CRISES AND NEW BEGINNINGS
ART IN SLOVENIA 2005–2015
– group exhibition
Moderna galerija +MSUM – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
22 December 2015 – 3 April 2016
Curators: Bojana Piškur, Igor Španjol, Vladimir Vidmar
The exhibition aims to present a selective overview of developments just past or still taking place, and attempts to define the main phenomena and trends in contemporary art in Slovenia over the past decade.
+ FB Photo Album
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Igor Štromajer participating with:
EXPUNCTION
Deleting Net Art Works, 2011
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Memory is there to deceive.
Expunction is a project by mobile Internet communicator Igor Štromajer. Between 11 May and 16 June 2011, Štromajer, a pioneer of net art both in Slovenia and worldwide, ritually deleted a number of his classical net art works produced between 1996 and 2007. He expunged one net art project per day, permanently deleting it from his online server, so that the projects are no longer available at the Intima Virtual Base. He deleted 37 net art works altogether, amounting to 3,288 files or 101.72 MB.
Those of Štromajer’s projects that were not on the Intima Virtual Base online server at the time of expunction but are permanently loaded on the servers of the galleries and museums that have acquired them through purchases or donations (Centre Pompidou in Paris, Ars Electronica Lab in Linz, Computer Fine Arts Gallery in New York, MNCA Reina Sofía in Madrid, etc.) were (and still are) inaccessible to the artist for deletion.
The Expunction project broaches the questions of temporality, duration, archiving, and accessibility of (net) art works that automatically change over time as the hardware and software change (browsers, players, applications etc.), slowly but inexorably losing their functionality and consequently also their content. The artist’s basic premise in this project was that whoever creates, programs, and composes art is also entitled to deprogram, deconstruct, and delete it. This is not an act of violence or destruction, but rather the observation of the natural rhythm of birth, life, and death, cyclically repeated and oscillating in natural amplitudes. In a way, Štromajer has erased history, including his own personal history, since he believes our memory serves to deceive us, to misrepresent rather than paint and describe the past. A deceptive memory can be erased without qualms, since it does not portray a real picture of the past it speaks of, but always only a deceptive, distorted image. For this reason the deleted works or their remaining fragments, undeletable once they have been made publicly accessible since the World Wide Web is so widely spread and fragmentary, tell us much more about the originals (original works) than the originals themselves. With its empty slot and precise documentation, a nonexistent work, or rather its absence, points out the ephemerality of a net art work, telling at the same time much more about the deleted work than the so-called actual original could.
Number of deleted net art works: 37
Number of deleted files: 3.288
Amount of deleted files: 101.72 MB
– Deletion frequency: one (1) net art work per day
– Started: 11 May 2011
– Duration: 37 days (last project deleted on 16 June 2011)
– Subject: net art works by Igor Štromajer, created between 2007 to 1996, were being deleted, erased from the original intima.org server
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intima • Igor Štromajer 