3. Societal Issues
logies of their time. Summer is nothing but an animated GIF, of which there are countless on the Internet, but the 25 images or frames have been deposited on as many servers, hence the importance of friends having online presence. What we observe is a young woman, Olia Lialina herself, on a swing in summer. But the rate at which the frames of this animation run depends on the state of the network and the distance that separates the servers that are all around the world. Just as pre-cinematographic devices depended on the energy of those who activated them manually. Subsequently, it was the operator himself who activated the crank to film sequences. Cinema is a matter of time and Summer’s temporality is that of the Internet too, when
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the first loop has passed, the cadence stabilizes as we imagine the cadence inherent in the hand crank also stabilizes. As Lialina said to Jillian Steinhauer: “I like to swing on the location bar of the browser. I like to know that the speed of swinging depends on the connection speed, and that you can’t watch this GIF offline.” [35] The question that this purposefully global artwork poses is the contrast between the apparent casualness of this young woman in the wind on her swing and the extent and complexity of the apparatus ensuring her swinging movements. Unable to measure distances, we measure here the time that Dominique Moulon
separates us from a cinema of yesteryear that was activated manually.
Alternatives Aram Bartholl emerged in the electronic arts community in the mid-2000s. He was one of the first post-Internet artists, as he