This article offers a framework for understanding and refl ecting upon the various ways that urban scholars have worked with visual representations of city spaces. It suggests that there are three main approaches: representing the urban, evoking the urban and performing the urban. The paper discusses the methodological implications of each of these.

By exploring the cliché that socialist cities are ‘grey’, this paper seeks to employ the anthropology of colour for unravelling the peculiarities of the East European urban experience. By analyzing the oeuvre of Władysław Reymont, I show that greyness in Eastern Europe has a distinct lineage. It is not, like in the West, a colour poised between black and white, but the very opposite of red. I show how greyness emerged as the central trope for narrating Polish agrarian capitalism, and how after 1945 it was moved onto the urban turf. Greyness became salient because it captured the very essence of the contradictions of nascent urban Poland: a blend of freedom and oppression, equality and hierarchy, solemnity and joy. I describe these conflicting meanings of greyness and show how colour suddenly became the fulcrum of the struggle to generate an urban experience beyond capitalism and socialism that would be East European and cosmopolitan at the same time.

The article presents functional, spatial and symbolic transformations of New York City and its architecture after the terrorist attack of 9/11. Destroyed Twin Towers have been replaced by the new WTC One, highest building in the US. Its architecture is controversial, but according to author, it will soon became a new symbol of New York. 9/11 tragedy did not stop development of the city. Just contrary: New York’s ambition is to become a model for cities in the 21st century, a resident-friendly and sustainable urban eco-system.

The text deals with an issue of reading images as a way of perceiving the osmosphere. The author observes that eyesight might enhance other sensory modalities, provided that the eye no longer is isolated from natural interaction with the environment which has olfactory properties, but also audio and haptic. The analysis is related to two possibilities of reasoning about smells based on visual data. In the first case, the photograph appeals to the olfactory memory and serve as a tool to elicit a narration on scents from a person. In the second case, the use of the olfactory imagination seems to be necessary as a sort of subconscious for the hegemonic eye. The image an individual can see evokes internal representations, which should be taken into account when analysing and interpreting the urban space.

Space as a Film. Architecture in the Perspective of Audiovisual Studies

Based on the BA thesis Urban Spaces of Motion Pictures: Modern Architecture in the Perspective of Audiovisual Studies, this paper explores the links between architecture and cinema. My goal is not only to show some theoretical concepts regarding this topic (including ones by Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard), but also, and primarily, to study the actual effect which the cinematic perception has on the fi eld of modern architecture. Therefore, I analyse two projects of Rem Koolhaas (Embassy of the Netherlands in Berlin and ZKM in Karlsruhe) in the perspective of audiovisual studies. In my analyses, I examine such notions as “the narrativity of architecture” and “the architectural media screen”, using some methodological tools borrowed from the field of film studies.

Olja Triaška Stefanovič (1978) was born in Novi Sad, Serbia, lives and works in Bratislava, Slovakia. In 2007 she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design at the Department of Photography and New Media in Bratislava, Slovakia.

In her art practise she is focused on the relationship between photography and space, historical and sociological memory space, the disappearance of space, but also changes of its functionality and space simulation.

For last four years she works at the Department of Photography and New Media and this year finishing her doctoral studies of photography at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. She was presenting her work at many group and solo exhibitions in Slovakia, Czech Republic, Serbia, Spain, Germany.

Kwestie wzajemnych relacji oraz powiązania i oddziaływania na siebie sfer technologii i kultury stają się coraz istotniejszym przedmiotem refl eksji kulturoznawców i medioznawców. Śledząc polskie publikacje z tej dziedziny z ostatnich lat, wypada zauważyć, że problematyka ta jest omawiana wielostronnie i w gruncie rzeczy odzwierciedla główne dylematy i pytania badawcze, istotne dla tak właśnie zarysowanej problematyki. Z pewnością jedną z bardziej wartościowych inicjatyw badawczych, które pojawiły się w Polsce w tym obszarze, jest Interdyscyplinarne Centrum Badawcze HAT (Humanities/Art/Technology) na Uniwersytecie im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu. Centrum zostało powołane w 2011 roku, a głównym jego celem – jak czytamy w deklaracji programowej HAT – „jest prowadzenie i inicjowanie nowatorskich projektów, które realizują ideę synergicznej współpracy pomiędzy specjalistami różnych dziedzin z zakresu nauki, technologii i sztuki”.