s actually a bit of a wonder that it still works.”

Hosted (2020) is the companion piece — the same files uploaded to 70 hosting services, which altered, removed, and watermarked them. Her word for hosts: “very hostile enemies pretending to be your friends.”

The counterexample for on-chain art

Anyone minting generative work should sit with Summer’s survival record: 13 years on 25 volunteers’ domain renewals, no chain involved. The ledger records ownership; the artwork survives because people renew domains and know how to move files. On-chain provenance and on-chain art are two different problems, and the net art generation solved the second one a decade before the first one existed.

Her Net Art Generations diagram (2026) is showing at panke.gallery in Berlin, in the exhibition Network Portraits.