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, and that was where the troubles began, continuing to this day.

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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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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.

press · artKIT

tvs1aa

tvs1b

Televizija Slovenija · TVS 1 · Kultura · 27/11/2024 · Petra Skok

TVS Tele M

TVS Tele M

↑ TVS · Tele M · Kultura · 26/11/2024 · Petra Skok

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30× MFRU

30× MFRU, 2024

↝ in conversation with key organisers, curators and artists, we explore the history of the International Festival of Computer Arts

mfru.org/30years
writer, editor: Valerija Intihar
designer, programmer: Marko Damiš

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U3 Press

U3
10. trienale sodobne umetnosti
10th Triennial of Contemporary Art

Moderna galerija MG+
Ljubljana, 21/06 – 17/11/2024

dnevnik_22-6-2024

↑ Dnevnik, 22/06/2024

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HOLO: Ritualistic Self-Deletion

Igor Štromajer Commemorates Ritualistic Self-Deletion
· HOLO – editorial and curatorial platform, May 2024

“Igor Štromajer aka intima commemorates the 13th anniversary of his ritualistic Expunction performance on social media. From May 11 to June 16, 2011, the Slovenian media artist perma-deleted 37 of his net art pieces produced between 1996 and 2007, including acquisitions by the Centre Pompidou, Ars Electronica, and the Computer Fine Arts Gallery. Purging one artwork per day, Štromajer erased his personal history, asking questions about temporality, access, and memory as deception.”

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[kritika] Digitalni oksimoron

[kritika]
Treći program Hrvatskog radija
Tena Starčević, Triptih
14/05/2024, 16:00
[20:40]

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Poetika i politika digitalnih tehnologija

Poetika i politika digitalnih tehnologija
VIZKULTURA, Zagreb, 09. 04. 2024

Multimedijalni kulturni centar SplitDigitalni oksimoron, skupna izložba, 28. 03. – 17. 04. 2024

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