Julia Milner

Click I Hope

Julia Milner’s artistic strategy reflects the rapid changes in our technogenic world with precision and feeling.

Her sudden arrival on the photography scene has been remarkably colourful. In the Actual Mobilography project the 24-year-old artist displayed her personal style with an immediacy and freedom that only the very talented and very strong possess. Her exhibition at the Moscow International Biennale, Fashion and Style in Photography 2005, proved a sensation. For this she devised self-portraits and portraits of friends or acquaintances using a «close-range» mobile phone with built-in camera. She then drew over these mobile-camera shots and transformed them into bold and expressive images. Julia Milner involves her characters in a game that can expose, or on the contrary, retouch their ego. Whatever the case, she has found an intriguing approach that is both striking and light-hearted. The impartiality of vision, the flexibility of this wordless interaction with her subjects and Milner’s sense of humour guarantee the success of this young artist who is subtly and gently ironic about herself and the glamorous world around her.

When enlarged to monumental proportions Julia Milner’s work turns the «defects» of cellphone photographs into the articulated stylistics of a new trend −151; «mobilography». As a new area of technology mobilography generates a new kind of artistic reflection, expanding the boundaries of art territory.

In her video project Universe Julia Milner uses scientific photographs of the universe with such phenomena as cosmic galaxies, circular nebulas, lunar eclipses, sun spots and solar wind, created by astronomers using the most complex equipment and described by them in a scholarly language that is at the same time metaphorical and poetic. But in Milner’s work images of female sexuality emerge through these cosmic landscapes, as totemic symbols of the eternal femininity of the Universe. The dynamics of gender alterations which also occur in the process of art leads to a change of accent, from male totem symbols to female elementals. The artist turns her project into an amusing yet serious game.

This exhibition at the European House of Photography (MEP) also includes Julia Milner’s internet project Click I Hope, first shown at the Russian Pavilion during the 52nd Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art.

In creating her own version of a new cyber-behaviour game, a form of net art 2.0 based on the latest technologies of Web 2.0, the artist appeals to our innate vital energy, moving from the reflective paradigm to a strategy for action. Milner’s installation consists of an LED screen projecting the net-art project Click I Hope (www.clickihope.com), with a touch screen allowing visitors to participate in the project. The phrase «I hope» floats across the screen in 50 different languages. Following the instruction Click I Hope, visitors to the site click on one of the languages offered. Usually they choose their native language. The words flicker in an interactive response. As the visitor clicks a counter appears beside the selected language, showing the total of participants who clicked on any given language. These phrases in different languages grow or shrink in proportion to the number of users who clicked on that language in different parts of the world. A general counter relays the number of project participants at any given moment. We don’t know why anyone clicks on I Hope in one or another language. But this is I Hope rather than I Kill, as taught by most computer games and propagated by vast swathes of the mass media. Click I Hope is a virtual accumulator of the hope essential to every one of us.

The project was launched in June 2007, and in the space of a year more than 1,000200 clicks have been recorded. Milner’s use of internet art and the new interactive technologies that have recently appeared in cyberspace is a natural anticipation of the art of the future. It will inevitably emerge as a reflection of the new types of communication that have evolved in the virtual world and increasingly supplant the real world and more direct forms of human communication. In this virtual space the artist acts as a demiurge setting the rules of the game, and the artwork itself is created and developed by the accumulated action of all participants in the project.