“LIA is an original, she’s created generative art with code and released it online since the 1990s. Through the aughts, teens, and twenties, she has continued to explore performance, animation, sculpture, and drawings created with her custom software. Her early work was a strong influence for me personally — it helped motivate me to learn how to code back in the 1990s. ‘Cube_1997’ is an iconic work for that moment in LIA’s work. When a2p was launched in 2019, it didn’t support generative software, so LIA converted her code to the video you can watch here. When Feral File was launched in 2021, software artwork was supported so work like LIA’s could be seen the way the artist intended.” —Casey REAS
“‘Cube_1997’ was never lost. Its creator, LIA, brought forth its existence in 1997 using the power of her mouse and her keyboard and her will (and some electricity, too); it had failed to sufficiently please her at the time and, after just a few years, she abandoned it, and it lay, forgotten, in a folder within a folder, at a dark corner in the furthest reaches of her realm of ancient backups. But things that are only forgotten are not actually lost; things that are only hidden can be found once more. It has been 22 years since ‘Cube_1997’ was forged and, even if many things have changed meanwhile, many things are still the same: a pixel is still a pixel, black is still 0x000000, white is still 0xFFFFFF, and LIA still loves both black and white with all her heart. Like love letters to a former self, ‘Cube_1997’ was rediscovered and recovered, and brought into the 21st Century with much care and love. Sadly, not all things can be preserved in such a transition, and what was once a fully living and breathing application, capable of generating an infinite number of images forever (albeit at a somewhat shabby resolution of 640×480), can, today, only manage 24 seconds in one sitting — but for that 24 seconds, ‘Cube_1997’ shines forth in glorious 1080p.” —Damian Stewart, writing about LIA’s work on a2p in 2019
LIA debuted new work on Feral File in the first exhibition, Social Codes, in March 2021.