Expunction – Deleting www.intima.org Net Art Works

If one can construct, program, build and create art, one can also delete it and deprogram it. Expunction was a natural, normal process of deleting my net art works, of removing them from my server. It was not a spectacle, nor an act of aggression or anger. It was not the artist's attack on society, and it was also no religion. It was simply a procedure, a protocol. Something you have to do, to follow. Things appear, things disappear. My decision was conceptual, and I saw it as a constructive one, not as a destruction. I was deleting to revive, to vivify. All initial net art works lost their «natural environment», because the Internet 1.0) has already gone. It is impossible to preserve the net art works in their original form, because there is no original form anymore, browsers have changed, external links are broken, external linked servers are down, pop-up windows are blocked, Java functions differently etc. The whole Internet is so very 2.0 now. Memory is there to deceive, not to tell us how it was.

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 perday Started: 11 May 2011
Duration: 37 days (last project deleted on 16 June 2011)
Subject: net art works by Igor Štromajer, created from 2007 to 1996, were being deleted,
erased from the original www.intima.org server.
An act of love, definitely.
www.intima.org/expunction


Biography
Igor Štromajer (Intima Virtual Base – www.intima.org) is an intimate mobile communicator, a multimedia artist. His works comprises nearly 150 projects presented at more than 100 exhibitions in 50 countries on all the continents. The two most widely known are Ballettikka Internettikka and Oppera Internettikka (1997–2011). He has received several awards for his work (in Moscow, Hamburg, Dresden, Belfort, Madrid and Maribor), and his projects form part of the permanent collections of the prestigious art institutions, among them Le Centre national d'art et de Culture Georges Pompidou - Musée national d'art moderne in Paris, France; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain; the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana, Slovenia; the Computerfinearts Gallery - net and media art collection in New York, USA; the Maribor Art Gallery, Slovenia). His multimedia projects research emotional tactics, intimate political guerrilla, and traumatic low-tech communication strategies. As a guest artist he lectures at universities and contemporary art institutes in Europe, North and Latin America, and Asia.