Polish

“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.

“Młodość 1861 liter później” (“Youth 1861 letters later”) is a work based on Adam Mickiewicz's poem „Oda do młodości” (“Ode to the Youth”) from 1820. After the user activates the process, the original poem disappears letter after letter and the title changes accordingly to the number of disappearing signs. On the entry page we could see the original work by Mickiewicz which in this case is entitled “Młodość zero liter później” (“Youth zero letters later”) and user by clicking the top right corner of the page or the Esc button activates the process which is defined as “doczekiwanie starości” (“waiting for the senility”). The process of disappearing goes in one, inevitable direction and cannot be reversed, the only thing a user can do is to pause it or witness the terminal decay of the work into nothingness. After all letters are gone the title displayed is: “Młodość 1861 liter później” (“Youth 1861 letters later”).

Original work by Adam Mickiewicz is one of the flag examples of Polish romantic tradition, which in this case could be characterized by the grandiloquent tone of the work and totality of the presented vision. The implied timelessness and grandiosity of “Oda do młodości” in “Młodość 1961 liter później” is contrasted with the absolute inevitability of decay and the passing of time. Something that once was the anthem of the youth turns into nothing more than a collection of empty spaces and the explosion of human potency is reduced to the possibility of mere pausing or postponing what is terminal.

“Młodość 1861 liter później” is one of the examples of Leszek Onak's prolonged investigation into the topic of time, present in his previous works such as “Kręgosłup Czasu” (“Spine of the Time”) from 2011. What is specific about “Młodość 1861 liter później” is its seriousness and undoubtedly pessimistic tone.

The work is dedicated to Genowefa Zmarlicka.

YELLOWFLOWERPOWER (2017) is the fifth film by Norwegian concrete poet Ottar Ormstad. Here again viewers encounter letter-carpets and a yellow y he identifies with. The work is based on slogans and song-titles from different countries at the end of the Sixties, presented in their original language, intentionally without translation.The texts are combined with photographs of sculptures from the Vigeland Park in Oslo/Norway, where Ormstad lives and shot the naked people exposed in stone and iron by sculptor Gustav Vigeland (1869–1943). This park is the largest in the world based on one artist and contains more than 200 works.The film also includes live video-footage of Charles Lloyd playing saxophone in front of a huge painting by Norwegian expressionist painter Edvard Munch (friend/enemy of Vigeland), as well as an unpublished photo of the young Mick Jagger, both shot in Oslo by Ormstad.Like in earlier works, Ormstad uses a strong sound in the very start for creating a period of silence at the beginning of the film.The animation is created in close collaboration between artist Margarida Paiva and Ormstad.YELLOWFLOWERPOWER invites viewers for an individual experience dependant upon the viewer's language background and tolerance towards non-translation.

Video HD 16:9, duration: 07:17Animation: Margarida PaivaSound: Hallvard W Hagen & Jens P NilsenConcrete poetry, cameras, piano and production by director Ottar Ormstad© Ottar Ormstad 2017

Ruczaj - cyberżulerska gra ekonomiczna (Ruczaj - cyber hobo economic game) is a web-based experience simulating living in Polish suburbs with access to fast internet connection. There are only three things that player can alter. First, writing social media posts that generate „likes”. When you have enough likes, you can „code corvee” which provides beer. With beer, you go out where farming some weed is possible, weed can be exchanged for a social media post and so on. Every action is fulfilled with one mouse click. Gathering likes, beers and weed is creating mutually dependent loop that quickly becomes insufficient to generate income. Especially when your debt to Social Insurance Company is growing with every second.

Game is constructed of three columns where on the left are listed actions that player can make, in the middle is news feed with e-mails and messages from other people and companies and on the right are debts that need to be payed. There are no objections in the game to finish it nor ways to lose or win. Boring, repetitive and frustrating gameplay is very much intended. There is nothing to do, no perspectives to progress and no prize – only dry and absurd sense of humour.

Ruczaj is available online for free and can be accessed with any computer or mobile phone. Used medium is central to the nature of the game – it is almost fully randomly generated, but always tells the same story of slow, jaded neighbourhood where nothing happens anymore. Player quickly catches that feeling of bitter internet experience and probably leaves unsatisfied.

Cyber hobo (or cyber junkie) is a person that has given up on the state of today's internet – he knows that only junk and scraps are left in cyberspace of graphomaniac and corporate cliches. Cyber hobos are actually trying to find and distil something extraordinary and original from banal sea of repetetive aesthetics.

Poetry in Polish created by Amazon Mechanical Turks (AMT). 

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. 

The Stoberskiade is several hundred stickers scattered across all the continents of the globe, which, after being photographed, will come together on a web site to create a wholly unique "street biography" of Jaś Stoberski. This is simultaneously a tourist route through the life and work of a writer that owes a debt to situationist psychogeography, where the concept of the map is set on the basis of drifting through places that are, by premise, unattractive and untouristy. This "sticker biography" is open-ended non-fiction, encouraging the viewer to download a sticker from the Ha!art web site, print it out, stick it in a place where the great stroller Stoberski might have gone, and then send a photograph to the web-site administrators