Igor Štromajer’s exhibition focuses on the project Expunction. Between 11 May 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 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)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.
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2012
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.
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