The aim of the article is to show the methodological and practical potential of combining anthropology of sound, wet ontology, and the oceanic ecology of the soundscape. I refer to this combination as the drifting anthropology of hydrosound. Taking advantage of the transdisciplinary nature of an anthropology of sound and presenting the specificity of underwater techno-mediated listening, I point to a shift towards less anthropocentric and inclusive understanding of human and environmental interactions. This inclusiveness is exceptionally clear in the practices of underwater listening. The article is divided into three parts. The first is an outline of the process of the emergence of anthropology of water and an introduction to the anthropology of sound. In the second part, I focus on the underwater listening processes. In the third, final one, I try to formulate the anthropology of hydrosound by referring to the wet ontology as well as multi- and interspecies approaches.

In this article, I would like to consider the comparison of stranding to landcentric cognitive processes that translate into the creation of an impossible world – devoid of water and its potentials, rhythms and cycles immersed in it. I will illustrate this with examples of fresh water and sea hydro-policies (including nuclear trials in the Pacific) and will explore cognitive and activist alternatives proposed by the Polynesian sailors and navigators. I will also use two ambiguous metaphors of a ship and a Polynesian voyaging canoe as an opening for different narrations of the planets’ future in the climate crisis.

The article explores possible intersections between cultural disability studies and the blue humanities. It opens with a discussion of cultural representations of atypical aquatic mammals and fish. Yet, the main focus is placed on various contemporary literary texts (Mateusz Pakuła’s Wieloryb: The Globe, John Wilson’s From the Depths, and Kaite O’Reilly’s In Water I’m Weightless), which were written either by or for artists with disabilities. As will be shown, all of them allude to water or/and marine environment in order to comment on disability, its social constructedness and context dependence, and the conservation of biological and cultural diversity. In doing so, these texts challenge the fixedness of the disabled/non-disabled binary and subtly hint at a possibility of transgressing the traditional opposition between the human and the animal. This in turn points to the potential of applying the oceanic perspective, or what Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters call ‘wet’ and ‘more-than-wet’ ontologies, in disability studies.

The aim of my article is to analyze the contemporary diversified notion of practices in the field of visual arts, performative arts, and artivism as related to the care of the aquatic ecosystems. I also intend to introduce the hydro-art in Poland as the category of the blue humanities – relatively recent branch of the new humanities, conceptualized in the Western academies and still little know in the Polish context of Central-Eastern Europe. I apply the navigating tools offered by the blue humanities are to argue for a visually non-obvious and discoursively experimental narrative, sensitive to the areas of ignorance and embarrassing truths hidden behind colors. The following examples of artistic or artivist projects form Poland are included to broaden the narrative of the blue humanities: Ewa Ciepielewska’s artistic and ethnographic drift  on the Vistula River, the artistic residency FLOW/Przepływ; the hydrofeminist collectives such as Cecylia Malik and Sister Rives, and Bojka Diving Collective, the paintings of hydro-ecotopia by Małgorzata Wielek, and Justyna Górowska’s WetMeWild. The article also announces the transnational cooperation – the hydrofeminist artistic research project, Anti-Monument to a  Shrimp, which I intend to implement together with Górowska, and the American ecosexual artists, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens.

This essay addresses the idea of perspective as it is suggested by C. Geertz. This idea presupposes that (wo)man interacts with the surrounding physical world while taking separate yet overlapping positions grounded in such frames as common-sense, aesthetics, religion, science, and others. The author proposes to introduce another perspective which speaks for a unique frame which (wo)man composes while interacting with other (wo)men. This is an anthropological perspective framed as a particular case. The author refers to a number of American anthropologists who directly or indirectly yet critically appeal to Geertz’s heritage to show what is necessary to compose the foundations of the perspective in question. In this respect, G. Marcus’s and M. Fischer’s crisis of representation, L. Abu-Lughod’s the particular, J. Limón’s modernity-postmodernity relation, and P. Rabinow’s, A. Stavrianakis’s and J. Faubion’s triad of the present, the actual and the contemporary is discussed. The author offers a model to analyse the interaction in question. At the same time, the author suggests that the anthropological perspective should be understood in terms of self-awareness and complexity to approach other (wo)men creatively and critically.

The article discusses the strategies and research methods used within the community science paradigm developed by the Public Lab group. The workshops and practices of scientific cooperation with local communities are discussed on the example of the Public Lab’s founding project – monitoring the effects of an ecological disaster related to the oil spill from BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil platform into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The methods used to conduct the research were based on the local community’s involvement and led to the establishment of new models to disseminate data and scientific knowledge in which local participants play a crucial role and have access to essential measurement data. The article discusses the DIY method’s applications, the technique of experimental cartography and mapping performed using meteorological balloons and kites. The community research methods are juxtaposed with the contemporary contexts of the evolving blue turn in the humanities, social sciences, and media practices.

* Artykuł powstał w wyniku realizacji projektu badawczego „Sztuka jako laboratorium nowego społeczeństwa. Kulturowe konsekwencje przełomu post-technologicznego” (kierownik: A. Jelewska) nr 2014/13/B/HS2/00508 finansowanego ze środków Narodowego Centrum Nauki.

The paper is located at the intersection of the art history of the Polish neo-avant-garde and the environmental humanities informed by feminist new materialisms. It proposes an interpretation of performative works in which artists used aqueous matter as an object of interaction, a source of artistic transcription, and as an active participant in artistic scenarios. It concentrates on works that were realized during the open-air art meetings in socialist Poland and in particular at the Osieki meeting in 1973 with the title The Art of Water Surfaces [Plastyka obszarów wodnych]. Based on the analyzed works, it offers a speculative reflection on Hydroart, which is defined as region-specific development parallel to land art practices.

This text explores the uses of water metaphors in the discourse of digital media on the example of Leonardo’s Submarine, a three-channel AI-generated video work by the artist and writer Hito Steyerl, presented at the Venice Biennale in 2019, as well as its subsequent installation in a purposefully built virtual reality underwater gallery in winter 2020/2021. The two venues for staging the work are discussed in the context of Steyerl’s writings on the change of the European geographical imagination from the Renaissance up to the present day and the role played in this change by digital technologies. Steyerl’s ideas about the shift from the horizontal to vertical perspective and the present condition of groundlessness are “submerged” in a watery context of the ocean to test how verticality and groundlessness behave in an underwater environment. Drawing on selected concepts developed in the field of blue humanities, this text seeks to investigate Steyerl’s practice as an artist and new media theorist to show how it employs water metaphors to challenge rather than perpetuate our habitual thinking about the ocean and the media used to represent it.

New media have had a considerable influence on television and the viewing practices of consumers. Social media services made it possible for everyone not only to express their opinion on shows, but also, on an increasing scale, to watch them via mobile applications. To describe these processes the author introduces the concept of the ‘connectivity of television,’ developed based on the ANT theory as proposed by Bruno Latour. According to that theory, describing television as a network incorporating both human and non-human actors is an accurate representation of the modern TV entangled with new media. Additionally, it allows to depart from hierarchical definitions of television (such as John Fiske’s three orders of text) and a strict division between the broadcaster and the audience.

In the article, the author is surveying the scientific discourse on political threads embraced in the Kapuściński non-fiction biography written by Artur Domosławski. This discourse spectacularly reveals the wider problem with the discourse on the Polish People’s Republic. There will be indicated how presuppositions concerning Ryszard’s Kapuściński leftism (valorized the leftism positively or negatively) position the interpretation of the book Kapuściński non-fiction. Various typologies of the discourse on PRL will be enumerated and the problem of whether the biography written by Artur Domosławski eludes the classical narration on real socialism will be discussed.

The text is an experimental sketch based on a dialogue between an ecohydrologist and an anthropologist of culture. The authors will subject a critical, interdisciplinary reflection to various water languages used colloquially or in selected professional discourses. They will ask themselves what water is in different contexts, how it is spoken of, how it is thought of, how it is treated and what role water related languages play in times of climate crisis. After all, it is reasonable to ask whether water is a resource, chemical compound, life, service provider, stakeholder, law, or sewage. Based on examples in contemporary discussion on water and the associated blue-green infrastructure the authors distinguish several trends in different ways of talking about water: economic, medical, defensive, scientific and communitarian. They will reflect on the mechanisms comparable to colonial ones that determine the domination of some and the infantilization or cancelation of others, especially the communitarian ones. This dialogue will reveal an “intercellular” permeability of water definitions and how easily water can assume some meaning to escape it and create a series of new ones.

This reflective paper shares considerations of curatorial research of art and water during the current climate crises as part of both contemporary art and Blue Humanities fields. This paper shares water-based methods utilised to develop the Hydrocene, the water-based curatorial theory I have named and defined as an act of curatorial planetary caretaking. In my doctoral thesis, Ingesting the Hydrocene, I argue that water, this most vital of materials, is the central figure of the climate crisis and that a zeitgeist of groundbreaking artists cultivate critical and collaborative methods of relating with water from which we must learn. The Hydrocene as a curatorial theory reveals hitherto unexamined curatorial perspectives on the interrelation of art and water in acts of planetary climate care. The act of naming and defining this artistic tide as the Hydrocene, is a curatorial act of caretaking returning to the epistemological origins of the curator as caretaker. The flow-on effect of the art of the Hydrocene is the potential for more radical ways of relating to water ethically.

Sharing the Hydrocene and the complexities of a sustained dedication to learning from and with water in the field of art, this paper aims to illuminate the way water offers intellectual, emotional, physical and metaphorical sustenance to myself and the artists I work with. In return for this wealth of knowledge from water, I aim to recognize waters own agency, power and adaptability, and to enter into principled collaborations with it.

The paper reflects on an academic practice of applying interdisciplinary and progressive humanistic discourse to the analysis that is only marking its critical and revisory character. The example considered in detail is Aleksander Woźny’s book Scenariusze kultury w mediach i medycynie narracyjnej [Culture Scenarios in Media and Narrative Medicine]. The tendency to overtheorize about general cultural mechanism of explaining experience (i.e. culture scenario), appearing in the book, as well as the tendency to instrumentally use the idea to advocate peripheries in the humanities, are being recognized and commented on. The review also pays a close attention to narrative medicine and its application in Woźny’s analysis in order to indicate some discursive appropriations.

The article presents the latest monograph by Patrycja Trzeszczyńska (Diaspora – Memory – Places: The Ukrainians from Poland of the 1980s in Canada. An Ethnographic Study), which analyzes the functioning of the memory of migrants from Poland. The inspiration to undertake to carry out the research was the author’s intention to continue her studies on the memory of the Lemkos. On the basis of the impressive material collected in the course of P. Trzeszczyńska’s three-year field research (conducted in the years 2014–2016), the anthropologist proved the occurrence of a vital ‘diasporic’ transformation in the identity of the migrants who, even if they remember the trauma experienced by their parents, this memory is no longer necessary for them to construct their own Ukrainian identity. In this situation, looking for Lemkos in Canada turned out groundless, since each new wave of migrants from Poland brought along their own memory (or post-memory) of the past, which led to the internal differentiation within the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada as far as both generations and regions are concerned. Thanks to the penetrating analysis of the functioning of the generational memory of migrants from Poland, the author of the monograph expanded the knowledge on the role of memory in the process of creating and enriching cultural identity of contemporary (no only diasporic) communities.

This review concerns New Media Behind the Iron Curtain: Cultural History of Video, Microcomputers and Satellite Television in Communist Poland (original title: New Media in Polish People’s Republic), a book co-authored by Piotr Sitarski, Maria B. Garda, and Krzysztof Jajko. The publication offers a unique insight into vernacular usages of new technology (videocassette recorders, microcomputers and satellite TV) during the last decades of the Communist rule in Poland. Making the diffusion of innovations theory its basic approach to the subject, the book grounds its claims using rich data including interviews, photographs and documents from the analyzed era. New Media presents a comprehensive, case study-focused approach to the analysis of political, economic and social contexts concerning the dissemination, appropriation and application of technological innovations by individual users.