Extension ’97

History Is Written by the Victorious

And Losers Have Nothing to Lose

[archival documentation]

The Extension competition was organized in 1997 by the Hamburg Kunsthalle as an international net art contest.

In January 1996, I created my first net art work, 0.HTML. The work was submitted to Extension ’97. It consisted of a collage of online materials such as political speeches, animated GIFs, philosophy quotations, academic texts, and fragments of history. Andreas Broeckmann later described it as “an archive of historical techno imagination, world politics and a grain of melancholy” (Leonardo Electronic Almanac, MIT Press, 2000).

0.HTML (created: January 1996, deleted: 15 June 2011)

My work received the third prize.

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NON-ART

A freely accessible version of the Large Language Model was instructed to write a short essay on non-art entirely on its own, in a single nonchalant sweep and without any human intervention, whether content-related, theoretical, stylistic, or grammatical. The version employed was OpenAI GPT-5 [Free], August 2025 release.

[slovenska verzija je spodaj: NEUMETNOST]

Internet, 14 August 2025

NON-ART

a=tF²: Non-Art as the Product of Time and the Square of Force


Introduction: The Asymmetrical Premise

Non-art is not a concept that can be unlocked by definition. It can only be approached through an incision, an opening cut into its own incapacity for naming. If definition, in its most naïve horizon, promises stability, the cut promises an unresolved wound: an incision that leaves no scar, an imprint of incompletion in which the scar precedes the wound, and the wound emerges from its own forgetting.

In this sense, non-art is both the precondition and the consequence of its own construction: a precondition because it presupposes the inevitability of representational failure, and a consequence because it continually reproduces its own negation as a mode of persistence. Identity unravels in what might be called the interval of coherence, not as the void between two points of meaning, but as an excessively precise difference that traverses every point and drains it of all stability. In this tension, in the rhythm of appearance and disappearance, the experience of non-art offers neither convergence nor divergence, but a perpetual lateral displacement, a tangential sliding. It moves not from something toward something else, but from displacement toward further displacement.

“Non-art is merely the discipline of delay,” writes Domitia Verne, “where delay itself is not a temporal interval, but an ontological derivative that strips every appearance of the possibility of becoming an event” (Verne, Topology of Sub-Absence, 1974). This delay is not a euphemism for indeterminacy, but a rigorous form and, at the same time, the dissolution of form, through which non-art ensures that meaning never ripens but is presented as continual pre- and post-ripening.

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└⦿✚⦿┘

└⦿✚⦿┘
by Igor Štromajer
2014 – 2025

· new entries, June 2025

intima.org/o-o

Net Art Books, Portugal

Two books published this year in Portuguese that, among other things, also discuss Štromajer‘s net art works.

· Arte, Digital, Academia, Museu Zer0 Vol. 2, Porto, 2025
· Net Arte no Triângulo das Bermudas, Lisbon, 2025

Arte, Digital, Academia, Museu Zer0 Vol. 2
Luísa Ribas and Miguel Carvalhais (Eds.), Porto, 2025

This book brings together texts in the fields of computational literature, sound art and computational music, digital art curation and exhibition, and critical digital art and design.

In her text A Curadoria Online e a Net Art em Portugal, Sofia Ponte mentions Štromajer‘s work i want to share you – what are you doing to me?.

Texts by Rui Torres, Diogo Marques, Bruno Ministro, Francisca Rocha Gonçalves, Rui Penha, Ana Nistal Freijo, Helena Barranha, Sofia Ponte, Luís Pinto Nunes, Filipe Pais, Ana Carvalho, Joana Pestana, Luísa Ribas, Miguel Carvalhais

Net Arte no Triângulo das Bermudas (Net Art in the Bermuda Triangle)
Sofia Ponte (Ed.), MEO, Lisboa, 2025

In her text Redes de Cuidado (Networks of Care), Annet Dekker discusses Štromajer‘s works Expunction and -oµ4×.

Texts by @c, Annie Abrahams, Beatriz Albuquerque, Mário Cameira, Joana Chicau, João Cruz, Annet Dekker, Daniel Pinheiro, Coletivo Pizz Buin, Sofia Ponte, Rudolfo Quintas, Alice dos Reis, Luísa Ribas, Luis D. Rivero-Moreno, Susana Mendes Silva, Rui Torres, Coletivo wr3ad1ng d1g1ts.

Bright Night Berlin

Bright NightIn Between
exhibition of net art activities + sound night

panke.gallery, Berlin
23 May 2025
7 pm ~ 4 am

Artists at the exhibition:
Amy Alexander, Vuk Ćosić, Constant Dullaart, Sarah Friend & Arkadiy Kukarkin, JODI, Olia Lialina, Jonas Lund, Joana Moll, Everest Pipkin, Sebastian Schmieg, Yehwan Song, Miyö van Stenis, Igor Štromajer & Brane Zorman

· curated by Sakrowski

Igor Štromajer & Brane Zorman:
Ballettikka Internettikka
Internet Ballet (28 March 2002)
video doc (20:42)

📷 Galya Feierman at panke.gallery

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└⦿✚⦿┘

└⦿✚⦿┘
by Igor Štromajer
2014 – 2025

· new entries, April 2025

intima.org/o-o/

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Unicode poems in Zagreb

3¦×Fñ-Qé3=Mià+
one hundred and one poems co-written by a human and a machine

3¦×Fñ-Qé3=Mià+

📍 Booksa / Kulturtreger
Thursday, 13  March 2025 at 19:30
Martićeva 14D, Zagreb

· in collaboration with Format C / Hacklab01 / MaMa

The Zagreb launch of the latest collection of computer-generated poems by Igor Štromajer and his computers took place on Thursday, 13 March 2025 at 19:30 at Booksa – in collaboration with Format C / Hacklab01 / MaMa.

Štromajer in Booksa 📷 Sanja Junaković

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.else.if – grey) (area

.else.if

by Igor Štromajer
HTML · JavaScript, 2025
solo exhibition
1 March – 1 June 2025

Wi-Fi Gallery grey) (area
St. Mark’s Square, Korčula, Croatia
Curator: Darko Fritz
· galerija siva) (zona

 · ten Unicode poems co-written by a human and a machine

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Total Screen Time, Berlin

Total Screen Time – Brainrot
— group show · a one-night exhibition on phones
panke.gallery, Berlin
Saturday, 1 February 2025
18:00 – 21:00

· curated by Aram Bartholl and Socrates Stamatatos

↑ auto.function } .client a=tF² () else.if

Igor Štromajer participates with the work:
auto.function } .client a=tF² () else.if
(2025)

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