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Fundamentalne pytanie o wpływ nowych technologii cyfrowych na kondycję kultury oraz (idąc jeszcze dalej) na sposób uprawiania refl eksji naukowej w ramach szeroko rozumianej humanistyki, jawi się z pewnością jako jedno z centralnych pytań zadawanych przez współczesnych kulturoznawców i przedstawicieli dyscyplin pokrewnych. Przekonanie o tym, że narzędzia informatyczne w swym oddziaływaniu w sferze społecznej przekraczają w sposób znaczący granice użyteczności i wąsko rozumianej funkcjonalności, a wręcz mają coraz bardziej istotny wpływ na wzorce naszego zachowania, na zmiany w sposobach kształtowania się interakcji społecznych, innymi słowy na kształt współczesnej kultury, staje się coraz bardziej powszechne. Technologie informatyczne – jak się wydaje – są czymś więcej niż Bolterowskie „technologie defi niujące”, które doprowadzały do zmian kulturowych, „ogniskując pozornie rozproszone w danej kulturze idee”.
More...Recenzja książki Piotra Nowaka, Hodowanie troglodytów. Uwagi o szkolnictwie wyższym i kulturze umysłowej człowieka współczesnego, Biblioteka Kwartalnika KRONOS, Warszawa, 2014.
More...The review of: Kulturowe studia miejskie. Wprowadzenie, E. Rewers (red.), Narodowe Centrum Kultury, Warszawa 2014.
More...The review of: Gregorgy Scholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture,Pluto Press, London–New York 2011, ss. 240.
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More...Keywords: Czesław Miłosz; Krasnogruda manor; Zbigniew Fałtynowicz; biography
Z. Fałtynowcz, Miłosz | Krasnogruda, introduction by P. Kłoczowski, graphic design by K. Kubicka, Wydawnictwo Fundacja Pogranicze, Sejny 2016.
More...Keywords: Virtual worlds; David J. Gunkel;
Review of: Daniel Vella - David J. Gunkel, Gaming the System: Deconstructing Video Games, Game Studies, and Virtual Worlds, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018, pp. 264.
More...Keywords: Thomas Bernhard; photography; Extinction; picture;
Thomas Bernhard was not an expert in photography, its history and especially theory. He never dealt with the discursive description of her phenomenon. However, in his last great novel, Extinction (1986), he made several photos a kind of memory trigger and a center for building a story. The article deals with the issue of a special, extremely critical, not to say iconoclastic, assessment of the role of photography as a medium of stupefying people who succumb to its seductive power. The analysis of the fragments of photography appearing in the novel is just a starting point for deeper reflection on the impossibility of erasing photography as a medium of memory, it is a fundamental polemic with the thesis of the novel narrator, which the author identifies with the author himself. Here, Thomas Bernhard’s Extinction is an excuse to reflect on how photography and photographing can be considered a disease of our time, as the Austrian writer anticipated in his novel in the eighties of the last century.
More...Keywords: History of film narration; Film Neomodernism;
Badania narratologiczne na gruncie rodzimego filmoznawstwa wydają się – i to po raz kolejny – przechodzić falę wzmożonego zainteresowania, czego świadectwem jest kilka opublikowanych w ciągu ostatnich dwóch lat książek. Dwie podejmują temat bezpośrednio, choć z różnych perspektyw oraz w różnych ujęciach (monografie Jacka Ostaszewskiego i Roberta Birkholca), trzy kolejne oscylują w dużej mierze wokół narracji, nawet jeśli pozornie zogniskowane są na zagadnieniach poetyki czy stylu (propozycje Rafała Syski, Barbary Szczekały, Andrzeja Zalewskiego).
More...Keywords: taxidermy; speculative; art; ecocriticism; Giovanni Aloi; animals; animal studies
The purpose of this review is to familiarize the Polish reader with the extensive and interesting monography: Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene, published by Columbia University Press. The Author Giovanni Aloi –art historian and museumologist, takes up the challenge of opening new fields, and asking new questions in research on taxidermy in art and science. The speculative methodological approach proposed by the author, draws on the new materialism, archology of knowledge and “speculative turn,”and enables him not only to thoroughly analyze the art involving taxidermic objects, but also to conduct erudite analyzes of discourses, practices and “nexuses”defining complex human-animal relationships. Taxidermy is a pretext to reflect on the sources of animal representation in contemporary culture and discourse of natural history, as well as to show the abovementioned relationships in the context of ecological, economic and environmental crises, and the uncertainties characterizing the “dark ecology”of the Anthropocene. This work is an extremely valuable contribution to Ecocritical studies and the still developing field of animal studies.
More...Keywords: new media; innovation; communism; technology; vernacularity
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.
More...Keywords: French digital games; French Touch; Alexis Blanchet; Guillaume Montagnon; game studies
This article is a critical reading of the book Une histoire du jeu vidéo en France by Alexis Blanchet and Guillaume Montagnon. The book – divided into five chapters – explains the first three decades (1960–1991) of digital game development in France, stretching from scientific experimentation, through the rise and fall of console and arcade gaming industry, to the rapid increase in microcomputing and the emergence of a French gaming identity. Close to the increasingly popular emancipatory paradigm in historical gaming research, the publication relies on comprehensive and exhaustive material, stretching from the gaming magazines to interviews with French game developers. Even though the book does not delve into the cultural contexts around the popularity of specific games, it remains an essential work for readers willing to understand the processes contributing to the French digital game field’s state.
More...Keywords: resilience; adaptation; field research humanities; arts of attentiveness; microbiology of mass killing sites; Alternaria alternata; Anna Zagrodzka; Polaroid photography;
This article locates Anna Zagrodzka’s project Alternaria alternata in the context of reflections on the relations between genocide and ecocide as manifested in problems of conservation of Nazi extermination camps. The artist’s photographs depicting elements of the landscape of death camps chronicle the events and processes of deterioration that result from objects, such as buildings, walls, fences and plants, being inhabited by bacteria, fungi and lichen. Approaching the environmental microbiology of mass killing sites by applying the methods of laboratory research to examine elements of buildings, artefacts, water and the soil offers incontrovertible evidence of the relentless vitality of life at such locations. In this article, I show how Zagrodzka’s research contributes to the laboratorial humanities, on the one hand, as well as to field research humanities, on the other. I also demonstrate how her work applies the arts of attentiveness that are typical of the research methods of multispecies ethnography. Analysis of the artist’s work shows that the continued existence (or survival) of Homo sapiens will require the preparation for difficult and long-lasting processes of adaptation to changing conditions brought about by ever new threats, crises and potential catastrophes. Adaptation can be assisted by artworks and by research in the humanities that create future scenarios enabling preparation for possible, though often unforeseeable, events.
More...Keywords: book review; Magdalena Zdrodowska;
Book review: Magdalena Zdrodowska, O historii techniki inaczej. Telefon, kino i cyborgi. Wzajemne relacje niesłyszenia i techniki, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2021, ss. 492.
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