Presented at conference or festival

Crazy demo by UBU lab members. 

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 

“Heating Season” by Piotr Marecki is an analogue conceptual book, written by the city of Krakow. The texts are produced by the new citizens (I year university students), as well as people whose families have been living here for generations and the avant garde artists. The book „Heating Season” is also based on the large bases collected among the citizens of Krakow. The respective parts of the book have been created by using different writing techniques, also those employing the collective narrator. Among them are: surveys conducted among randomly chosen landline phone users, records from the so-called “smogwatching” sessions, surprise quiz in the university class, smog investigation made in the social media and the weather transcripts.

On January 12th, 2017 there were 113983 files on Piotr Marecki's laptop. This digital work is an attempt to lift them one by one – which takes several minutes. The work was first presented as a wild demo during the Synchrony/Recursion demoparty (NYC–Montreal, 27th–29th January 2017) and was not voted last in the competition.

Robbo. Walkthrough is a hybrid piece in a form of text generator, as well as an analogue book. The text itself is generated on the 8-bit Atari computer, and has premiered as a wild demo on the demoscene party Silly Venture 2k17 in Gdańsk. The piece has been programmed in Pascal by Wojciech Bociański (known in the Atari scene as Bocianu) with soundtrack by Lisu (created in Raster Music Tracker.) The concept and text has been created by Piotr Marecki.

The first part of the title is an allusion to the game Robbo (1989,) a cult Polish production for the 8-bit Atari, while the second part references walkthrough, i.e. the text providing clues of how to finish a game, a popular genre in the digital media fiel,. However, Robbo is a literary (or rather: nonsensical) rendition of a walkthrough. The work is 56 minutes long, and constitutes an attempt to create digital ambient literature.

The analogue book itself has also been created in a rather unusual way. The text generated on the 8-bit Atari computer has been transcribed on the editor, and then assembled using Calamus, a program created in 1987 for use in the Atari ST/TT work environment. All of the elements of the work – text, music, code, composition, as well as graphics – have been created by the Atari enthusiasts, premiered on the Atari-themed party and are being distributed among the retro computers enthusiasts.

While Robbo generator can be regarded simply as an entertainment or a joke, its authors believe that it also describes how the short-lived technologies are often replaced by so-called killer apps. An answer for this kind of technological acceleration is the practice of returning to the discarded and dead media or technologies (in this case the Atari computer) which can provide a critical commentary to this acceleration, at the same time preserving the cultural content in the excess-based contemporaneity, its circulation and repractice.

(Source: Author's Description)

"J.R. Carpenter draws language through the icy passage of code's style" Nick Montfort

An Ocean of Static transforms the dense, fragmented archive of the North Atlantic into an astonishing sea of fresh new text. From the late 15th century onwards, a flurry of voyages were made into the North Atlantic in search of fish, the fabled Northwest Passage, and beyond into the territories purely imaginary. Today, this vast expanse is crisscrossed with ocean and wind currents, submarine cables and wireless signals, seabirds and passengers, static and cargo ships.

In this long-awaited poetry debut by award-winning digital writer and artist J.R. Carpenter, cartographic and maritime vernaculars inflected with the syntax and grammar of ships logs and code languages splinter and pulse across the page. Haunting, politically charged and formally innovative, An Ocean of Static presents an ever-shifting array of variables. Amid global currents of melting sea ice and changing ocean currents Carpenter charts the elusive passages of women and of animals, of indigenous people and of migrants, of strange noises and of phantom islands.

This book is made of other books. The texts in this book are composed of facts, fictions, fragments, and codes collected from accounts of voyages undertaken over the past 2,340 years or so, into the North Atlantic, in search of the Northwest Passage, and beyond, into territories purely imaginary. The texts in this book are intended to be read on the page and to serve as scripts for the live performance of a body of web-based works. These texts retain traces of the syntax and grammar of code languages.

Have you ever read a novel that is essentially an audio installation, an art gallery? A novel the mysterious story of whose protagonist unfolds before your eyes?The non-linear action novel Project: Innokentius Marple is a uniquely pure specimen of 21st century interactive fiction. Citing the european non-linear narrative classic Milorad Pavic, this novel is one of those artworks that have gotten free of the linear-language slavery and give the reader an opporunity to create the text to a certain degree, to take the reading process to a whole new level.