[spectre] Make Love, Not Art by Igor Štromajer at Aksioma Project Space, Ljubljana

[Aksioma]

Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, kindly invites you to the opening of the exhibition and presentations:

Igor Štromajer
Make Love, Not Art
www.aksioma.org/make_love_not_art

Aksioma | Project Space
Komenskega 18, Ljubljana, Slovenija
29 February – 16 March 2012

Presentations and exhibition opening: Wednesday, 29 February 2012, 7 p.m.

Accompanying the opening of the exhibition, there will be three presentations. They will shed light on digital life in cyberspace, which can end with the expunction of data, oblivion or the death of online identity. Igor Štromajer will present the incentives for the project Expunction and the problem of archiving online works of art. Gordan Savičić – who, as part of the project Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, enabled the users of the social network to erase their entire profile to secure their right to privacy and free management of digital life – will discuss the issue of persistence of online identity in social networks. Ida Hiršenfelder will consider digital death as a political and aesthetic statement in works of art and the idea of eternity of online life as an absurd desire to archive everything that exists.

Images available for free download: www.aksioma.org/press/make_love_not_art.zip

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Igor Štromajer
Make Love, Not Art

Igor Štromajer’s exhibition focuses on the project Expunction. Between 11 and 16 June 2011, Štromajer, one of the pioneers of net art in Slovenia and worldwide, carried out a ritual expunction of his classic net projects, which he created between 1996 and 2007. Every day during that period, he deleted one net art project; he removed it permanently from his server, so that the projects are now no longer available on the web server of Intima Virtual Base. He completely deleted 37 net art projects, totalling 3288 files or 101 MB. The documentation of the expunction and the entire project is available online at www.intima.org/expunction.

The project Expunction raises questions about temporality, duration and availability of net art projects (the so-called “net art”), which change over time and slowly, but persistently lose their utility and, accordingly, their content. Štromajer’s principal guide in this project was the idea that one who creates, programs and constructs art can also deprogram, deconstruct, delete it. This is not an aggressive or destructive act, but rather an instance of taking into account natural rhythm: birth, life, death, which repeat themselves cyclically and oscillate in natural amplitudes. Štromajer has deleted history, including his own personal, intimate history, for he believes that memory is here to deceive, to betray us, and not to show and describe the past for us. A deceitful memory is not hard to delete, for it does not offer a realistic image of the past of which it speaks; it is always just a fraudulent, fabricated image. Hence, once they are published, the deleted art works or their remaining fragments – which can no longer be deleted due to the dispersal and the fragmentation of the world wide web – tell us much more about their originals (the original art works) than the originals themselves.

Igor Štromajer (Intima Virtual Base – www.intima.org) is a web artist, intimate mobile communicator and virtual performer, who has participated in various exhibitions and festivals at home and abroad. The opus of Intima Virtual Base comprises more than fifty projects, which have been exhibited at more than a hundred different exhibitions in 45 countries. Štromajer received several awards for his work (in Moscow, Hamburg, Dresden, Belfort, Madrid) and his projects have been purchased to be included in permanent collections at leading art institutions (such as the Centre national d'art et de Culture Georges Pompidou – Musée national d'art moderne in Paris, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Computerfinearts Gallery – Net and Media Art Collection in New York, the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the Slovene Museum of Contemporary Arts in Ljubljana, and the Maribor Art Gallery in Maribor). As artist-in-residence, he lectures at universities and contemporary art institutes in Europe, USA and Canada.

Gordan Savičić received his Bachelor of Arts degree (in Digital Art and New Media) from the University of Applied Art in Vienna, and his Masters degree from the Institute Piet Zwart. He often collaborates with other artists on artistic projects in numerous countries, such as Austria, Croatia, Germany, Serbia, Switzerland, France and Great Britain. Web 2.0 Suicide Machine was conceived as part of the media hack cooperative moddr_ from Rotterdam.

Ida Hiršenfelder is a contemporary art critic, assistant on video programmes and at the DIVA (Digital Video Archive) station with SCCA, Institute for Contemporary Art – Ljubljana. She regularly collaborates with LJUDMILA – Ljubljana Digital Media Lab, and Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art. Her texts have been aired on Radio študent and published in the daily newspaper Dnevnik. Occasionally, she writes texts for exhibition catalogues.


Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2012
www.aksioma.org

Artistic Director: Janez Janša
Executive Producer: Marcela Okretič
Assistant Production: Sonja Grdina
Public Relations: Mojca Zupanič
Technical Supervisor: Valter Udovičić

Acknowledgments: Robert Sakrowski, Brane Zorman

The programme of Aksioma Institute is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.
Sponsor: Datacenter d.o.o.


Contact:
Marcela Okretič, 041 250 830, aksioma4 at siol.net
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
Neubergerjeva 25, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
www.aksioma.org

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