As part of the Internet Archive’s 25th Anniversary celebration we asked artist Olia Lialina to contemplate what the year 2046 and the future of the internet might look like through the lens of her own art practice.

Olia Lialina’s artwork Perpetual Calendar builds upon the rich digital folklore tradition to start a day on your social network by wishing each other a good one in the form of an image, often animated, and most likely glittering. With https://haveagood.today/ you can go to the future and the past, checking what day of the week were you born, or on what day of the week New Year eve 2071 is going to be. At the same time you can see it as a flipping through of her archived collection of the graphics that represent an important layer of vernacular web. In the beginning of the century the tradition to wish a good (nice, great, sexy,…) Monday (Tuesday, Humpday,…) with a self made or found graphic replaced “Welcome to My Home Page” greetings and relieved the ever growing urge for updates.

Olia Lialina (b. 1971, Moscow) is among the best-known participants in the net.art scene of the 1990s – an early-days, network-based art pioneer. Her early work had a great impact on recognizing the Internet as a medium for artistic expression and storytelling. This century, her continuous and close attention to Internet architecture, ‘net.language’ and Web vernacular – in both artistic and publishing projects – has made her an important voice in contemporary art and new media theory. Lialina is a co-author of Digital Folklore Reader and keeper of One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive (together with Dragan ESpenschied). She is an Animated GIF model and professor for Art and Design Online at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany.