Saturday, December 17th (4pm-7pm).
In English, on appointment at v.bobin@leslaboratoires.org and +33 153 561 594

"Why do men collect art? Aesthetics, competition, risk, prestige,
mate attraction, legacy, immortality. It’s an entrepreneur’s wet dream."
— @markamerika, twitter.com/#!/markamerika/status/66945302233493504

"As technology moves forward.. all my work is falling apart.. I’d
like to move forward as well, into a more outside adventurous
practice, so this video is an attempt to document the ruins and
the remains of my internet work."
— dvblog.org/?p=8154


Expunction – Deleting www.intima.org Net Art Works
by Igor Štromajer, 2011

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 per day
- 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.

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On May 2011 Igor Štromajer started to delete his net art projects, created from 1996 to 2007 (Expunction - www.intima.org/expunction, 2011). The process of deletion opened many questions about temporal fragility of contemporary artistic practice, especially when we talk about new media art works. You are invited to join us at the encounter, where we would like to talk about the disappearance of projects and their temporal traces, about the attempts to keep the projects going on or to delete them, transfer them or archive them, to keep them or to leave them going.

Live Internet Broadcast:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/les-labos
Saturday, 17 December, 16:00 - 19:00 (CET +0100 UTC; Paris Time)
+ ask questions via Twitter, use #explab hashtag.

Igor Štromajer (Intima Virtual Base – www.intima.org) is an intimate mobile communicator, a multimedia artist. His oeuvre 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.