Problems with philosophical engineering
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.

The third  culture. On contemporary relations among art, science and technology 
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.

Material without qualities – digital technology as a metamedium   
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”.

Aporias of the internet art. Cybercultural utopias twenty years later  
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.

Antropology of literature – project  of interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity?  
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.

Another dimension of openness. Internet reproduction and redistribution of cultural content  
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.

Remix vs. mashup – on how two cybercultural metaphors resonate   
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.

A Day from Life on Earth, or YouTube as cyberculture    
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).

Cyberspace – Cyberpresence – Cybertheatre
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.

Multimediality as a new aesthetics of contemporary culture – the example of new polish drama
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

Technological imagination and the question of identity in contemporary Japanese
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

Technological imagination and the question of identity in contemporary Japanese
In this essay we elaborate on the phenomenon of independent computer games by com-paring it to the independent stream of American cinema – also known as Indiewood. The parallel between the film 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 influence 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

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).
 

Recenzja:

Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, Sztuka interaktywna. Od dzieła-instrumentu do interaktywnego spektaklu, Wydawnictwa Akademickie i Profesjonalne, Warszawa 2010, ss. 344

Grażyna Gajewska, Arcy-nie-ludzkie. Przez science fiction do antropologii cyborgów, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, Poznań 2010, ss. 317

Piotr Zawojski (red.), Digitalne dotknięcia. Teoria w praktyce / praktyka w teorii, Stowarzyszenie Make It Funky Productions, Szczecin 2010, ss. 193

Kim jestem?
(z cyklu: Immersyjne refl eksje)