Year: 2016

Audible Walls, Breathing Vaults, and the Fantastic Sites of Re-Imagination

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Based on a presentation at the Media Art Histories conference in Riga, Latvia a couple of years ago, the final paper of my longstanding Polish media art project has been published in Acoustic Space #15: Open Fields. Art and Science Research Practices in the Network Society. It looks at the fantastic as a productive mode of re-imagination and re-making, inspired by that famous Shklovsy notion of ostraniene, or defamiliarization. The article turns to Polish media artworks that—through images, experiences, and encounters —are not only strange but also disruptive, challenging the architectures, broadly defined, of the contemporary condition. Dominik Lejman’s Breathing Cathedral (2005) provides a case of a media art practice that harnesses the interplay between materiality and immateriality to re-imagine urban history, civic politics and architectural heritage; in Making the Walls Quake… (2012) Katarzyna Krakowiak creates a space where architecture becomes audible; and in She-Ona: Media Story (2008) Izabella Gustowska produces a fantastical experience of our mediated environment in a way that reflects back on the structures of the digital condition and transforms the technologies …

Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field

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Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field (Intellect/University of Chicago Press, February 2016) Publisher’s website Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field situates media art—as technologies, practices, and experiences—in the politics of postsocialist Eastern Europe. It considers how artistic activity became representative of the tensions between global cosmopolitanism and national self-enfranchisement after Poland joined the European Union in 2004. Within this context, the book considers how media artists questioned and reimagined their site—historically, politically, technologically—and situates their works within the specific ecology of Poland’s aesthetic traditions and political history. This expansion of the global history of media art to include Eastern Europe’s heritage explores a key moment in Europe’s political and cultural history that brings together art history and criticism, media and cultural studies, globalization and nationalism studies, and political theory. In order to articulate a site-specific context to an art form often considered as belonging to the “non-place” of a global digital culture, the book proposes a genealogy of Polish media art through the lens of Polish experimentation, one that includes the Constructivists of …

Making and Doing: Cultures of Creativity

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A graduate seminar I offered at Ryerson University in Fall 2015. DESCRIPTION This is a course about making. We will be thinking about making, but also making in order to think. We consider current trends around what has been described as “maker culture” or the “Maker Movement.” These communities of “makers” are reviving traditions of craft, the handmade, the open source, and the DIY through practices like knitting, weaving, or woodworking, but also 3D printing, hardware tinkering, and physical or digital hacking. But what is making? We will work through this question first by situating making in the broader history and philosophy of tools and technologies. Why do we make? The concept of critical making will provide us with a way to think about hands-on practice as a form of reflection and analysis, before we consider in particular craft, DIY, and hacking in the context of a renewed attention to materials, objects, and things. The question of community is woven throughout, as it propels the maker “movement” away from the myth of lone inventors. We …