Category: Texts

[press, articles, papers, books, media, lectures, references]

EastUnBloc · Holo Magazine

“EastUnBloc” Reclaims Media Art from Socialist Europe

“nGbK Berlin‘s EastUnBloc examines the permeability of the ‘Iron Curtain’ through the lens of experimental media art by more than two dozen artists and collectives from socialist and transition-era Central and Eastern Europe. From Slovak homebrew computer games, to Igor Štromajer’s hardware hacks, to the set of Hungary’s guerilla Vákuum TV: the included pieces counter clichés of socialist conformity and reveal the many inventive strategies—’scripts’—of making do.”

— Holo Magazine, Toronto, 2025/11/29

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

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NON-ART

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

ᅠ
Introduction: An asymmetric premise

Non-art represents a concept that eludes classical attempts at definition, since it can only be approached through a cut or an opening that carves into its own inability to be named. While the predictable horizon of definition promises stability, this specific cut brings an unresolved wound, an incision without a scar, where the imprint of incompleteness causes the scar to actually precede the wound, while the wound itself emerges from its own oblivion.

In this context, non-art acts as both a precondition and a consequence of its own construction. It constitutes a precondition due to the inevitability of representational failure, and it remains a consequence because it constantly reproduces its own negation as a way of persisting. Identity collapses within what might be called the interval of coherence, where we face an excessively precise difference that traverses every point and deprives it of stability, completely displacing the idea of a void between two points of meaning. Within this tension and in the rhythm of appearance and disappearance, the experience of non-art abandons convergence or divergence in favor of constant lateral displacement or tangential sliding. Movement takes place from one displacement toward the next and completely renounces the linear journey from something toward something else.

Domitia Verne writes in her 1974 work Topology of Sub-absence that non-art is merely a discipline of delay, where delay does not act as a temporal interval but as an ontological derivative that deprives every phenomenon of the possibility of becoming an event. Such a delay does not appear as a euphemism for indeterminacy, but represents a rigorous form and a simultaneous decay of form through which non-art ensures that meaning maintains a constant state of pre-ripening and post-ripening, thereby avoiding the ripening process itself.

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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.

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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