Some of My Favourite Web Sites Are Art
http://www.alberta.com/unfamiliarart/

Project #5:

EASYLIFE
Alexei Shulgin
http://www.easylife.org/

Immediately upon visiting Alexei Shulgin's EASYLIFE, one gets the sense
that he is very much at home on the Internet. Welcome to his
house–don't worry about wiping your feet–the directive here is more
ideological "You Better Subvert Yourself." The placards Shulgin has
erected to "sponsors" Wired and Microsoft are faux and ironic–much of
Shulgin's work satirizes Internet culture. Here, he takes aim at these
two icons of market-driven Internet culture: he is after all a young
Russian artist who, working and socializaing online, can't avoid these
American commercial.digital.culture giants.

Shulgin has always reminded me of a POP artist like Warhol or
Lichenstein in that his work is consistently banal, light, conceptually
strong, and generally media-centric–one of my favorite projects of his
is WWWART (no longer available), an awards page that gave special awards
to random Web sites that were not art projects but had an arty
feel–similar perhaps to 20th century art's appropriation and
recontextualization of quotidien images (think of Duchamp's urinal,
Warhol's Soup Cans, etc.).

Shulgin doesn't rely on tight aesthetic protocols or weighty ideas–take
for example his project http://www.easylife.org/this_morning/ in which
he states his earthly desires to eat, defecate, wander, procreate, etc.:
these are fairly elemental themes, expressed with windows, simple html
and java. An important piece is "Forms Project," in which Shulgin
collected and curated examples of art works made with html forms.
Clever, energetic, and playful, Shulgin's work is easily built and
consumed. Enjoy!