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This paper discusses the image-text relations and puts forth the idea that visual experience is not fully accounted for by the model of textuality. A parallel is drawn between Henri Michaux’s work and Wittgenstein’s remarks about rule following in order to illustrate the pragmatic values of vision.
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At the beginning of the 20th century, profound changes occurred in various fields, including theater. Theater discovered another creative entity beyond the playwright - the Director. The Director became the central figure of Theater, which was enriched with new artistic and aesthetic tools of the time. Directors who sensed the demands of their era with creative intuition and aimed to present sufficiently good works of art validated their profession through new reforms. One of these directors is Vsevolod Emilyevich Meyerhold. He is one of the directors who not only influenced but also shaped the face (aura) and visibility of 20th-century Russian theater thought. Meyerhold, with his creatorship of producer (constructivist) stage design and biomechanical acting approach, has a rich creative heritage as a theater director, theorist, actor, and educator. This study discusses Meyerhold's innovations in Russian theater during the period he lived, his stance against Stalin’s “Great Purge” (Stalin Repression) policy, and his approach to the political developments of his time. Meyerhold, one of the victims of the "Great Purge", brought an innovative approach to stage decoration, bringing the stage and the audience together and involving the audience in the stage.
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The article discusses two controversial series by a celebrated Lithuanian gay photographer, Virgilijus Šonta (1952-1992). The first series, School Is My Home (1980-1983), documented the lives of mentally disabled children at a special school in Šiauliai and thus made them visible in the society that denied their existence. For his series Guys (1983-1986), Šonta photographed gay men, focusing on their bodies, but also composing the images as signs telling secret stories of clandestine gay culture prohibited in the Soviet times.
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This article examines the advantages of an artistic approach to collecting and mediating personal memories of contested pasts in a museum. It focuses on the community platform Backup Stories (Mažosios istorijos), founded and curated by the artist Auksė Petrulienė, which has been operating since 2017 at the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art in Kaunas, Lithuania. Dedicated to the museumification of Soviet and post-Soviet industry through working class testimonies, it is analysed as an example of bringing together memory activism, creative mediation, and critical reflection on the phenomenon of memory. The author argues that Backup Stories helps to reflect on broader issues at the intersection of museums and memory studies, such as the reliability of memory, the problem of the transmission of memory, and the museum’s commitment to its memory communities.
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Pottery in Banat is a rich and long tradition that dates back hundreds of years and is part of the cultural heritage of this region in western Romania. This craft has been passed down from generation to generation and has evolved over time, adapting to social and technological changes. The tradition of pottery in Banat is closely related to the needs of the local community, but it has also experienced innovations to meet current demands. Pottery in Banat represents an interesting synthesis between tradition and innovation, and potters continue to make significant contributions to the cultural and artistic heritage of this region. This craft not only provides practical objects, but also preserves and transmits the cultural identity of the local community. Features of pottery in Banat: Traditional materials: Potters in Banat mainly use clay and clay to create pottery. Traditional techniques: Banat potters use traditional techniques for shaping, decorating and baking clay vessels. Functionality and aesthetics: Banat pottery generally has a dual functionality - utilitarian and aesthetic. Innovations in Banat Pottery: Modernization of Techniques: In recent decades, Banat potters have incorporated modern technologies into the production process. Diversification of products: In addition to traditional cooking and serving vessels, Banat potters began to produce decorative objects, souvenirs and contemporary art pieces from clay. Promoting tradition: Despite the introduction of modern elements, Banat potters are very dedicated to preserving and promoting local traditions. This is reflected in cultural events, exhibitions and workshops that celebrate the craft of pottery.
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The aim of this article is to indicate the benefits that ethnographic exploration of the design process can bring to social design studies. Drawing on the work of authors writing on the basis of pragmatic approaches, science and technology studies (STS), and actor–network theory (ANT), the text analyses design as a socio-technical and situated practice of “ordering things and people” and thus also of negotiating and shaping a common world. The text considers both ethnographic reports, in which researchers have tried to understand and describe how designers work, and a completely different research area – the anthropology of medical practices (in the spirit of ANT, as proposed by Annemarie Mol). The article tries to show that the findings from this field are quite similar to the reflections of ethnographic studies on the design process and offer promising insights for a relational ontology of design that can be studied empirically.
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Danish anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup has declared that if “We cannot experience the world from the perspective of others, we can still share their social experience.” My own perspective in the field of design – which involves sharing the social experience of anthropologists in a number of ways – encourages me to offer a phenomenological reflection on the “design process.” My position as an anthropologist and ethnographer combining her research with teaching at a design school has resulted in collaboration with designers in co-taught courses, research projects, exhibitions, and publications. The different pragmatics of ethnography and education have encouraged me to develop tools for a discursive rendering of the processes in which I partake: both for my own research purposes and for designers and design students to use in reflecting on their own activities while working on their projects. “Design process” is an emic, designerly expression, defined by the most prominent writers on the topic. I attempt to reflect on its non-hylemorphic understanding of creativity and its contextualisation within the Ingoldian sense of following the material.
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Currently, the system of design education faces the challenge of redefining the possible scope and ways of educating future designers. The complexity of the world around us, both in the technological and geopolitical dimensions, as well as tasks related to climate protection and public health, pose entirely new challenges to the practice of design. A distinctive voice in regard to criticism of design education is the “Future of Design Education” project, which was strengthened by Donald Norman and Paul A. Kirschner’s famous text titled “The Teaching and Learning of Design.” Norman and Kirschner noticed a fundamental deficit in the education of designers in regard to their compatibility with so-called modernity: its complexity and challenges. In addition, the authors pointed to the lack of an interdisciplinary environment of knowledge, competence, and skills in educating future designers. The “Future of Design Education” initiative is an open forum for the exchange of ideas and experiences in design education – its goal is to try to rethink and redesign design education. The mere appearance of such an initiative allows us to draw two conclusions: (1) the design community has noticed deficits in the education system; (2) the design environment is self-reflective when attempting change through design. Design has changed from being goal-oriented to being criterion-oriented – the object of design is no longer the object but its usability, accessibility, or serviceability. In design, the context of products, services, or communication becomes crucial – contemporary education in the field of design should therefore focus on a holistic approach to design methodology and should supplement education with social, technical, economic, and environmental contexts. The design community’s current discussion on redesigning design education seems crucial. However, it is closed to the external perspective – interdisciplinarity, which is emphasised at every step in the theoretical sense, although it is not commonly used in ongoing discussions. The text addresses an even broader issue: teaching design to non-designers, thinking about design as a superior problem-solving competence and seeing designers as moderators and animators of social change.
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This paper deals with Polish creative-workshop spaces. Its aim is to consider whether they can effectively function as third places, that is, as social spaces separated from the home and workplace. At the same time, it is also indicated that – being makerspaces – they themselves co-create the city. An additional goal of the paper is to redefine the concept of creativity in light of research on workshop spaces. This is important especially in the context of urban studies and the promotion of an entrepreneurial approach to cities. The text is based on the results of a quantitative-qualitative research project conducted in selected makerspaces, fab labs, and hackerspaces in Poland.
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This text presents and analyses the principal marketing strategies used by Danish, Swedish, and Finnish companies and describes the set of marketing messages characteristic of Scandinavian design brands. The most popular strategies involve geo-recognition, with sociolinguistic mechanisms that influence the names of companies and products and the self-description of brands. The contradictory issues of nobilitation and egalitarianism, which have a pivotal role in the advertising of specific products for different groups of recipients, are addressed. Co-branding, including image collaborations between brands operating in different sectors, and mass media influence (the leading tool of advertisement, through films, series, and TV commercials), are other strategies. Connections are established between design promotion and widely recognisable cultural phenomena, such as hygge or lagom. Analysis reveals that the main marketing strategies characteristic of the design brands of the North revolve around a multitude of connections to Scandinavian heritage and culture.
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This paper argues for the emergence of a new art movement termed Co-Creativism, emblematic of the profound synergy between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) in shaping artistic narratives. Emerging as a successor to post-postmodernism and metamodernism, I propose Co-Creativism began its ascent around 2018 and has since solidified its prominence by 2023, notably influenced by the postCOVID landscape. The era transcends viewing AI as a mere instrumental entity, instead recognising it as an integral co-contributor in the creative realm. Through a methodical approach encompassing case studies and content analysis of artist statements, this paper aims to define the key characteristics and underlying themes of Co-Creativism. By examining the interplay between the global context, the art world, the notion of the artist, art-making practice, the audience, and co-creativist art, the goal is to provide a comprehensive understanding of Co-Creativism.
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The second half of the 1970s saw the birth of a trend in Polish cinematography later described as the cinema of moral anxiety. Films created as part of this trend grew directly out of a specific socio-political reality. On the one hand, they spoke of universal values such as truth and goodness, to which they owe their universality and topicality, and on the other hand, they showed the reality of Poland in the 1970s. Although not an absolute rule, the plot of films of moral anxiety was often set in intellectual, journalistic and artistic circles. However, the theatres, ballrooms and television corridors described in the films were a metaphor for the Polish People’s Republic. By setting the action in artistic and creative circles, especially rather mediocre ones, among small-town masters of ceremonies, heads of small student theatres, provincial actors, it was possible to circumvent the bans and slip under the censors’ radar. All the problems and conflicts occurring in the real life of all people living in a real socialist country were reflected in these films. They all faced similar situations, being oppressed by cliques and arrangements in the workplace and in public life.
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Whenever domestic art historiography handles the subject of Vladimir Lenin, it is only in the context of socialist realism. It is as if October 1956 contributed to the disappearance of the presentations of the leader of the Bolshevik revolution from the public space of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL). The preserved works of art and documentation of art competitions related to Lenin present a false image of the Polish history of the period from 1956 to 1989. The methodological assumption of this article was the adoption of symbolic caesuras that result from the dynamics of political events, not artistic ones, as it was politics that influenced changes in artistic life and art, not the other way around. The selection of October 1956 and the date of the restoration of the name “Rzeczpospolita Polska” (the Republic of Poland), along with the crowned White Eagle at the end of 1989, as terminus post quem and terminus ante quem is the result of two orders: in the earlier period, the point of reference for all images of Lenin and his presentations in Polish art was socialist realism; at that time, the subject of Lenin was dealt with rarely compared to that of Stalin, who was treated as the main person responsible for the success of the Soviet Union. The focus of the research on the years 1956–1989 is also a response to the attitude of denial, noticeable in the literature on the subject, towards the presence of “Leninists” in the communist art of that period. The author analyses the causes of that puzzling phenomenon by dealing with the issue of the memory of the participation of artists in the communist machine of visual propaganda.
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Theatre as “the most social of the arts” interacts with the audience, the surrounding reality and responds most quickly and accurately to social changes. Not infrequently, the stage itself prosecutes or catalyses these transformations. The article is devoted to the socio-political dimension of theatre in “People’s Poland” in moments of crises. In addition to the impact of the “Polish months” and martial law on the shape and content of the Polish stage, the article shows selected reminiscences of these events in the theatre, as well as the catalysing function of theatrical art, manifested in periods of breakthrough.
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