18 years of being net artist were 18 years of

        explaining difference in between net art and web art
        explaining difference in between net.art and net art
        removing the dot from net.artist
        being called media artist
        being mixed up with the austrian artist Lia
        being called cyberfeminist

        getting to know that i'm in a show from vanity search
        getting requests to send screenshots in 300 DPI
        refusing to show the work offline
        refusing to show the work without address bar
        rejecting Internet Explorer (and later Safari)

        being told that there is no fee for online works
        being interviewed about net art economic models

        praying that it works in the next browser version
        updating for the next browser version
        making no back ups
        editing files directly on server
        ignoring the rumors that net art is dead

        learning HTML
        teaching web design

these are not the only things that happened to me,
but the ones that were there from the very beginning and never went away

Olia Lialina is a pioneering internet artist and theorist. She is an Animated GIF model and Professor for New Media at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart.