[aha] PRESS RELEASE: 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 
<http://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 
<http://www.aksioma.org/press/make_love_not_art.zip>


*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 <http://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 
<http://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 <http://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 <mailto:aksioma4 at siol.net>_
*Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana*
Neubergerjeva 25, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
_www.aksioma.org <http://www.aksioma.org/>_
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