Publications

In the early 1960s, work began in Canada on what is now one of the most recognizable, , “foundational” computer systems for creating a spatially localized database – containing a variety of social, environmental and economic data – and digital mapping. It was through these maps that economic development decisions were to be made more efficiently and better – the entire program was created with the initiative to introduce improved national resource management practices. The story of this somewhat , “legendary” program has a much broader dimension. This ” improved management” ultimately did not benefit rural development, but it did strengthen the flourishing urban planning, industry and modern concepts related to recreation and leisure. The CGIS allowed for the production of an easily digestible cartographic form that seemed to comprehensively and objectively show the territory being mapped, ultimately supporting the colonial schemes established by white European settlers prior to its development.

“Nuclear Gandhi” is a surprising and controversial image of the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi. Often portrayed against the backdrop of nuclear explosions, his poses and styles clearly suggest awe and admiration for the ongoing mass destruction. This image is related to Sid Meier’s Civilization VI – one of the most influential video games in the history of gaming. The aim of the article is to analyze this particular case study and consider processes from many different angles that led to the emergence of this controversial phenomenon. To do so, the notion of archiverse is introduced – an assemblage (after Jane Bennett) of all cultural, political, economic and technological archives performed by the user. By following the connections between different and often seem- ingly distant data and contexts, it is possible to propose an archive-centric perspective for video game studies.

The paper is a presentation of our research focused on the ecological disaster caused by the explosion of the nuclear power plant reactor in Chernobyl in 1986, in terms of its social, cultural and artistic context. We apply the concepts of hyperobject (Morton) and hauntology (Derrida), and autoethnographic method (Adams, Jones, Ellis), in an attempt to reveal human and nonhuman agencies in the description of the catastrophe’s long-term cultural consequences. In the autoethnographic and investigative-artistic part of our research we analyse our interactive installation, Post-Apocalypsis (2015), but also historical facts and private narratives. The notion of hyperobject in connection with the autoethnographic methods and investigative-artistic part of our research serves to trace the process of displacing phenomena, facts and private narratives about the Chernobyl accident in the context of time and space. The concept of hauntology enabled us to go beyond the uncovering of recurring cultural, political, social micronarrations and fear about nuclear energy in Poland.

The article discusses the use of the proprietary spectrocartography research method to study the interdependencies between history, forms of landscape design, colonization mechanisms, green areas management, processes of ecological degradation, and urban policies. This method involves carrying out research using various data from the fields of sound ecology, biocommunication, botany, ecology, and environmental psychology, as well as methodology from the field of art-based research and art & science. The genesis and hidden ideology contained in the design of the artificial lake Elsensee-Rusałka, which was dug in Poznań by Jewish prisoners of war during World War II, as well as post-war and modern forms of the revitalization of the lake area and adjacent green areas, are analyzed in detail. The ultimate goal of the research project is to create an open experimental digital archive relating to the concept of hybrid space, digiplace, and augmented reality, in which all the data obtained during the research will be collected. These data will be used to create a new form of storytelling, taking into account historical asynchrony, nonhuman actors, and the space itself as a causative entity.

Krawczak M, Jelewska A. Spectrograms of the environment: entangled human and nonhuman histories. W: Alsina P, Vila I, Tesconi S, Soler-Adillon J, Mor E, red. Possibles. Proceedings of 27 International Symposium on Electronic Art. ISEA International; 2022:376–382.

The chapter reflects on the impact of video and video art from the 1960s on contemporary art forms a cultural paradigm of dynamic reality. Originally, the video format was remediating the reality of TV and film production and initiating a democratization of the medium, till the 1990s and further, when video, we argue, started a revolution that emancipated digital devices after which they themselves became a part of a digital world in which we live in. From then on remediations happen not only within the media, but also on a deeper, interconnected levels of digital reality. If one cannot talk about mediations without remediations, then every mediation is always already remediating the mediated world.

Video Remediations: From Transmission Medium to Data Landscape. Three Phases of Video Remediations, in: Remediation: Crossing Disursive Boundaries. Central European Perspective, ed. B. Suwara, M. Pisarski, ISSN 2195-1845, ISBN 978-3-631-79504-0, Peter Lang – Veda, Berlin 2019, pp. 113-127.

The article presents the concept of postdigital collective memory—a proposal that opens possible research fields for postdigital science and education. Postdigital collective memory is co-created between human and nonhuman beings and technological media, with the latter treated as sensitive sensors. In order to exemplify this concept, the article presents research results from field practices and design workshops conducted by the Humanities/Art/Technology Research Center at Lake Elsensee-Rusałka in Poznań and the prototype of the Sensitive Data Lake (SDL)—a digital environment project incorporating human and nonhuman actants and attempting to restore a shared narrative about a place whose history has been suppressed and has faded from public memory. This lake is one of many examples of what Tony Fry calls ‘total design’: it was created during World War II, through the forced labor of Jewish prisoners, as part of the Nazi expansion into the East; and the project attempted to redesign the environment and remove the local inhabitants. Following the theories that analyze the long duration of ‘total design’ (Fry) and the concepts of transitions design (Escobar), the author’s own Critical Media Design (CMD) method was applied to develop various experimental strategies for design and educational work related to the history and memory of the Elsensee-Rusałka site in the postdigital reality.

The article analyses the methods of postdigital pedagogy based on critical media design (CMD), and collective practices which involve using sound recording and emission as a tool for counter-mapping the problems associated with the history and politics of digitally mediated urbanism. The article provides a detailed account of, and draws on materials from, the Emotional Urban Weather workshop conducted in 2014, in Warsaw, for an international group of professional young researchers, designers, artists and activists. The workshop took place in specially chosen districts of the Polish capital, in which the participants applied various sound design and critical media design strategies in order to address the historical, social, economic and political problems related to this place. Using technological tools capable of recording, emitting and measuring the parameters of sound, they prepared forms of sound intervention in the city. At the same time, this process became an experimental way of ‘opening up’ the problematics of a place by counter-mapping complex socio-cultural issues. Reflection on the workshop and its outcomes have contributed to the development of a postdigital pedagogy. The practices of critical media design (CDM), when combined with field recordings, affective listening and sound intervention, allow various technologies to be incorporated into theoretical critique and new forms of experimental engagement.

In this article, we discuss how techno-imaginations are designed within the nuclear regime as a tool to neutralize responsibility for military violence. We directly refer to the strategy of nuclear terrorism used by the Russian army against civilian infrastructure during the war in Ukraine. This situation is spectrally embedded in the interference of various media discourses and refers to the nuclear renaissance policy, which is one of the official cultural and political doctrines of contemporary Russia. We use the infrastructural perspective of media studies (Parks and Starosielski 2015), at the same time referring to the founding texts of nuclear criticism (Derrida 1984, Kerckhove 1984) to show the need for a new critical approach to analyzing the dependence between nuclear infrastructures and the cultural consequences of these transformations. We put forward the thesis that one of the most critical cultural consequences of intertwining the nuclear industry with the media, and the narratives generated by them, are new forms of weaponizing civil- ian nuclear infrastructure and a new topological figure of time in which the present shrinks to strengthen the future. This onto-technological dependence generates new forms of atomized memory in which the past is justified by pursuing a sustainable nuclear future, the present facts are displaced, and the negative aspects of nuclear accelerationism are neutralized.