- Artist
- LIA · liaworks.com ↗
- Raster
- raster.art/artist/lia ↗
- Based
- Born in Graz, Austria. Lives and works in Vienna
- Practice
- Generative software, net art, moving image, performance, installation, projection, sculpture, and digital applications
- Now
- Three Suns shown at Istanbul Digital Art Festival, Atatürk Cultural Center, 3-7 June 2026
- In the set
- little boxes on the hillsides, child ↗ · 777 editions
Being Yourself While Fitting In ↗ · 56 editions - Links
- Full bibliography ↗
LIA belongs to the formative generation of artists who encountered the networked computer not simply as a display device, but as an environment in which artworks could operate. Born in Graz and based in Vienna, she has worked with code since 1995 across software, video, live performance, installation, sculpture, projection, and applications. Austria’s federal arts administration describes her as a pioneer of software and net art, emphasizing a process in which a concept is translated into a formal structure and refined through repeated exchanges with the machine.1 This account is useful because it locates authorship neither in an autonomous computer nor in a fixed image. Authorship resides in the construction, testing, and calibration of a system.
That distinction has guided LIA’s work across several technological eras. Her early web project Re-Move .org, initiated in 1999, comprises ten interactive generative works made in Macromedia Director. Users can manipulate parameters that shape compositions poised between organic motion and hard-edged abstraction.2 The project received an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica in 2003, and its continued preservation indicates how software artworks exceed the lifespan of the platforms on which they first appeared.3 What persists is not merely a characteristic visual style. It is a model of participation in which an artist defines possibilities, a computer performs instructions, and a viewer encounters variation through time.
Drawing with executable rules
LIA’s practice joins the histories of drawing and painting to the temporal logic of computation. Lines become trajectories, colors become variables, and composition becomes behavior. In a 2019 interview, she characterized code as the means by which an observation or idea is translated into formal relations, producing real-time multimedia output.4 Her abstractions are therefore grounded in experienced phenomena, including movement, interpersonal relation, and natural structure. They do not illustrate those sources literally. Instead, they extract organizational principles and test what those principles can do when made executable.
This approach was already explicit in Sum05, commissioned for the 2005 exhibition Generator.x: Art from Code at Norway’s National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design. The work uses algorithmic rules to direct autonomous agents through a bounded system, presenting source code as a primary material rather than an invisible technical support.5 Such projects make clear why LIA’s minimalism should not be mistaken for simplicity. A reduced vocabulary can generate dense perceptual events when its elements possess duration, responsiveness, and variable relations.
Her account of changing hardware further complicates the notion of technical progress. In a 2013 interview, LIA observed that increased computing power enabled more complex structures and more elements on screen, while higher resolutions also removed the intimate relationship with individual pixels that had shaped her early work.6 Each technological gain introduces a different constraint. For LIA, limitation is productive because it gives a system resistance. The artist’s task is to locate a visual language inside that resistance, whether the boundary is a low-resolution screen, a browser, an edition protocol, or a fabrication device.
A hillside multiplied
little boxes on the hillsides, child was released through Art Blocks Factory on October 19, 2021 as a collection of exactly 777 artworks. LIA’s project statement describes abstract suburban cityscapes generated by a program developed from a Processing sketch through careful choices of angles, transparencies, and line weights. House-like forms appear and disappear, while two color features, “cheeky blue” and “cheeky red,” preserve a bug in the calculation of the color spread.7
The title comes from Malvina Reynolds’s song “Little Boxes,” and LIA frames the project as a contemplation of houses, cities, and the cycle through which homes replace environments before ecosystems eventually replace them. The Art Blocks work succeeds little boxes on the hillsides, mother, presented at bitforms gallery in San Francisco in 2021. The 777 on-chain works are its “children”: still artifacts from the mother program’s generative output. Pressing the “a” key in the live view reveals the animated process behind each still.7
That parent-and-child structure gives the edition model a precise role. The fixed collection is not presented as an exhaustive archive of an infinite system. It is a finite set of states drawn from a program that continues to unfold in motion. Repetition supplies coherence, while changes in rows, columns, shape, opacity, color, and line density keep each composition distinct.
2021, little boxes on the hillsides, child
2021, little boxes on the hillsides, child
2021, little boxes on the hillsides, child
2021, little boxes on the hillsides, child
2021, little boxes on the hillsides, child
2021, little boxes on the hillsides, child
2021, little boxes on the hillsides, child
2021, little boxes on the hillsides, child
2021, little boxes on the hillsides, child
2021, little boxes on the hillsides, child
Live on Art Blocks: little-boxes-on-the-hillsides-child-by-lia ↗
Belonging without disappearance
Released through Art Blocks Factory on August 15, 2022, Being Yourself While Fitting In consists of exactly 56 artworks. LIA’s project statement explains that the work began as a formal study using simple layered shapes, then changed when animation was introduced. Its forms, colors, and motion visualize the tension between social conformity and self-expression, repeatedly painting and repainting the composition into shifting patterns of movement and stillness.8
This theme has precedents throughout LIA’s practice. Discussing Not Even Love Will Tear Us Apart, she described pairs of stable shapes whose conjunction generates new forms as they move together.6 The individual elements do not dissolve, but their relationship exceeds either component. In Being Yourself While Fitting In, a similar logic expands from the couple toward the group. The work asks viewers to attend to boundaries, not as walls, but as active zones where difference is negotiated.
The series also clarifies LIA’s distinctive use of abstraction. No figure carries a prescribed identity, and no scene supplies a fixed narrative. Meaning emerges through perceptual analogy. Alignment, crowding, separation, and accommodation become spatial experiences before they become verbal concepts. The algorithm organizes those experiences into repeatable but nonidentical events. Each edition can be read independently, while the tension named by the title becomes more visible across the finite group.
2022, Being Yourself While Fitting In
Live on Art Blocks: being-yourself-while-fitting-in-by-lia ↗
From browser to material object
Although screens have been central to LIA’s history, her work does not treat software as immaterial. Filament Sculptures, developed from 2013 to 2015, used custom software to control a 3D printer’s movement across three axes. Variations in extrusion, speed, and print-head position allowed filament to organize between deliberate construction and physical emergence.9 The project makes visible something equally true of her screen works: code always meets a material apparatus. A browser interprets instructions, a monitor emits light, and a printer negotiates gravity, heat, and plastic.
This attention to execution helps explain LIA’s longevity across changing platforms. The work is not attached to novelty for its own sake. It repeatedly returns to a durable set of questions about translation, constraint, and relation. In 2021, Casey Reas included her in Feral File’s inaugural exhibition, Social Codes, where dada data appeared as browser-based custom software written with p5.js.10 The exhibition positioned the web as both venue and community for artists who write code. LIA’s presence connected that contemporary ecosystem to experiments begun before creative coding had consolidated into a recognized field.
More recently, the restoration of Re-Move .org has made those beginnings accessible again.12 Preservation here is not nostalgia. It allows current audiences to experience an artwork whose meaning depends on operation, responsiveness, and duration. In June 2026, LIA’s video Three Suns was shown at the Istanbul Digital Art Festival at the Atatürk Cultural Center.11 Across the two Art Blocks collections, the same commitment assumes a new distribution model, but the artistic proposition remains consistent. LIA builds bounded systems that do not close meaning down. They open a space in which form can behave, difference can recur, and viewers can recognize familiar structures without being given a single answer.
LIA’s systems do not use variation as decoration. Variation is the subject through which individuality, collectivity, and authorship become visible.
Bibliography
The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the LIA links page ↗.