Polish culture

“Polska przydrożna” ("Roadside Poland") is an anti-racer designed for the 8-bit Atari, immersed in demoscene aesthetics and the general climate of retro games. The program references the book "Polska przydrożna" by Piotr Marecki (Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2020), which describes a road trip along Polish side roads. Instead of straightforward travelling, the protagonist of the book wriggles around small towns (these locations are listed in the form of a text scroll). The demo itself is devoid of elements characteristic of racers (car, speed, movement, attractive landscapes), thus the work testifies to the pandemic time in which it was made (sports matches without spectators, universities without students, peopleless tourist destinations). The chiptune composed by Caruso refers to Polish disco-polo folk music (designed on Raster Music Tracker). The demo is programmed using MADS assembler. Demo made by Gorgh (code), Maro (idea), Caruso (msx), Kaz (gfx), 2020.

Work was a part of the conference paper prepared with Aleksandra Małecka. Abstract:

Since 2013 we have been using experimental strategies to transfer into to context of Polish culture chosen works of American avant-garde from the fields of electronic literature, uncreative writing, conceptual literature, procedural writing, flarf and related genres. These works include art by Kenneth Goldsmith, Nick Montfort, Steven Zultanski, Steve Kotecha, Lawrence Giffin, Amaranth Borsuk, Scott Rettberg and other authors. In our pursuits, we have used various platforms and tools, both digital ones like Google Translate, Amazon Mechanical Turk, various programming languages (Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl), as well as analogue, that is traditional books. The chosen American texts, dating from the 90s to present day, very often reflect the artists’s response to the development of digital media and their impact on writing practices, as well as their reaction to the popularity of creative writing courses in the USA. Both contexts are poorly understood in Poland, which is considered a half-peripheral country in terms of development of digital media and has a different literary writing tradition, in which creative writing courses have little presence and impact. Given this completely different context, meaning a lack of a lexicon to speak of these works and no parallel community of critics and artists, it is not surprising that the transfer of American avant-garde works into the Polish language and culture encounters a challenging context of reception. In this paper we will consider the reception of American avant-garde works in Poland.