Kaashi, or Varanasi, is one of those places to surely feature on anyone’s Freudian bucket list.
Vaporwave is an artistic movement, developed under the conditions of global capitalism, which functions in the space of global Internet. Piotr Płucienniczak – author associated with electronic literature, but also with Polish redefinition of vaporwave aesthetics, emphasizes that vaporwave is, on the one hand, an international cultural code, and on the other hand presents critically and ironically "goods inaccessible to us, poor people". I would like to discuss this paradox in my speech based on the analysis of the Polish postvaporwave projects. The western, American vaporwave is generally described by its critics (also in Poland) by means of hauntology, accelerationism and nostalgia. The Western vaporvawe expresses nostalgia for the 90s – a time of utopian thinking about timeless prosperity and development of technology. I put forward the thesis that these categories (especially nostalgia) do not quite match the Polish varieties of vaporwave aesthetics. The most recognizable, comprehensive and well thought out Polish vaporwave project is Z U S w a v e. It was created by the Rozdzielczość Chleba group (a creative collective and a publishing house, producers of cyberculture, mostly cyberliterature). Z U S w a v e. is a transformation of the western aesthetic phenomenon and its critical potential into the Polish symbolic field. With Z U S w a v e., its creators look at the western original trend from a peripheral position – culturally, geographically, politically and economically. Z U S w a v e. is also postvaporwave and metavaporwave. The project was created in 2015 – the year of the diagnosis of vaporwave death, therefore their authors refer critically to the trend itself. Polish vaporwave focuses instead on „non-places” such as shopping centers, as well as a very specific institution – ZUS – a state institution responsible for social insurance in Poland. In my talk I would like to reflect on aesthetic, symbolic and metaphorical differences in Polish and Western visual and textual vaporwave works, for instance analyse which elements have been preserved and which have been legibly replaced by local equivalents. I will also try to answer the question - is there a place for nostalgia, a child's perspective in Polish vaporwave? Does the Polish vaporwave, like the western one, miss, aestheticize and idealize the past? What is the reception of the local vaporwave in Poland and is it read in the same way as the original trend? The symbolic layer used by Polish creators of vaporwave refers more to the present, suggesting that since the 90s, little has changed in Poland. Z U S w a v e. is strongly entangled in the most current problems of Polish people. Polish cybernetic poets notice the ominous imagery of the computerization and virtualization of the state institution and in the face of the realities of Polish employees who cannot count on retiring in the future.
Created specifically for the ELO Symposium, this piece is a textual response to net art and electronic literature, in the form of an essay/poem/opinion as animated gif. Words replace each other over time. The user is not allowed to interact in any way other than opening or closing the page. The piece exposes a personal nostalgia for linear things, exact categorization, and known objects as well as a simultaneous excitement and apprehension regarding the future or net art, virtual worlds, and abstract literature.
(Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery)
Jason Scott is a man on a mission — save all the things.
But what does “save” mean in the modern world, in the waterfall of personal and private data, and where do we even begin? Turning on the history-o-matic, Jason provides a backdrop to our attempts to “save”, what has been done, and what we can do. The talk will be fast-paced and loud, like a hard drive at the end of its life.
(Source: dConstruct Archive)
Distance presentation
Blue Velvet is a documentary about Hurricane Katrina and its affect upon New Orleans, LA. “Combining sound, text, photography, video, and several maps, the piece sculpts an evocative and poignant landscape that nonetheless refuses all registers of nostalgia, insisting as it does that we locate Katrina and the Crescent City among multiple trajectories of policy, memory, and representation”
(Source: “Blue Velvet”—Vectors, cited in the Electronic Literature Exhibition catalogue).
Blue Velvet: Re-Dressing New Orleans in Katrina's Wake" is an interactive essay enabling its users to submerge themselves in a poetic wordscape describing the contours of American racial politics post-Katrina.
Artists' Statement
Scholars in the Humanities have long labored under the conceit of the auteur mode of production. We are taught and reproduce the illusion that we produce our work alone, in isolation, thinking great thoughts pretty much on our own, in conversation if at all with the great works produced for the most part in this way. Composing "Blue Velvet" was a stark reminder of how wrong-headed this picture largely is. The very idea for the piece came out of a conversation with Tara McPherson. It would look nothing like it does now but for the incredible design work of Erik Loyer and cartographic shaping and mediated elaboration enabled by Stefka Hristova. The final product is the outcome of intense weekly conversations over something like a year between the four of us about design, look, content, navigation, media, technological failures and fixes, in short, about New Orleans literally and metaphorically. But there were other inputs, exchanges, relations that helped make the piece come to life, from silent conversations with writers and artists who have felt the pulse of the Big Easy, in moments of health and illness, as well as with theoretical and political critics of neoliberalism. The sooner we get over the conceit of solipsistic self-production, the better off the Humanities will be.
But the process confirmed something more than this. Much of writing in the Humanities has tended to be linear. "Blue Velvet," however, encourages connections, transversals, relationalities; a writing that is more fragmentary without being self-contained, open to play across dimensions, to interactivity between media, to a different kind of complexity. To mixing and mashups, made and remade.
The stress on metaphoricity consequently becomes crucial. There is, as Godard once remarked, a beginning, middle, and end, but never quite in that order. One can begin again and again, and almost anywhere; while ending one's session with the material as one sees fit. So the writing—better, the composing and orchestration because it is never simply writing in such a forum—is in constant play with the reading, whether concretely or as possibility. So the medium loosens the sense of absolute control. It is as if the material writes you, rather than the reverse. The experience has been liberating, as much from the literality of the linear within the narrow constraints of one's own writing as from the tyranny of the narrowly textual more broadly.
But then New Orleans will tend to have that effect on one too.
(Source: 2008 ELO Media Arts show)
Design by Erik Loyer.