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Arts & Cultural Studies Review

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Issue 4 (66)

Po obrazach: rekonfiguracja studiów nad kulturą wizualną

2025 Next

Publication date: 16.12.2025

Description
The publication of this volume was financed by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków – Faculty of Management and Social Communication & Polish Academy of Sciences.
 
Cover design: Małgorzata Flis.

Licence: CC BY 4.0 licence icon

Editorial team

Editor-in-Chief Anna Nacher

Deputy Editor-in-Chief Ewelina Twardoch-Raś

Secretary Justyna Janik

Issue editor Anna Olszewska

Issue content

Anna Olszewska

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (66), 2025, pp. 437-440

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.25.033.22961
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W kręgu idei

Barbora Kundračíková

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (66), 2025, pp. 441-454

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.25.034.22962
This study explores the concept of postphotography as a transformative moment in the ontology and temporality of visual culture, shaped by interconnected phenomena of computer technology, artificial intelligence and planetary crisis. Departing from traditional indexical models of photography, the postphotography image is no longer a direct trace of reality, but an operative, predictive and distributed event. Drawing on Jan Patočka’s philosophical insights on time as revelation, the study frames the image as a dynamic actor that opens rather than represents worlds. With the help of works by Jiří Thýn, it proposes that postphotography is not just a stylistic or technological shift, but an ontological and epistemological rupture that invites us to rethink what images are and what they do in the context of contemporary media ecology.
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David F. van der Merwe

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (66), 2025, pp. 455-476

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.25.035.22963
This essay explores how generative AI has destabilized the visual image, not only as an object of perception but as a contested site of authorship, ownership, and meaning. In a post-Mitchell landscape where the image is no longer what it seems, nor made by whom it claims, the essay harks back to Walter Benjamin’s concepts of aura and the dialectical image to position the visual under conditions of automation and opacity. Instead of asking what AI-generated images are, it asks what they are for. Drawing on the Viennese school’s concept of Kunstwollen (the artistic will or purpose underlying image production) the chapter groups four key case studies around the intentions that animate them: Boris Eldagsen’s The Electrician (to provoke and critique), Jason M. Allen’s Théâtre d’Opéra Spatial (to showcase tool mastery), ING Bank’s The Next Rembrandt (to bridge media legacies), and Obvious’ Portrait of Edmond de Belamy (to generate economic value). Across these unstable images, aura is not absent but refracted: reshaped by algorithms, platforms, and publics. What emerges is a constellation of microtheories for understanding the visual not as a stable category, but as a shifting terrain of negotiations between human and machine, concept and code, value and visibility.
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Kristina Pranjić

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (66), 2025, pp. 477-492

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.25.036.22964
This article introduces the concept of the “hydro-ecological avant-garde” as an ecofeminist and ecocritical approach to art history and visual culture studies, developed from the perspective of the Northern Adriatic. It approaches the Adriatic Sea not only as a geographical reality but also as an epistemic and methodological space, foregrounding the material agency of water, relational aesthetics, and more-than-human epistemologies. By situating avant-garde practices across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the study reconsiders Western and Eurocentric narratives that have marginalized East-Central European experimental avant-garde art, highlighting how ecological fragility, shifting borders, and cultural entanglements shaped experimental visual cultures. While the broader project combines archival research, art, cultural history, and digital cartography, the article contributes a conceptual and historiographical reframing, drawing on posthuman and feminist materialist theory, as well as environmental and blue humanities. Its transversal approach unfolds across three periods marked by crisis – the interwar avant-garde, the post-World War II neo-avant-garde, and contemporary eco-art – organized into three clusters: “Adriatic Mythopoetics,” “More-than-Human Engagements,” and “Resistance to Extractivism.” These clusters trace how artists mobilized water as metaphor, method, and environment to articulate ecological and feminist concerns, cultivate multispecies accountability, and resist extractive and normative visual regimes. The article positions the Adriatic as an active agent in visual history rather than a passive context, suggesting how peripheral archives and eco-situated practices generate alternative genealogies of the avant-garde. In doing so, it lays conceptual ground for an eco-aesthetic framework that integrates spatial and ecological dimensions into art studies, advancing a hydro-epistemological critique grounded in situated aesthetics.
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Pejzaże kultury

Anna Olszewska

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (66), 2025, pp. 493-507

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.25.037.22965
In his brilliantly revealing history of visual studies, Martin Jay (1993) demonstrates that the anxiety around coulometric regimes stems not from the flaws in visual spectacle (although these are many) but from its mesmerising power. Consequently, the humanities have divorced their critical approach from the struggle for insights into technical discourse; considering the scarcity of eloquence in the nascent field of twentieth-century computer sciences, it is no wonder that this was no easy task. The proposed essay delves into rare conceptual statements from machine vision research to present them as an important reference point for voicing critical positions in current ecopolitical debates. It singles out a few strands of solutionism to confront technical agnosticism – too benignly accepted in a general overview of visual studies – with a set of concerns that glare out from under the discourse of engineering. For the reasons laid out below, the titulary call for writing on clouds encourages us to exploit technical expertise as the most fertile ground for those seeking to illuminate tectonic shifts, to which visual culture serves as an early witness.
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Marta Włusek

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (66), 2025, pp. 508-519

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.25.038.22966
This paper explores the intersection of critical theory and artificial intelligence, with a focus on the cultural implications of AI-generated images. Grounded in the foundational ideas of the Frankfurt School, specifically adapted to address contemporary technology, the analysis interrogates how generative AI technologies reproduce and reshape dominant ideologies through visual media. Engaging with concepts such as the culture industry, standardization, and reproduction, the paper argues for a renewed cultural critique of technology. Through a qualitative intervention analyzing images from major text-to-image platforms, the paper demonstrates how AI image generation contributes to an algorithmic standardization of culture that homogenizes visual output and reinforces existing social biases. Ultimately, the paper positions the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory as a transferable and vital framework for understanding and contesting the socio-technical imaginaries embedded in contemporary algorithmic culture.
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W kręgu idei

Laura Pomianowska

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (66), 2025, pp. 520-533

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.25.039.22967
This article investigates the phenomenon of algorithmic neoorientalism as an automated, unconscious reproduction of orientalist visual tropes within generative AI systems. It argues that AI-generated images no longer function as representations but as operational data structures, shaped by culturally encoded dataset and prompt-driven models. The author introduces the concept of affectivity as an artistic strategy of disrupting algorithmic standarization and reasserting marginalized visualities. Works by Trevor Pagle, Zach Blas, Hito Steyerl are examined to show how AIbased art can subvert and reveal latent epistemic violence. The article proposes a reconfiguration of visual culture studies, grounded in postcolonial and infrastructural critique, where the image becomes a site of algorithmic power and counter-visuality.
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Konteksty i rozważania

Maciej Nawrocki

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (66), 2025, pp. 534-550

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.25.040.22968
The paper is a comparative analysis of certain narrative aspects of the Fallout digital game series and its television adaptation, Amazon’s Fallout. Using the theory of remediation, the paper compares narrative and worldbuilding techniques in both formats, highlighting how the television series diverges from the games due to media-specific qualities. Key aspects such as character construction, storytelling, spatial narrative, and pacing are analyzed to demonstrate how the adaptation both preserves and transforms the original’s thematic and aesthetic elements. The study underscores the significance of contextualizing media-specific practices within cultural and historical frameworks, contributing to a nuanced understanding of digital game adaptations as a form of remediation.
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Olga Łojewska

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (66), 2025, pp. 551-570

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.25.041.22969
Urban wastelands are the internal exteriors of the city. Ambivalently situated beyond the circuits of everyday functionality, they are relationally connected to the urban system from which they are mentally excluded. In this article, Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is critically reconceptualised and mobilised to account for the creative, subversive potential of urban wastelands. By emphasising their relationality, processuality, and temporal stratification, the article strives to articulate the productive heterogeneity of temporary spaces which persist beyond the rigour dictated by the overdetermining force of capitalist urbanisation. The argument is developed through a case study of Edmund Szyc Stadium, an abandoned sports facility in the centre of Poznań. The complex history of the stadium is juxtaposed with its current material qualities. Appropriated as a forced labour camp during the occupation, the abandoned site is now a habitat of an emergent ecosystem, lacking material acknowledgment of its past. Colin McFarlane’s framework of fragment urbanism is adapted to account for the multiplicity of fragments and temporalities constituting the heterotopic character of the wasteland. The entanglements between material and non-material, human and more-than-human, as well as absent and present fragments of the abandoned stadium are conceived as existing in a productive tension, charged with the potential to articulate a processual identity of place. The heterotopic alliances formed between these disparate fragments can undermine the prevailing politics of memory and the practices of capitalist urbanisation, serving as a base for developing new strategies of commemoration and practices of urban ecology.
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Funding information

The publication of this volume was financed by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków – Faculty of Management and Social Communication & Polish Academy of Sciences.