Igor Stromajer *1967 (Ljubljana)

works / festivals (selection): extensions, Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg 1997) / European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück, 1998) / Biennale de Montreal (Montreal 2000) / Impakt Festival (Utrecht, 2002) / Centre national d'art et de Culture Georges Pompidou (Paris 2003) / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid) / Computerfinearts, net and media art collection (New York)
awards (selection): "El Mundo Award to the best Net-Art Work" (2001) and 1st price at the Media Forum (CyberMovie - Festival of Internet art projects), XXIII Moscow International Film Festival (2001) / 1st price at "Interferences", 2. Festival International d'Arts Multimedia Urbains, Belfort (2000).

artists site:
>> http://www.intima.org

project page:
>> http://www.intima.org/wpack

wapproject page:
>> tagtag.com/wpack

wPack (2004)

Igor Stromajer defines himself as "independent net.wap.gsm.gps.org intimate artist". He is founder of the intima virtual base (Institute for Contemporary Arts) in Maribor, Slovenien, supporting artistic activities and sound-projects and running a net-art internet-portal (intima.org). Stromajer is working mainly in the field of emotional effects of new technologies.
The key word for his project proposed for Cuxhaven is "packages". Packages as compressed, packed, ready-to-use units, containing something/whatever. As small pieces of downloadable software, they are going to be distributed via WLAN and will automatically execute programs on the mobile devices of the users. Stromajer describes the packages as emotional bombs, exploring frustrations, traumas, fantasies and emotions.
The key words for the content would be: artificial, autonomy, avatar, communication, control, difference, digital, emergency, emotion, eyes, fear, fluid, future, grace, identification, identity, imagination, impossible, information, joy, language, memory, mobility, montage, operation, option, organic, others, pain, questions, radical, reality, relation, self, sensibility, sensitiveness, silence, strategy, subject, sublime, symbol, syndrome, system, tactics, tears, territory, terrorism, time, transfer, utopia, vision etc. Those packages would be very radical, provoking (also in social, political and cultural sense - Europe: east/west, world: west/Islam etc) in terms of exploring the privacy and intimacy (nothing to do with romantics). And the main glue of the packages would be communication, finding a personal/private/intimate viewpoint, plus forming smaller or bigger, permanent or temporary wireless communities. They are - metaphorically - more like "software-questions" coming to our personal machines (computers, phones, palms...) demanding some contemporary answers which we as individuals/users will have to provide. And this is where the basic communication starts.