Issue 1 (9) 2011

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Arts & Cultural Studies Review

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2011

Publication date: 14.12.2011

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Issue content

Kłopoty z inżynierią filozoficzną

Jaromir Bogacz

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 7-23

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.11.002.0223

Hilary Putnam once wrote that all these very abstract and seemingly idle philosophical arguments eventually lead to major discoveries in the ﬁelds of politics, science, etc. Follo- wing this remark, I would like to draw a connection between two debates. The ﬁrst one is the famous exchange between Jacques Derrida and John Searle – perhaps the most important confrontation between continental and analytic school of philosophy. The second one, far less known, took place at the beginning of our century on the www-tag mailing list. Here Tim Berners-Lee, creator of World Wide Web, and Pat Hayes, one of the leading ﬁgures in the ﬁeld of Artiﬁcial Intelligence, were discussing the future of Semantic Web – a very ambitious project from the borderland of AI and network science.
My goal is not only to highlight some apparent similarities among arguments used in these two debates. Rather, I would like to show that these arguments are embedded in larger discourses, which, consequently, shape the future of our technological environment.

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Trzecia kultura. O współczesnych związkach sztuki, nauk i technologii

Ryszard Kluszczyński

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 24-36

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.11.003.0224

Contemporary cultures undergo the process of deep and diverse hybridization. Among numerous elements and factors of this process, relations between art and science play no- wadays very important role. I analyse this concept in the framework of the theory of the third culture, C.P. Snow put forward in his Rede lecture and publication in 1959. The third culture concept has been subsequently discussed and reinterpreted by John Brockman. In my analyse I return to Snow’s idea of dialog as a basic form of the agency of merging arts and sciences. To explain how such processes have developed in the ﬁelds of contemporary artistic practices I present two case studies: the analyse of interactive Augmented Reality installations of Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss in the context of ICT science; and the analyse of nanoart works of Victoria Vesna.

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Tworzywo bez właściwości – technologia cyfrowa jako metamedium

Marcin Składanek

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 37-45

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.11.004.0225

Today, we witness two generative forces of digital media culture meeting – ﬂexible, open, easy-to-use digital technology and large-scale social communication, sharing of in- formation, knowledge and media representations. These two forces are equally important in media convergence and divergence, but also tightly coupled. This paper traces the root of “metamedium” concept, developed in late 70s by Alan Kay, to show that at the beginning two crucial aspects of digital revolution were intentionally connected within the project of creating “personal dynamic media”. Thinking of digital technology as a “material without qualities” – as a open to any transformation, mutation and extension metamedium – has signiﬁcant impact on new media discourse. Not only because it reveals essential difference between “old” and “new media”, but also because it exposes solid ground for practices od media hybridization, innovation or – using Lev Manovich notion – process of “deep remixability”.

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Aporie sztuki Internetu. Cyberkulturowe utopie 20 lat później

Ewa Wójtowicz

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 46-54

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.11.005.0226

During the last two decades almost all the utopias of freedom, communication, access and cultural diversity have faced, respectively, problems of cenzorship, e-invigilation, exclusion and aesthetic homogenization. The reﬂection on cyberculture in its ﬁrst years was characterized by the development of methodology, fascination with the unknown, the lack of technical knowledge, access difﬁculties and a great enthusiasm. Therefore we can distinguish some common attitudes, like the fear of dehumanization and losing real contacts for the sake of virtual ones. Also, in the 90s were the decade of great interest in telepresence and cyborg-like body prosthetics. One of the key features is adding the preﬁx „cyber-” to many words and relating to ﬁction (mostly literature and cinema). Artistic activity may be traced halfway between ﬁction and science-based technology. As network-based decentralization has played a positive role, it also has a double meaning. There is no responsibility and no direct enemy that may be criticised. This problem may be considered as a central aporia of the digital avantgarde, to use the term coined by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Since networks are no longer metaphors, as Eugene Thacker notices, they become real, but still unstable. Artists using networks are involved in many contexts, sometimes disappointed with utopias of freedom and visions of endless space. All this creates a complex picture of art within cyberculture twenty years after its emergence.

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Antropologia literatury – projekt interdyscyplinarny czy transdyscyplinarny?

Izabela Domańska

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 55-64

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.11.006.0227

The aim of this article is to discuss on a few antropology of literature conceptions from a different research circles and debate about proposed relations between involved disciplines. I paid a special attention on the manner of deﬁning the research ﬁeld of the antropology of literature in particular projects. This issue should be concidered in a wider context – the question is: in what extent, the research on antropology of literature is a part of an interdisciplinary or transdyscyplinary research tradition? Transdyscyplinary research should be considered as based on a professional specialization, but undertaking problems immpossible to solve within the framework of the particular disciplines. In this way it leads to a new reserch ﬁeld constitution. Analysis of the presented examples implicates that antropology of literature research tends toward transdiscyplinarity.

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Inny wymiar otwartości. Internetowa reprodukcja i redystrybucja treści kulturowych

Mirosław Filiciak

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 65-76

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.11.007.0228

In the article, the author uses the statistics to discuss the real growth of creativity of networked digital media users. He suggests that in the ﬁeld of cultural studies grassroot creativity is often overemphasized, putting researchers at the risk of “cultural populism” (described by Jim McGuigan in the 90s) in version 2.0. The suggestion does not question the impact of new technologies on cultural practices – although it suggests there is a need to look for a shift of power in other areas. One of them is informal circulation of professionally created cultural works. Instead of legitimizing the “creativity compulsion”, media studies should closely follow the relation not only between producers and consumers, but also between the formal and informal processes of obtaining, curating and redistributing media works.

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Remiks i mashup – o niełatwym współbrzmieniu dwóch cyberkulturowych metafor

Anna Nacher

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 77-89

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.11.008.0229

The article is concerned with the gentle shift within theorizing on cyberculture where the well known and much publicized metaphor of remix has often been employed as a paradigmatic tool to describe the culture of constant reconﬁguration as well as (according to Lawrence Lessig’s famous statetment) Read/Write culture. Given the popularity of the term throughout the whole decade of 90s and beyond, it is signiﬁcant that the concept of remix has recently faded out, replaced by the notion of mashup. Reaching out to some practices of the freshly established ﬁeld of sound art and reﬂection on the audiality, the article sketches the distance between two terms which, although close in meaning, represent also signiﬁcant differences when it comes to the strategies of cultural recycling and reconﬁguration of already recorded/coded material.

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Dzień z życia Ziemi, czyli YouTube jako cyberkultura

Tomasz Żaglewski

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 90-180

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.11.009.0230

The article attempt to deﬁne YouTube’s cyberculture by describing a model of its user and by showing the ways of participation in this particular cyberspace. Author starts his research by mentioning the rick roll strategy as one of the major practices of “using” the YouTube content. However the main part of the article is concentrating on the efforts to reveal YouTube as a cyberculture thanks to the analysis of Life in a Day production and its reception. And so, one of the crucial theories that constitute YouTube as an individual medium is the one explored by Richard Grusin. Grusin’s thesis about the re-mediated and pre-mediated aspects of new media helps to understand the main idea of YouTube as a socio- technical proposition as well as Jan van Dijk’s characteristic of the new media offers like fragmentarization of the cultural texts or its constant visualization. By referring to the Life in a Day project, author of the article is able to point out the basic determinants of YouTube’s cyberculture by describing it as an example of digitalized bedroom culture and snack culture (both terms links with a speciﬁc tradition of thinking about the media consumers and consumption itself).

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Cyberprzestrzeń – cyberobecność – cyberteatr

Sandra Kmieciak

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 107-119

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.11.010.0231

In antiquity Zeus descending ex machina on the scene, caused the performance to became more spectacular and affecting. In the Middle Ages the same task was fulﬁlled by ﬁre blazing gates of hell, in the Romanticism – dioramas and now LCD screens, video cameras, microports and devices which transform sound, projectors or the Internet. If theater does not want to become a fossilized and archaic art, it had to creatively respond to changes in the modern world, otherwise the theatres could be converted into museums. But each time when theater connects with new medium, the question returns: what is theatre or where are theatre’s boundaries? How far can the creator go so his work is still associated with the theatre and not the TV/video/Internet? The topic of the article is the problem that arises for con- temporary theatre’s specialists when moving play into the Internet. Although the projectors, computers, screens, television and cameras open up theatre to the new possibilities, they permit to break the current time-space constraints, they make cause a lot of theoretical problems too. First, when scientists have to call these phenomena. In the following examples I show, that new media reasonably incorporated into the performance don’t cause damage, on the contrary – they make it more absorbing, enriching its senses and the presentation becomes more interesting visually.

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Multimedialność jako nowa estetyka we współczesnej kulturze. Na przykładzie nowego polskiego dramatu

Wojciech Baluch

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 120-126

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.11.011.0232

Today, in the times of the Internet, everyone has the right to create their own virtual reality that they will explain, promote, or actually sell as a useful and simultaneously attractive image of the modern world. In my article, devoted to era of new media in a modern Polish drama, I also promote my vision of the world. Discusing with proposals of Lev Manovich and Henry Jenkins, I make an attempt to describe new reality as a new multimedial aestetics.
On a base of analysis of chosen polish dramas, written on the turning point of XX and XXI century by young Polish dramatists, I try to establish the concept of weak discourse which seems to be more adequate than concepts of hybrydic reality, which create a discomfort for modern people. This concept is also more open for critical reﬂection which I hinted at brieﬂy at the end of this article

Wyobraźnia technologiczna i problem tożsamości we współczesnym filmie japońskim

Krzysztof Loska

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 127-142

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.11.012.0233

Popular convictions as to character of Japanese culture are dominated by the orientalist stereotypes that include self-contradicting images of a society that is traditional and at the same time modern and technology-based. The ambiguous portrait of Japan seems to a certain extent justiﬁed, if one takes into account the transformation that took place throughout the 20th century and which gave rise to a new model of culture that was shaped thanks to a unique combination of various elements, both native and foreign. I am planning to focus on the impact of the mass media on the awareness and an everyday life of the Japanese people. Besides, I am going to consider the extent as to which the new environment has been transformed by the information revolution. For my research I shall use the contemporary cinema which perfectly reﬂects cultural issues of the nation in the process of the vehement social change, and which shows the hopes and fears of the future

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Indie games: fenomen niezależnych gier komputerowych

Bartosz Lewandowski , Maria B. Garda

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 143-153

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.11.013.0234

In this essay we elaborate on the phenomenon of independent computer games by comparing it to the independent stream of American cinema – also known as Indiewood. The parallel between the fi lm and gaming industries, that can be observed in the United States, has its roots in the early years of arcade games when the young companies like Atari were bought by media giants like Warner Communications. Having this infl uence in mind, we investigate the similarities and differences between those two segments of audiovisual media production. To illustrate the argument, we examine the two most prominent indie game titles of the past few years: World of Goo and Braid. In the last part of our article we also try to introduce a more national perspective by describing the situation of independent computer games in Poland.

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Blue Morph: uwagi o działaniu samoorganizującej się zmiany krytycznej (self-organized criticality)

Victoria Vesna

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 154-160

Although we tend to imagine butterﬂies as silent, colorful creatures, they in fact gene- rate intense inaudible noise while in process of change. The microscopic encasing becomes the interface of sound intensity and scattered light mimicking the simultaneous beauty and turmoil inherent to the metamorphosis of the butterﬂy that is an endangered species. We discover that change does not happen gradually as we might like it to be, but is a sudden, intense surge of energy that is destructive and creative simultaneously. The visualization of the surges of metamorphosis very much resembles the ups and downs of the current ﬁ- nancial markets in crisis. This, in addition to the recent close succession of environmental disasters, wars, riots and social upheavals of our current global state points to a collective metamorphosis to a new paradigm. The Blue Morph enables a space where one can tune in to the personal and collective experience of change.
The article explains the ideas behind the Blue Morph installation, created in the process of cooperation between an artist (Victoria Vesna) and a scientist (James Gimzewski).

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Między sztuką, nauką a technologią

Agnieszka Kulazińska

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 161-164

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Między sztuką, nauką a technologią. Dyskusja

Michael Punt, Monika Fleischman, Wolfgang Strauss, Martha Blassnigg, Roger F. Malina, Nina Czegledy

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 165-172

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Rozmowa z Eduardo Kacem – rozmawia Monika Górska-Olesińska

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 173-179

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Reviews and Resources

Fikcja i reguły w grach komputerowych

Katarzyna Prajzner

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 180-186

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Interaktywność w kulturze partycypacji

Ewelina Twardoch-Raś

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 187-194

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Antropologia cyborgów

Roch Sulima

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 195-200

Niecne memy. Dwanaście wykładów o kulturze Internetu Magdaleny Kamińskiej

Magdalena Zdrodowska

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 201-206

Między człowiekiem a bitem

Bartosz Kłoda-Staniecko

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 207-210

Kim jestem?

Sidey Myoo

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 1 (9) , 2011, pp. 211-210

Files to download

Tekst UNKOWN Spis treści UNKOWN

Słowa kluczowe: linguistic philosophy, jacques derrida, john searle, analytic school of philosophy, semantic web, Media culture, digital media, digital technology, social communication, metamedium, internet art, cyberculture, dehumanization, antropology of literature, research circles, transdyscyplinary research, interdisciplinarity, cultural populism, cultural practices, media studies, internet reproduction of cultural content, redistribution of cultural content, cyberculture, remix, mashup, sound art, audiality, recorded/coded material, youtube, cyberculture, cyberspace, life in a day, cyberspace, cyberpresence, cybertheatre, new media, lev manovich, henry jenkins, multimedial aesthetics, hybrydic reality, Japanese culture, contemporary cinema, identity, social change, computer games, Indiewood, game industry, independent computer games