!gor #352;: ✚

Igor Štromajer is an intermedia artist whose interdisciplinary work always crosses the fields of net art, virtual and tangible reality, internet spaces, and unlocking the potential of dystopian emotions. In the 1990s, he started researching specific art interventions in the spaces of contemporary communication channels and technologies. He describes his practice as a ;sensory-tactile para-artistic actionism’ or ‘intimate mobile communication’, with the Internet always representing the key platform for his artistic actions. Without a doubt, Štromajer is a pioneer of net art, in which he discovered amazing potential, at a time when the majority only saw the Internet as an instrument of everyday, practical use. Until now, Štromajer continuously and consistently develops his strategies of creating ‘parallel worlds’ that reach beyond tangible and material substances. With his creative work, new terminology has come to life: pseudo-artistic action, intimist guerilla, traumatic low-tech communication strategies. He is an eclectic artist with an oeuvre that encompasses more than 200 artworks and projects, presented at over 300 exhibitions, biennials, and festivals in 60 countries (transmediale, ISEA, EMAF, SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica Futurelab, V2_, IMPAKT, CYNETART, Manifesta, FILE, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Hamburg Kunsthalle, ARCO, Microwave, Banff Centre, Les Rencontres Internationales, The Wrong – New Digital Art Biennale, etc.). In his works, Štromajer establishes strategies of ‘unreasonable resistance’ and offers unsuccessful tactics for overcoming political anxiety. He has received multiple awards (Frankfurt, Hamburg, Dresden, Belfort, Madrid, Maribor, Podgorica, etc.), and his works have been bought by central art institutions (such as Le Centre national d’art et de Culture Georges Pompidou – Musee national d’art moderne, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Computerfinearts Gallery – net and media art collection, New York; and Art Gallery, Maribor).

Štromajer’s net art continuously and purposefully revolves around personal paradoxes and authorial (self-)irony. He often describes his artefacts as ‘non-art’, and consequently defines his art as ‘abandoning art’, positioned between mistake, trial, and possibility. As an author, he constantly questions the ontological borders between presence and absence, both on the physical and on the mental levels. In one of his interviews, he said: ‘Yes, I would like to know what happens with the objects when they are alone, when there is no person there to interpret them or make contact with them. I am interested in a world where objects live autonomously, where they simply are.’ He developed a realisation of this idea with Brane Zorman in the project Ballettikka Internettikka: a net ballet or guerrilla action in which the authors/performers smuggled camera-equipped robots into relevant institutions at unusual and informal times, with the purpose of enabling a perspective of the existence and atmosphere of ‘art’ spaces when they are empty, not functioning, and being in their absolute self-sufficiency.

Being engaged in an artistic practice that embraces the principles of continuous technological improvement, he is in fact constantly in a ‘working environment’ that is becoming obsolete with each new day. And yet, he believes that the concept of obsolescence can also be a beautiful, natural, and attractive artistic format. It is this analysis of progress that has led him to specific projects. If, as an author, he sees that a specific work that he programmed does not work as it should anymore (due to the changed technological circumstance), he tries to repair and reprogramme it – or more often simply erases it. By erasing his artworks, he creates new spaces of creation, as the act of deletion creates a new artwork: in place of the previous non-functioning work, there is a new non-work or empty space, freed from artistic tensions and ready for new ideas.

Between 11 May and 16 June 2012, he performed Expunction (Pixxelpoint), a ritual deletion of 37 of his web works created between 1996 and 2007. This unconventional action received wide recognition among web communities, and then migrated into physical space in the form of lectures and exhibitions. Along with an extremely large body of work, Štromajer has spent recent years continuously developing countless versions of his Make Love Not Art slogan, which adds a political dimension to his subversive artistic interventions. He shares his invaluable archive and the constant self-restoration of past and future projects with the public at https://intima.info.

At the beginning of Štromajer’s creative path, the World Wide Web might still have been the (promised) space of freedom and, most of all, democracy. Over the decades, however, it has proved to be a more and more censored, controlled, and privatised field. At the same time, net art has been tested, as its subversiveness has quickly become popularised and generally accessible for realisation. Despite this, the creative sensitivity of Igor Štromajer always sees a few steps into the future and presents itself as a constant hint of what is to come. His manifestations are, therefore, always full of drops of unpretentious vision, which never fail to see themselves with irony and to see art with cynicism.