Media Art Preservation
The 20th century brought significant changes in art practice and theories, which also influenced contemporary art conservation strategies. Not only does the field of media art require special care, but it is also ageing much faster than classical works of modern art. The specialisation of media art (time-based media) conservation will be introduced using two projects as examples: Re:Senster – a project for the restoration of the cybernetic sculpture Senster (1970) by E. Ihnatowicz and the exhibition REBOOT. Pionieeiring Digital Art at Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam (2023–24) organised by LI-MA media art platform in Amsterdam. As will be shown in the presentation, the priorities of both projects were to draw attention to media art, its already century-old international history, its cultural potential and the problems of collecting and exhibiting. The lecture highlights that the range of art preservation based on new technologies is extensive, constantly changing, and always predicated on knowledge exchange, transdisciplinary collaboration, and networks of care.
Variable Media Initiative, https://www.guggenheim.org/conservation/the-variable-media-initiative
DOCAM, https://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=1544
Laurenson, P., The Management of Display Equipment in Time-Based Media Installations, Tate papers online https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/03/themanagement-of-display-equipment-in-time-based-media-installations (accessed 24.01.2022)
Hölling, H., ‘The Archival Turn’, in: Data Drift: Archiving Media and Data Art in the 21st Century, ed. R. Smite, L. Manovich, R. Smits, Riga: RIXC and Liepaja’s University Art Research Lab, 2015, p. 74.
Re:Senster Projekt, http://senster.agh.edu.pl
Lost Art, film on Senster, TATE London, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoZb5MTKzQc&t=16s
Exhibition REBOOT, Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam, https://nieuweinstituut.nl/projects/reboot-baanbrekende-digitale-kunst
LI-MA Living Media Art platform, https://li-ma.nl
Who Cares for Netart?, video by LI-MA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zfocV9QEVs
Digital Canon!?, LI-MA https://www.digitalcanon.nl/#list
Mediakunst.net, https://www.mediakunst.net
https://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org by JODI
Scrollbar Composition by Jan Robert Leegte, http://www.scrollbarcomposition.com
https://mouchette.org by Martine Neddam
Symposium Transformation Digital Art 2024, LI-MA, Amsterdam, https://li-ma.nl/article/transformation-digital-art-2024/
Ecomedia. From Fibre Optics to the Cloud (and Back Again)
The lecture explores ecomedia – a category born at the intersection of researching visual culture, environmental humanities (including humanities analysing culture’s associations with the logics of a fossil fuel-dependent society), postcolonial theory and media theory. Expanding beyond eco-criticism, it opens up to numerous approaches undermining dominance- and exclusion-based worldviews: feminist and queer theories; de-colonisation, and the perspective of disability studies. The ecomedia approach offers a relevant response to notorious issues of the Anthropocene, including climate crisis, and neocolonial extractivism policies disregarding their ecological consequences or social cost, the logics of Plantationocene, and the elimination of biodiversity (occasionally referred to as the sixth extinction, a term coined by Elizabeth Kolbert).
The ecomedia-based perspective is a proposition that allows for understanding inter-relations connecting fibre optics, clouds, soil and oceans (and anything in-between). It is one of the research practices calling for a verification of anthropocenic and extractivist ideologies our worldviews are based on.
Should one adopt Marshall McLuhan’s classic propositions as a point of departure for modern media theory, one might well claim that they had initially been highly anthropocentric. Media were originally perceived as a tool of expanding the human sensorium. Is the anthropocentric perspective unavoidable in media theory? Could earth, air, water and fire be considered media? Is Gaia a media platform? On the other hand, can we afford to exclude the ecological cost of basic media-related infrastructures in any research of media-based cultural practices? In what way does the media theory fit into the ideology of extractivism? The lecture raises these and other questions, following the less frequented paths, and reaching for theoretical propositions offered by John Durham Peters, Cajetan Iheka or Melody Jue (among others).
Martín Arboleda, Planetary Mine. Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism (Kopalnia planetarna. Terytoria wydobywcze w czasach późnego kapitalizmu), Verso, London-New York 2020.
Anna Barcz, Environmental Cultures in Soviet East Europe. Literature, History and Memory (Kultury ekologiczne w radzieckiej Europie Wschodniej. Literatura, historia i pamięć), Bloomsbury Publishing 2020.
Ewa Bińczyk, Uspołecznianie antropocenu. Ekowerwa i ekologizowanie ekonomii (Socialising the Anthropocene. The Eco-Verve and Ecologising Economics), Nicolaus Copernicus University Press, Toruń 2024.
Cajetan Iheka, African Ecomedia. Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Afrykańskie ekomedia. Formy sieci, polityki planetarne), Duke University Press, Durham-London 2021.
Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media. Thinking Through Seawater (Błękitna dzikość mediów. Myślenie oparte na wodach morskich i oceanicznych), Duke University Press, Durham-London 2020.
Andrzej Marzec, Antropocień. Filozofia i estetyka po końcu świata (The Anthropo-Shadow. Philosophy and Aesthetics after the End of the World), PWN, Warsaw 2021.
Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology. For a Logic of Future Coexistence, Columbia University Press 2018.
Justin Parks, “The poetics of extractivism and the politics of visibility” (Poetyka ekstraktywizmu i polityka widzialności), Textual Practice, vol. 35 No. 3, 2021, pp. 353-362, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2021.1886708
Lisa Parks, Nicole Starosielski (ed.), Signal Traffic. Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (Ruch sygnałów. Badania krytyczne infrastruktur medialnych), University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago and Springfield 2015.
John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds. Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Wspaniałość chmur. W stronę filozofii żywiołów jako mediów), The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2015.
Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals. From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Radykalni zasobów naturalnych. Od petro-nacjonalizmu do post-ekstraktywizmu w Ekwadorze), Duke University Press, Durham 2020.
Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure” (Etnografia infrastruktury), American Behavioral Scientist vol. 43, No. 3 1999, https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326
Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Sieć podmorska), Duke University Press, Durham 2015.
Maristella Svampa, Neo-Extractivism in Latin America (Neo-ekstraktywizm w Ameryce Łacińskiej), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2019.
Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, “What do we talk about when we talk about extractivism?” (O czym rozmawiamy, rozmawiając o ekstraktywizmie?), Textual Practice vol. 35 no. 3, pp. 505-523, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2021.1889829
Michael Truscello, Infrastructural Brutalism. Art and Necropolitics of Infrastructure (Brutalizm infrastrukturalny. Sztuka i nekropolityka infrastruktury), The MIT Press, Cambridge-London 2020.
Selected reading on Shelley Jackson’s Snow project:
https://www.instagram.com/snowshelleyjackson/?hl=en
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/17/shelley-jackson-writes-snow-story-tattoos
Anna Nacher, The Creative Process as a “Dance of Agency”. Shelley Jackson’s Snow: Performing Literary Text with Elements (Proces twórczy jako „taniec sprawczości”. ‘Śnieg’ Shelley Jackson: interpretacja tekstu literackiego w oparciu o żywioły), [in:] Digital Media and Textuality, ed. Daniela Maduro-Cortes, Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2017 https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783839440919-011/html?lang=en&srsltid=AfmBOooiHM1Wjp9yWNqOcVDnndJeko291hU1QUW16sn5Jzn8mFG1pjyq (open access)
Selected reading on the Rare Earthenware Unknown Fields project:
https://liamyoung.org/projects/rare-earthenware
Selected reading on Justyna Górowska and Ewelina Jarosz’s Cyberwedding to the Brine Shrimp (Cyfrowe zaślubiny z krewetkami solankowymi) project:
https://justynagorowska.com/Cyber-wedding-to-the-brine-shrimp
https://fundacjachmura.pl/cyber-wedding-to-the-brine-shrimp
https://sprinklestephens.ucsc.edu/2021/09/21/wedding-to-the-brine-shrimp/
Caring for Techno-Ecological Entanglements in VR Projects
The lecture explores the potential of Virtual Reality technology-based artistic practices in the context of the global climate crisis in the Anthropocene era. In the first part of my intervention, I intend to examine Le Corps-glitch (multitudes), a project by Marie-Eve Levasseur. The work symbiotically combines the human body with floral, animalistic and technological components through Virtual Reality immersion. The result is a techno-environment wherein more-than-human relationships are shown in ways that are dynamic and animated in equal measure. In the second part, I will consider Air Morphologies by Matterlurgy duo, an interactive research project based on Virtual Reality technologies, which investigates the materiality and composition of air pollution particles, their causes, effects and morphological agency.
Offering new multisensory experiences, the projects above transform the functionalities of contemporary technology, purposely abandoning the anthropocentric perception of nature as a consumerist performance. Consequently, the immersive and interactive practices generate new operational methods that reject homogenous and consumption-targeting schemas, stimulating a new sensitivity to techno-ecological entanglements. The immersivity of artworks allows participants to overcome indifference to ecology and thus develop a relationship with the environment based on care for the more-than-human world.
Materially Random Stories. The Unique Experience of Narratives in Digital Gaming.
In contact with digital gaming, players experience randomness on multiple levels – less in terms of gaming mechanics than in connection with other uncertainty-based functionalities. Greg Costikyan (2013) claims this to be a prevalent mechanism used to keep players interested and involved. Uncertainty is by no means limited to the option of a specific object appearing or event occurring in the game; it is also connected to developing narrative tension. We may grow uncertain of our own skills during the game, while remaining unaware of how other players might behave. Games with an uncertainty focus have become observably more popular over recent years. While most related studies explore the ethical aspects of using so-called “loot box” mechanisms – boxes containing random spoils used as prizes (Nielsen & Grabarczyk, 2019; Xiao et al., 2022) – it is notable that randomness may serve as a foundation for gambling content as well as aforesaid experimentation with the uncertainty formula in digital gaming, and the pleasure it produces. Moving beyond an examination of capabilities of procedurally generated gaming environments, designers have begun introducing interesting mechanisms on a narrative building level. Such experiences are strongly based on algorithmic operations that become something closely akin to a dispositive, a structural force for participating individuals. Adopting Michel Foucault’s theory as her point of departure, Karen Barad perceives dispositives as material-discursive practices responsible for meanings arising from relationships. Owing to such practices, phenomena acquire separate properties and boundaries explorable by other beings. Once considered in a gaming moment context, gaming randomness-associated mechanisms ultimately define everything that happens in the game, as well as our required player responses. A moment undetermined just a short while ago becomes determined as well as unique. Interestingly, the approach reflects all the main tendencies in algorithmic culture, as algorithm perception through the lens of objective randomised destiny begins to prevail. Omnipresent content standardisation notwithstanding, uncertainty associated with how algorithms operate gives rise to a sense of an individual and intimate user experience. It is that corelation of standardisation and individuality that I intend to present in my lecture.
Barad, K. M. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Costikyan, G. 2013. Uncertainty in Games. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Nielsen, R., Grabarczyk, P. 2019. “Are Loot Boxes Gambling? Random Reward Mechanisms in Video Games”, DiGRA ’18 – Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message, DiGRA, July, 2018, http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/are-lootboxes-gambling-random-reward-mechanisms-in-video-games/
Intelligent Unconsciousness (Alienating AI Modelling)
The talk explores attempts at the alternative modelling of artificial intelligence the experimental installation and system HYPNOTIC AI (HAI) created by Ania Malinowska and Przemysław Jasielski. HAI is an art-based-research project that contributes to the debate on “the artificial unconscious”, in disagreement with dominant isomorphic AI models that tend to restrict insights into the peculiar machine intelligence by emulating human ways of thinking. HYPNOTIC AI offers human-computer (man-machine) interaction, allowing an experience of their respective phenomenological idiosyncrasies in a code-free exchange of mind abstraction. Reaching for techniques of hypnosis , HYPNOTIC AI prompts discognitionas a tool for exploring AI’s potential beyond traditional codes and materiality. The talk offers insights into the implications of the HYPNOTIC AI system in contexts of AI, man-machine relationships, and philosophical ponderings of artificial consciousness, alluding to experiments in design and art while hoping to inspire novel discussions concerning the evolving dynamic between human cognition and machine intelligence.
Tentatively Trained Entropy Generators
In my intervention, I intend to explore the connections between information and entropy, and context – in post GPT-4 (large multimodal language model published by OpenAI in March 2023) commercialisation reality. We will begin with a “return to cybernetics”, its creator Norbert Wiener having warned, “Cybernetics is a two-edged sword, and sooner or later it will cut you deep”. Cybernetics is indeed worth revisiting, as it has revisited us. The contemporary context of cybernetic “image-objects” (such as the automatic factory described by Wiener) has little in common with the way of producing science or technology in the early post-World War II days. Nonetheless, the “image-objects” designed by cybernetic engineers have become a reality, yielding machines whose workings would cross all boundaries of cybernetic imagination: Amazon’s warehouses, autonomous vehicles, or the aforementioned GPT-4. With regard to the latter, I will argue that this “generative and tentatively trained transformer” is a primary-level trained generator of entropy – social and information-oriented – and of mental entropy defined by psychiatrist Antoni Kępiński. Yet in order to perceive these entropies and describe their generation mechanisms correctly, critical revision needs to be applied to the interpretation of entropy in information theory, and to the calculative description of the mind as a cerebral property involving information processing. I will attempt to showcase the outcomes of such theoretical interventions, as well as its potential practical use.
Electronic Cohabitation / Digital Collaboration
Piotr Cichocki
Electronic Cohabitation / Digital Collaboration
A profound change is about to take place, one spanning daily life and global political processes, and announced by media researchers over thirty years ago. The change will question the very core of such categories as local culture, cultural identity or space of culture. It has become blatantly obvious that developments on other continents affect our daily reality. Our political communities, neighbourhoods and individual consciousnesses have been incorporated into economic, ecological and political transformations spanning the globe.
New digital media are a significant – though by no means exclusive – component of aforementioned change. As it turns out, they are more than an information channel providing us with news from the other side of the planet, for example. They are also spaces and tools of co-existence and collaboration. Websites have become venues for hostile cohabitation – and alliances for taking action to make the world a radically better place.
We will be thinking and talking about collaboration in the space of the Worldwide Web, wherein representatives of assorted placed and communities work together by choice or from necessity, basing on multiple habitus and work methods. Examples of such actions include the “1000Hz” music production label I am head of, associated with ethnographic research across East Africa. The label publishes and promotes works by artists of the region, all communication between us handled by electronic platforms.
The group Help refugees in Lithuania, Poland and Belarus is a yet another and terrifying current example. Families of refugees from Syria, Iraq and Yemen use the group to try and contact individuals engaging in rescue and salvage operations in Poland.
The next example involves an array of broadly defined activities organised under the shared tag Extinction Rebellion (XR). In the nebula of virtual groups and face-to-face meetings, XR stands for assorted forms of collaborating to reverse the climate disaster.
In the course of the workshop, we will ponder successive spaces of collaboration and cohabitation.
Creative Ethnography and Social Art
Tomasz Rakowski
Creative Ethnography and Social Art
The purpose of creative ethnography’s conceptual framework is to describe artistic and social projects with the use of a specific method: the language of description is intended to transcend the language of art critique, cultural animation, or anthropology and social sciences. It is an experimental form of “thick description”, wherein knowledge and action, cultural cognition and artistic projects are connected to one another in different and more compact ways, with the use of new and frequently prototypic concepts. Generally speaking, these are quests for keywords which might help capture the experience of being and acting along frontiers of art, ethnography and daily life worlds.
Accordingly, I am describing social art projects primarily as an area of experimental collaboration, wherein a new and unpredictable sense of event is born. I believe something akin to a cultural cyclotron emerges therefrom, the ethnographic experience recognised as a point of departure; concurrently, a fully new cognitive field evolves alongside. These processes might well be referred to as the creation of artistic-and-demographic appliances which “produce extra reality”, conferring certain appearance upon it in order for a new look of social imagination to emerge. Often as not, these processes take on the nature of a pitfall referenced by Alfred Gell and, later, Roger Sansi: a draft scenario combining intentions and motivations of all project initiators and participants into a dramatic whole – wherein an artistic or animation action, once created, begins reinventing the perspective of each of the parties involved, generating something akin to an “inner” performance.
The concept further comprises a certain scope of freedom – an individual’s capacity for reaching a state of liminality and becoming “someone else” or “anyone” – for surpassing one’s life and cultural roles. The creative ethnography conceptual framework thus enables a more adequate rendering of artistic processes occurring in the extended field of art. As a methodology introduced to social practice, it co-creates a collaboration network which becomes an art-supporting environment, frequently outside art market structures. Consequently, creative ethnography enables the process of transcending ostensible contrasts formatting the modernist institution of art – an opposition between high art and the daily creativity of marginalised groups, practical value and aesthetic value of art, or between expert-level and radically democratic comprehension of artistic competencies.
Virtual Reality and Its Boundaries. An Organological Perspective.
Michał Krzykawski
Centre for Critical Research on Technologies
University of Silesia, Katowice
Virtual Reality and Its Boundaries. An Organological Perspective.
The most amazing thing about Virtual Reality is that it lets our brains be deceived. For the first time in the history of technologies – which is, in all actuality, the history of mankind – we have become capable of making the human brain believe that it is in a different location from the factual one. By employing a technological stratagem, we are tricking an organ whose pliability we have discovered only recently, and whose activity does not, on the other side, remain unrelated to technical environment transformations occurring at unprecedented speed.
Concurrently, we have begun tricking the human brain in a very specific political and economic reality of (digital) platforms capitalism to which these disarranging transformations are subjected. “Virtual Reality has potential for becoming the most social platform ever, because it actually makes you feel as if you had another person there”, said Mark Zuckerberg in 2016. No wonder he is attempting to turn Facebook into a “metaverse company” (combining the virtual world with the physical one) today by trying to convince nearly three billion users that “metaverse is the ultimate expression of social technology”.
Can Virtual Reality be conceived as socially and aesthetically desirable in the face of psycho-social consequences of physical world undergoing virtualisation? Can Virtual Reality be socialised to avoid exacerbation of “symbolic poverty” (Stiegler) and systemically preclude the “distribution of the sensual” (Rancière)? Wherein lie the virtual illusion boundaries? We will ponder these and other questions in the spirit of general organology proposed by French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, which explores relations between three types of organs: the psychosomatic, as the material foundation for mental structures; the artificial, as technological system components; and organisations (institutions) forming social systems.
VR in Daily Life, or the Pressure of Imaginary Futures
Jerzy Stachowicz
VR in Daily Life, or the Pressure of Imaginary Futures
In my intervention, I would like to begin with a glance at Virtual Reality as a component of imaginary futures, a term used by Richard Barbrook when describing the development of computers, robots and artificial intelligence.
According to Barbrook, a revolutionary technological change – one that would forever alter our daily life – has been constantly predicted since the late 1930s. Androids and robotic animals will evolve and become our genuine autonomic helpers, artificial intelligence indistinguishable from that of humans. A future thus imagined is not only projected from pages of science fiction novels; it is also present in sober analyses by sociologists and theoreticians of culture, marketing and media – and in everyday conversations.
The vision of such change assumes assorted forms, adjusting to social conversion, actual technological discoveries, market needs, etc. Invariably, the assorted sources estimate a timeframe of several or over ten-twelve years, whereupon an enormously dynamic technological and/or social variation is to be expected. Yet that variation continues to be late in coming – imaginary futures are yet to witness their moment of reality.
As the world of computers developed, the futuristic imaginarium has expanded to include virtual reality, ostensibly a “natural” consequence of the evolvement of computers, graphic interfaces, and artificial intelligence. William Gibson’s literary cyberpunk and such films as Tron or The Lawnmower Man have contributed to the process of disseminating visions of cyberspace. Are the incessant attempts at creating a universally accessible “VR for everyone” not an expression of science fiction-based determinism, as it were? Do we need such profoundly immersive experiences in daily life? Do imaginary futures comprise an actual political dimension? Or will VR forever remain a phenomenon fascinating and niche-focused in equal measure?
