group show
curated by Zentrum für Netzkunst & hosted by panke.gallery
Berlin
Opening: Saturday, 13 June 2020 • 16:00 ~ 22:00
Exhibition: 17 June – 4 July 2020
Open from Wednesday to Saturday • 15:00 ~ 19:00
stickt.t.me assembles stickers and sticker-sets that have been produced by 19 different artists and collectives who have participated in the online artist-in-residency-program organized by the Zentrum für Netzkunst on the Telegram messenger app. The sets can be collected online on Telegram or offline in a scrapbook at panke.gallery.
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• igor š ;tromajer: exPunction (sticker, 60×84 cm)
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Curated by Zentrum für Netzkunst (Tereza Havlíková, Paloma Oliveira, Anneliese Ostertag, Tabea Rossol, Sakrowski)
Participants:
Nadja Buttendorf | Sjonnie Barbarossa | Emma Damiani | Nieves de la Fuente | Carla Gannis | Emilie Gravis | Max Grau | Franziska von Guten | Joan Heemskerk | Thiago Hersan | IOCOSE | Merz Akademie Stuttgart | Rosa Menkman | Lorna Mills | Marie Luise Möller | New Media Class Kunsthochschule Kassel | Miyö Van Stenis | igor š ;tromajer | Barbora Trnkova [&] Tomas Javurek
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• igor š ;tromajer: exPunction (six stickers, 15×21 cm)
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Funding: Bezirksamt Mitte von Berlin
panke.gallery, Gerichtstr. 23, Hof 5, 13347 Berlin
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“The same picture passes through the hands of the collecting child a hundred times. It is filed, compared, and evaluated for exchange. No other picture book enjoys such thorough observation.”
– Heinrich Wolgast
The stickers collected in scrapbooks are often made of paper, vinyl, latex, foil, or plastic. Each collector knows every one of their pieces by heart – exchanging them with other collectors is an intimate act. Today, in messenger Apps, digital stickers are shared, not exchanged, as public PNG-files or Gifs – secret codes, collected in an infinite app-archive. In 1982, the predecessor of today’s digital stickers first appeared in a web forum: :-) the smiley face. This grinning facial expression was used to complement text in computer communication, helping to bridge the gap between a message and its intended meaning. Soon after, emoticons appeared, but were not meant to replace text messages; rather, these little symbols were integrated into written language, ultimately leading to an intertwinement of visual and textual elements. These pictorial signs function as symbolic icons that are grasped immediately, visually, expanding the domain of literacy to both word and image. In today’s messenger apps, the mediation of picture and text is greatly enhanced by stickers. Each sticker is affixed to a given emoticon, and forms part of a larger set. By sending single copies of individual stickers, the entire set is shared automatically, making it available for collecting. If a certain expression is missing, users are also able to create stickers by themselves: the production costs nothing. Circulating and being reproduced, shared and used in chats, stickers disrupt the logic of authorship and private collection. A sticker set consists of anywhere from one to 120 stickers. The individual sets are arranged serially, forming a logical system of both recurring and varying features. Most sets are not only defined by a given motif, but are also connected by aesthetic similarities. The interplay of repetition and change first becomes visible to collectors through their arrangement and implementation in chats.
stick.t.me assembles sets that were produced by 19 different artists and collectives during an online artist-inresidency- program on the messenger app Telegram. Some of the sets foreground algorithmic structures using bots to create endless series of hybrids of human faces and emojis, whereas others deal with breakups or silences in texting. There are sets referring to internet folklore, porn, shitposts, or post-internet therapy or visualizing our emotional complexities through graphs. While some sets engage with the future, others reflect on internet objects of the early web 1.0, reviving forgotten structures and remnants of the digital past.
The sets can be collected online, on Telegram, or offline in this scrapbook. The sending and receiving of stickers on Telegram is similar to the pasting and removal of glutinous pictures in the pages to follow. Each sticker can be exchanged and rearranged, animated and interpreted, according to the specific context and the collector’s wishes. Unlike the online Telegram archive, this scrapbook forms a closed collection. Like a Panini album, it sets out in advance what there is to be collected. The album builds the desire to own every single piece, a wish for completion. But the desired entities are scarce. The collector needs to decide precisely which sticker is in- or excluded from the personal collection. Each individual piece must be examined and evaluated, and like the children’s scrapbook, it requires intimate familiarity and inspection. The acts of collecting and exchange, unlike those in the digital realm, touch upon questions of personal property and taste in light of conditions of scarcity. After all, in these pages, you are still very much in a gallery.
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Zentrum für Netzkunst (Center for net art) reconstructs, maintains and preserves net art and net culture. The association researches archiving and contextualization of net art.
intima • Igor Štromajer 
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