⊡.gif ▸ Gallery Gallery, Sofia

Gallery Gallery / Галерия Галерия, Sofia, Bulgaria
19 May – 3 September 2022
Opening: 19 May 2022, 7 pm at Ploshtadka

curators
Albena Baeva & Rene Beekman

In 1996, Igor Štromajer created his first work of net art; 0.html. The work was an elaborate game-like interactive story in which Machiavelli, Nietsche, Hobbes, Tito, Kraftwerk and Neil Armstrong, among others, have cameos.

German curator and theorist Inke Arns wrote that “0.html is an archive of historical techno imagination, world politics and a grain of melancholy. At the end of the tour through this complex project, Štromajer confronts the visitor with the following words: ‘Internet is the most primitive medium ever’.”

0.html was deleted as part of the Expunction project in 2011.

However, one visual element from this legendary work survived; the rotating cube. The original file is a 64 by 64 pixel gif animation of a cube that rotates on one of its corners.

In February and March 2022, Štromajer produced seven post-blockchain non-fungible cubes (NFC) from the original gif and secretly exhibited them at seven Frankfurt art venues; AtelierFrankruft, basis, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Kunstverein Familie Montez, Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Portikus and Schirn Kunsthalle.

Now, 25 years after the original work was produced, Sakrowski, art historian, director and curator of router.gallery and the panke.gallery in Berlin, redesigned this iconic animation into an augmented reality (AR) artwork under the title Cube.Zero.

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Igor Štromajer: ⊡.gif, gallery Gallery
Sakrowski & Štromajer: Cube.Zero, Ploshtadka
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This spring, starting on 19 May, Štromajer presents ⊡.gif at Gallery Gallery; the original 64 by 64 pixel animated rotating cube is shown at the router gallery and the brand-new AR work Cube.Zero by Štromajer & Sakrowski at Ploshtadka. The exhibition will continue throughout the summer.

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Gallery Gallery / Галерия Галерия is the first gallery that is exclusively focused on digital art in Bulgaria. All exhibitions at the gallery are shown in a virtual exhibition space.

Ploshtadka / Площадка is the new virtual sculpture park of gallery Gallery. It shows digital sculptures visible to visitors’ mobile devices through augmented reality. It is a natural continuation of a digital exhibition space and the permanent collection of gallery Gallery.

A cubic function is a function of the form ƒ(x)=ax³+bx²+cx+d where the coefficients a, b, c and d are complex numbers, and the variable x takes real values, and a≠0. It is both a polynomial function of degree three, and a real function. Setting ƒ(x)=0 produces a cubic equation of the form ax³+bx²+cx+d=0.