Happy Ilya Day — 18 June marks the birthday of Ilya Eric Lee (李士傑 Li Shih-Chieh, 1973–2019). SCALE is opening the Ilya Files: a growing pool of records, links, and community memory around a connector who stitched together open-culture networks across Taipei and the world.

Why we remember Ilya

Ilya played a crucial role in Wikimania 2007 in Taiwan, where several people met for the first time—including SCALE editors Jonathan Phillips and Christopher Adams, and where Christopher Adams met Joi Ito. When visitors came to Taipei, Ilya would meet them, take them around, and connect the dots. The collage portrait on his people profile draws on an archival photograph by Joi Ito, contributed to Wikimedia Commons at that same event (CC BY 2.0).

His public work spans Elixus and the Metalist project, nettime-zh, NDAP digital archives at Academia Sinica, Culturemondo, exhibitions such as Towards Mysterious Realities, and Kingdom of Piracy's PiraGene / PiraPort — revisited at Shu Lea Cheang's Lab Kill Lab (2020) in his memory. He died suddenly in 2019, far too young.

We celebrate him every year on this day.

The Ilya Files

Material is gathered in The Ilya Archive.

Highlights already in the archive:

• Geert Lovink interview (2001) — Taiwanese net activism, Metalist, nettime-zh
• Wikimania 2007, Taipei
• Wikimedia GLAM Taiwan report (2013) — NDAP and open cultural data
• Towards Mysterious Realities (2016)
• Lab Kill Lab / Forking PiraGene (2020)
• ilyagram.org · Flickr · Instagram

Submit your Ilya records

Did you work with Ilya, travel with him, or save emails, photos, blog posts, or conference ephemera? Send material for the Ilya Files:

up@scalepublishing.com — subject line Ilya records

Stories, scans, links, and pointers welcome. With your consent we will index submissions for future publication. Nothing ships without review.

Toward an Ilya Reader (2027?)

We are floating an Ilya Reader for next year's Happy Ilya Day — a small edited volume or web reader drawn from the files: interviews, blog posts, network-culture documents, and contributed memories. If you want to help curate or contribute, say so in your email.

Corrections and additional sources always welcome.