Igor Štromajer
with Sakrowski:
ƒ(x)=ax³+bx²+cx+d

Exhibition
28 June–22 July 2022
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Until a few years ago, it was mostly video gamers, compulsive social media users and people who, for various reasons, had to spend most of their time online that shared the feeling of living in a hybrid, material and digital reality. The pandemic has made this experience commonplace. Words that were once exotic, like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), are now increasingly applied to our daily routine and mundane tasks and activities. As is common with digital experiences, hybrid realities have become a habit before we were even aware of them.

With its monumental and tautological representation of the possibility for inhabiting different realities, Igor Štromajer’s hybrid installation ƒ(x)=ax³+bx²+cx+d* produces and confirms this awareness and questions the different levels of perception and the ways in which the concepts of presence, ownership and accessibility relate to them.

In the installation, the central role is occupied by a 1 m³ concrete cube balanced on one of its vertices, representing the transposition into a physical space of the iconic GIF animation created by the artist in 1996 and recreated in 2021 for AR environments by art historian and curator Sakrowski.

The first two iterations of this trilogy complete the installation by materialising on the screens of visitors’ electronic devices.

* Cubic function

THE AUTHORS

Igor Štromajer, a non-amateur level para-artist – »le Pavarotti du HTML« (Libération) – researches tactical a=tF², intimate guerrilla, and traumatic low-tech communication strategies. He has shown his work at more than two hundred fifty exhibitions in more than sixty countries (transmediale, ISEA, EMAF, SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica Futurelab, V2_, IMPAKT, CYNETART, Manifesta, FILE, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Hamburg Kunsthalle, ARCO, Microwave, Banff Centre, Les Rencontres Internationales, The Wrong – New Digital Art Biennale and in numerous other galleries and museums worldwide) and received a number of awards (in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Dresden, Moscow, Belfort, Madrid, Maribor, Podgorica). His net art works 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, Paris, France; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Computerfinearts – net and media art collection, New York, USA; Maribor Art Gallery, Maribor, Slovenia. As a guest artist he lectures at universities and contemporary art institutes. MORE

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.