Olia Lialina is the new fellow in the research programme Communication in a Digital Age of the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy. From October 2010 to early 2011, she will complete a comparative study of the popular media culture in the telecafés and small Internet access shops of Rotterdam, Stuttgart and Moscow. Her research fellowship is a collaboration with the Goethe Institute Netherlands which hosts her as an artist in residence.

Olia Lialina, born in 1971 in Moscow, is a pioneer of net.art, among others with her site teleportacia.org. Since 1999, she lives in Stuttgart, Germany where she is a professor in the Pathway New Media of Merz Akademie, a design and art school. Her most recent research concerns what she calls the “vernacular web” and Digital Folklore. Her project for the Piet Zwart Institute will continue this research and develop it more specifically for the context of the multicultural city of Rotterdam.

As part of fellowship, Olia will give a “Digital Folklore Workshop” at the Goethe Institute Rotterdam and work with both Bachelor and Networked Media Master students of the Willem de Kooning Academy and its Piet Zwart Institute. Her geust teaching will result in a “speed show” of student work at a Rotterdam-based telecafé.