Agnieszka Polska
The Book of Flowers, 2023
HD animation, 9′40″
A short science-fiction film that combines Artificial Intelligence-powered animation with the 16 mm film pre-production, presents an alternative history to the human – plant ecology, where the floral species and humans for millennia existed in a close symbiosis.
Agnieszka Polska (b. 1985 in Lublin, Poland, based in Berlin) – a visual artist and a film director who uses computer-generated media to reflect on an individual and their social responsibility in the context of environments driven by the flow of information. Polska presented her works in international venues, including the New Museum and the MoMA in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Her solo exhibitions were organised by Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Nottingham Contemporary, Saltzburger Kunstverein, among others. She also took part in the 57th Venice Biennale, 11th Gwangju Biennale, 19th and 24th Biennale of Sydney, 14th Shanghai Biennale and 13th Istanbul Biennial. In 2018 she was awarded the German Preis der Nationalgalerie.
photo: Adam Gutt
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/
Seeking Agency. Between Critique and Speculation
Technologies are probably the final social life space of uncritical “progress”-related narratives. In a world of omnipresent crises, new technical solutions are seen as the last resort – even if they are the actual source of one problem after another, ecological and economic, as well as those associated with changes to public space. Cutting across such narratives has become all the more difficult, since technologies (media included) are usually perceived as something that simply works, is based on neutral choices, and carries no political dimension. Perhaps the field of art is the place where relations between technological transformations and societal life have been problematised in ways allowing the underlying processes – unseen and intangible – to be exposed, making power- and control-related issues fully visible. Based on references to selected works, the lecture will explore such activities. Yet in order to move beyond critique, we will also address the speculative dimension of art – artist-suggested visions of better, fairer and more sustainable technologies.
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.
Publication
Nowe ekosystemy sztuki
New ecosystems of art
Wystawa sztuki cyfrowej artystek i artystów z Polski w wersji stacjonarnej i online
Exhibition of Digital Works by Artists from Poland – On Site and Online
ŚCIĄGNIJ | DOWNLOAD
Organizator wystawy / Exhibition organizer: Galeria Arsenał w Białymstoku
Partner / Partner: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie
Zespół kuratorski / Curatorial team: Eliza Urwanowicz-Rojecka & Jakub Wróblewski
Identyfikacja wizualna / Visual identity: Renata Motyka
Architektura wystawy / Exhibition design: Jakub Marzoch
Współpraca / Collaboration: Iga Chmielecka, Paweł Nowak, Katarzyna Urbańska
Redakcja i korekta tekstów / Editing and proofreading: Ewa Borowska
Tłumaczenie z i na angielski / English to Polish and Polish to English translation: Aleksandra Sobczak-Kövesi
Promocja / Communication and promotion: Gabriela Owdziej, Piotr Trypus
Zdjęcia z wystawy / Exhibition photos: Adam Gut
Opieka nad właściwą realizacją projektu „Sztuki wizualne” / Supervising the proper implementation of the “Sztuki wizualne” project: Julita Sitniewska
Wsparcie prawne / Legal support: Urszula Dubieniecka-Kiszło
Opieka księgowa / Accounting: Marlena Maleszewska, Anna Olesiewicz, Katarzyna Wilimas
Koordynacja / Coordination: Eliza Urwanowicz-Rojecka & Jakub Wróblewski
© Copyright by Galeria Arsenał w Białymstoku and Authors, Białystok 2024
Wydawca / Published by Galeria Arsenał w Białymstoku, ul. Adama Mickiewicza 2, 15-222 Białystok, Poland galeria-arsenal.pl
Dyrektorka Galerii Arsenał w Białymstoku / Director of the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok: Monika Szewczyk
Białystok 2024
ISBN 978-83-66262-25-6
Janek Simon
Meta Folklore: A Study of Distance, 2024
computer animation, 5′
I have chosen an earlier work of mine, the GAN* model, as the point of departure. Meta Folklore generalises a database of over twelve thousand photographs of assorted location, cultural and temporal provenance, all depicting non-academic three-dimensional representations of the human body. While I customarily refer to the model as a source of inspiration for my own sculptures I later produce with the use of 3D printers**, my intent herein was to explore its inner structure. Each neural network-generated image is defined by a specific point in 512-dimensional Cartesian space. The space allows the notion of distance to be defined, the work itself investigating its meaning on the visual level.
* GAN – Generative Adversarial Network – neural network architecture type capable of generating new data conforming to learned patterns.
** Simon’s sculptures are a fantastical vision of universal modern-day folklore; while generated with the use of Artificial Intelligence, they are all based on genuine sources. 3D-printed figures have been created on the basis of a neural network authored by the artist. The continually expanded database – a collection of photographs depicting assorted figural ethnic sculptures from varied cultures and periods – is processed with the use of machine learning with intent to generate new and diverse pattern mutations. While ostensibly futuristic, the forms seem intuitively intimate and familiar, as if logically deduced from a longstanding tradition of non-academic figural sculpture., “Janek Simon. Works. Meta Folklore”, Raster 2022, https://en.rastergallery.com/prace/meta-folklore/.
Janek Simon (b. 1977) – conceptual artist, occasional curator. His interests include cultural geography (the issue of differences and distances between locations in particular), anarchism, and self-created technology and its political potential. Lives and works in Warsaw. Showed works i.a. at the Manifesta 7 and Liverpool Biennial, in Guangzhou, Prague and Ljubljana, as well as at solo shows at the Arnolfini Centre for Contemporary Arts in Bristol, the Casino Luxembourg, and multiple public institutions across Poland. Awarded the Grand Prix of the 2007 edition of the “Spojrzenia/Views” Competition. Nominated for “Polityka” Passports. Co-author of the Goldex Poldex autonomous art space in Cracow.
photo: Adam Gut
Eternal Engine (Martix Navrot & Jagoda Wójtowicz)
Unbelievable Geomagnetic Storm. Hyper-myth*, 2024
video, 7′30″
media: text, 3D, Unreal Engine, Python, Sound, Remix
A massive geomagnetic storm has been raging across Earth for a few days, the phenomenon caused by solar wind impacting the Earth’s magnetosphere – our planet’s magnetic field. It usually coincides with powerful solar eruptions referred to as coronal mass ejections, resulting in huge volumes of charged particles reaching the Earth. These particles disrupt the Earth’s magnetic field. Most commonly, they cause no major failure or damage, their presence indicated by the appearance of the aurora borealis – yet more powerful ejections can harm electronic devices and shut them down, in extreme cases disrupting entire infrastructure systems.
This time, our Sun’s activity has reached the maximum, confirming speculations regarding its destructive impact on human technologies.
Electronic appliances and monitoring systems are malfunctioning. Luxury automobiles are mutinous. Royal Servers have been destabilised. Changes to the terrestrial electromagnetic field may affect our inner electromagnetic field…
Believers in the destructive and hallucinogenic force of the phenomenon, the Court Jester and Empress of Time Extinct have recognised it as the long-awaited opportunity to rebel against the rule of the King and Queen of the Immortal Castle. In order to reach the Castle, they will have to travel the Unending Highway, facing their own imaginings, and desires born of the new systems.
* Hyper-myth / hyper-legend – a term coined by the Eternal Engine duo to describe the new model of mythology which gives rise to new archetypes rooted in current technological, environmental, and social phenomena.
** Immortal Castle – image of a monumental hyper-mythical system, where the King and Queen, the Castle’s perpetual guardians, are in charge of their digital kingdom, where capitalism is eternal, incited by the logic of profit and domination. The vision is one of a self-propelled chain of corporations united in a pervasive structure – a system seemingly without beginning or end, our mentality confined within its own borders..
Eternal Engine – multidisciplinary queer artistic duo formed by Jagoda Wójtowicz (she/her) and Martix Navrot (they/them, he/him). Martix Navrot (official ID name: Marta Anna Nawrot) is a programmer, poet, and audio and virtual experience artist. Graduated with a master’s degree from the Archisphere Studio, Faculty of Intermedia of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Participated in the Erasmus Exchange Programme at the Glasgow School of Art, Interaction Design programme. Assisted Piotr Kopik at the 3D and Virtual Occurrences I Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the years 2020-2023. Jagoda Wójtowicz is a multidisciplinary artist, 3D designer, gaming experience author, and audio artist. Graduated with a master’s degree from the Archisphere Studio, Faculty of Intermedia of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Former (2021) head of the New Media Studio at the Faculty of Stage Design of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. The duo have been collaborating for 6 years, engaging in speculative narratives regarding technological acceleration trajectories, technomysticism, parascience theories, post-labour, and the quantum future and psychedelic present. In their artistic practice, they critically investigate the domination of big tech corporations, analysing alternative technological development paths through the lens of storytelling, worldbuilding, and radical imagination. Every project authored by the duo involves a speculative multidisciplinary narrative with a post-real imagery focus, basing either on new media (i.a. VR, AR, AI, 3D, video, sonic fiction, creative coding) or on textual content, sculpture and space. Eternal Engine have shown their works i.a. at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Morris Gallery in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, BFI London, Krupa Art Foundation in Wrocław, Skala Gallery Poznań, HOS Gallery in Warsaw, Import Export gallery in Warsaw and Slug Art Gallery in Leipzig, at the Unsound Festival in Cracow, and many others. In 2022, the duo took part in the Unseen Futures art residency organised by Abandon Normal Devices in Manchester, and targeting queer female digital artists. That was also the year of Eternal Engine making the European Change Makers 2022 list published annually by Creative Europe.
photo: Adam Gut
