2013 – Users Right – Olia Lialina

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Context

Users Right is an Olia Lialina's invitation to the users of the computers for elaborate and sugest points that should be included in a rights list (1). The author calls on the collaborators to include whatever they think is necessary (1). The colaborative manifesto was published online on october 4, 2014 with four initial suggestions by Olia Lialina which are the following: "use free software on my computer", "be owner of my information", "see the computer" and "Choose none of the above" (4). In the present the manifesto has multiple suggestions and demandas made it by different user of the computers and the Internet (1). Each suggestion has two buttons, one for "agree" and another for "not agree" that allows to visualize the number of people that believes and support the demand or not, besides each one of the publications of the users can be discussed by other visitors of the site (1). In the manifesto, which shows activity until 2017, the demands are ordered from ascending to descending according to the number of people who agree with the statements (1). Those who visit the site can subscribe to the updates of the manifesto, that is, they can receive in their email notifications about the new demands postulated by the users (1). An animated version of the manifesto with some of the suggestions is also available on the website (2).

Authors

Olia Lialina is an artist born in Moscow considered one of the pioneers of net.art. She teaches New Media at the Merz Akademie and is the author of some of the most iconic net.art works of the nineties (3), among which are "My boyfriend came back from the war" (1996) (4) ) and Agatha appears (1997) (5). Lialina is also the creator of art.teleportacia.org, an online gallery dedicated to net.art, where a large part of her works are hosted (6).