Metric Culture, Denmark

Metric Culture: The Quantified Self and Beyond
International Conference, 7-9 June 2017
Organised by: Btihaj Ajana, AIAS and King’s College London
Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Denmark

Dr Elena Marchevska:
Intimacy without cause: self-tracking and the quantified self in the net-art work of Igor Štromajer
London South Bank University, UK
Panel: Quantified Self and capitalist value

Photo: Christopher Till ©

+ Programme (PDF)

Abstract:

Data is money, data is power, data is everything and everything can be data. Yet data is simply a set of information on a world that is messy, irrational, unstable, and emotional. In the V2 catalogue for the show ‘Data in the 21st Century’, the curator states that: ‘The rise of so-called big data and the emergence of technologies that are able to quantify our every move, preference and behaviour, have demonstrated where the friction lies between the unpredictable reality that we live in and the desire to capture it in data.” (2015).

The paper will look into the performative work of Igor Štromajer and his projects ‘Expunction’ (2012) and ‘Multifeminist studies’ (2016) run by/on his Intima Virtual Base production site. Through these projects he is working on simple technological solutions for handling data and emotional strategies. His role of being both performer within the work and simultaneously viewing oneself from an external position (watching yourself on screen to see how you fit in) in order to gauge avenues for proceeding is both disorienting and extremely engaging. As Štromajer summarises: ‘’’Intimacy without a cause’ today is the most radical resistance to capital. ‘ (2005:149) Both projects raise questions about temporality, duration and availability of net art project that deal with data which change over time and slowly, but persistently lose their utility and, accordingly, their content.