Intima, 89/96-03/04, radical emotions

Intima | virtual base, Ljubljana, 2004
Catalogue
28 pp., illus. b/w, Free
Website address: http://www.intima.org/art.html.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

Ljubljana is certainly a hotspot for web art, media art, and artistic research in the information age. The city has radically left behind its historic slumber as a provincial capital in the Yugoslavian federation to become the capital of one of the fastest developing new member states of the European Union. Already selected as the seat of a Soros Open Society Institute in the nineties, and home to the famous Ljudmila (Ljubljana Digital Media Lab), it has hosted the third edition of the migrant Contemporary Art Biennal 'Manifesta' (in 2000). With its 50 plus galleries and numerous museums, the city is a must for every art lover, whether she be interested in contemporary or historic art. Igor Stromajer's works were/are created there under the covers of www.intima.org and "intima | virtual base". They are urban in their formal and technical expression, utterly romantic and sometimes even gloomily sentimental in their content. Like a contemporary Joyce – who dwelled in close-by Trieste for some time – Stromajer uncouples narrative from storytelling and explores the human emotional condition through construction and technique. It leaves the viewer unsettled and uneasy, at least.

In this catalogue, Stromajer presents only images of his former work, without comment or reflection other than a letter from Karl Marx to his friend Friedrich Engels (on the difference between tools and machines) and a proof of a theorem from quantum mechanics. In this way, Stromajer continues his choice for low-tech strategies – here extended even to the content and the quality of the print medium. The reader is left with this cryptic message:

Single, structurally equal to all, and endless in the microstructure shows the totality and disconnectedness of intima in her mirror image. One, split into two is compatible with the life of intima. The magic structure of one and the obsession with individualism inspires the ritual beauty of polarity which is shown on the altar of art. The story about intima is presented by a mathematical microstructure. The circle is drawn and in the circle there is a whole world. There is a world of tactical communications and a world of impossible emotions, but intima is the zone of their co-existence (http://www.intima.org/art.html).

There is no clear path to and through Stromajers’ works. And there is no clear explanation why his works succeed in connecting frustrations, traumas, and fantasies (Zizek!) or rather why his connections frustrate, traumatize, and virtualise. In web art, technology and art work together to paradoxically distance the artist from himself and from the viewer he is getting closer to. To experience this process, the reader is better off at the website of intima.org, exactly where he will want to have a nice, tactile hard copy of its content.