This piece by Olia Lialina is one of the first works involving the narrative developed for Internet, perhaps one of the most cited within a European context. Implemented with simple HTML shapes, frames, posterized images, and default colors and fonts, they comprise a strategy for communicating with the web user that would characterize later works by the artist.
My boyfriend came back from the war could be defined as a story on love and solitude. An interactive story on love and solitude? It is difficult to answer since it is more like a monologue than a story, which only serves to reinforce the sense of solitude. A solitude which, unlike other artistic disciplines, is what characterizes the literary and which we can see both in the web user and in the reader of a book. A monologue that seems to play with the tension between a public confession and a private experience.