Expunction – Deleting www.intima.org Net Art Works
11 May – 16 June 2011
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Memory is there to deceive.
Expunction is a project by ex-net-artist and current pseudo-artist Igor Štromajer. Between 11 May and 16 June 2011, Štromajer 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 that our memory serves to deceive, to betray us, to misrepresent rather than paint and describe the past. A deceitful memory can be erased without qualms, for it does not offer an authentic image of the past of which it speaks, but always only a deceptive, a fraudulent, fabricated, and 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 www.intima.org server
[Flickr] 451 Expunction DEL NET ART Screenshots
[TXT] The Potential of Erasing (Liberating Ireversible Deletions: Art, Plasticity And Memory); Text by Pia Brezavšček; Selected excerpts about Expunction | The complete text can be found in: MASKA Performing Arts Journal, Vol. XXVII, No. 149–150 (autumn / October 2012)
– Annet Dekker: (Electronic Media) FUTURE, or how to live Forever, 2013
– Preserving Born Digital Art : Lessons From Artists’ Practice; Dr. Conor McGarrigle, Dublin Institute of Technology (PDF)
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[ Debating | Archiving ]
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Igor Štromajer aka Intima is a pseudo-/para-artist. He has shown his work at numerous exhibitions, festivals and biennials worldwide, among others at the transmediale, ISEA, EMAF, SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica Futurelab, V2_, IMPAKT, CYNETART, Manifesta, FILE, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Hamburg Kunsthalle, ARCO, Banff Centre, Les Rencontres Internationales, etc. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the MNCA Reina Sofía in Madrid, Computer Fine Arts in New York, and UGM.
