⊡.gif
Igor Štromajer
with Sakrowski
19-05-2022 until 03-09-2022
Opening: 19 May 2022, 7pm at Ploshtadka
In 1996, Igor Štromajer created his first work of net art; 0.html. The work was an elaborate game-like interactive story in which Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Hobbes, Tito, Kraftwerk and Neil Armstrong, among others, have cameos.
German curator and theorist Inke Arns wrote that “‘0.html’ is an archive of historical techno imagination, world politics and a grain of melancholy. At the end of the tour through this complex project, Štromajer confronts the visitor with the following words: ‘Internet is the most primitive medium ever’.”
0.html was deleted as part of the Expunction project in 2011. A video walk-through is available online.
However, one visual element from this legendary work survived; the rotating cube. The original file is a 64 by 64 pixel gif animation of a cube that rotates on one of its corners.
In February and March 2022, Štromajer produced seven post-blockchain non-fungible cubes (NFC) from the original gif and secretly exhibited them at seven Frankfurt art venues; AtelierFrankruft, Basis Frankfurt, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Kunstverein Familie Montez, Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Portikus and Schirn Kunsthalle.
Now, 25 years after the original work was produced, Sakrowski, art historian, director and curator of router.gallery and the panke.gallery in Berlin, redesigned this iconic animation into an augmented reality (AR) artwork under the title Cube.Zero.
This spring, starting on 19 May, Štromajer will present ⊡.gif at gallery Gallery; the original 64 by 64 pixel animated rotating cube will be shown at our router gallery and the brand-new AR work Cube.Zero by Štromajer & Sakrowski at Ploshtadka. The exhibition will continue throughout the summer.
Igor Štromajer aka intima, a non-amateur level para-artist – “le Pavarotti du HTML” – researches tactical a=tF², intimate guerrilla, and low-tech communication strategies. He has shown his work at more than two hundred fifty 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, The Wrong – New Digital Art Biennale, among others.
His net art 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 in Maribor.
Sakrowski holds a master’s degree in art history and works as a freelance curator in Berlin. From 1999 to 2003 he curated and organised exhibitions and lectures on net art as part of the project netart-datenbank.org. From 2007 to 2009 he worked as a freelance researcher on the “Net Pioneers 1.0” research project at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research in Linz. Since 2007 he has been working intensively on the web.video phenomena under the name CuratingYouTube.net and has presented his own video online tool gridr.org (2012). In 2014/15 he worked for the transmediale festival “capture all” as curator. Since October 2016 he has been managing and curating the panke.gallery in Berlin-Wedding. He is a founding member (2019) of the Zentrum für Netzkunst Berlin.