Porębski's idea, expressed in the late 1940s (and practically unelaborated before), could finally come to fruition in the new scientific-artistic practices, which were indeed carried out for over a decade. This time gave birth to the incredible works by Krzysztof Penderecki and Eugeniusz Rudnik, created among others in the Polish Radio Experimental Studio. In Syncretic Shows, Włodzimierz Borowski stimulated and observed his audience's reactions, experimenting with their visual and sensory capacities. Other important experiments included those carried out by Wojciech Bruszewski, Grzegorz Kowalski, and, at the end of the decade, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Ryszard Winiarski, and Ryszard Waśko, as well as the later electronic antinomies by Jerzy Połom, produced in cooperation with engineers and programmers, or Zbigniew Rybczyński's avant-garde works. An important part of the artistic practices of the 1960s and 70s involved artists reaching for scientific ideas, the language of mathematics, and computer science, as well as early neurology, cognitive psychology, ergonomics,4 and physics. Many of these works had a conceptual, project-based dimension; they were intended as experiments with the audiovisual form and with new ways of registering reality, but also broadening the perceptive spectrum of the audience.
An important area for the combination of art and technology was industrial design. Polish projects were often characterized by their exquisite quality, and frequently exceeded a mere practical dimension, paving the way for new artistic practices. The development of Polish industrial design in the merged fields of art and science was made possible in a large part thanks to the Artistic and Research Workshops (1954-1977), an institution associated with the Faculty of Architecture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. It was a place open to experiments on the middle ground between art and engineering, headed by, among others, Jerzy Sołtan and Oskar Hansen.
The early 1960s saw the creation of the Faculty of Industrial Forms at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, the first such unit in Poland. It was headed by Andrzej Pawłowski, who put an emphasis on the creation of interdisciplinary groups as an element of the education of designers. According to Pawłowski, a designer ought to work together with engineers responsible for particular production issues, as well as expand his or her knowledge of sociology, economics, technology of materials, processing technology, automation, and security, but also take full social responsibility for his or her work.5 Pawłowski had a very peculiar attitude to technology and was fully aware of the dangers associated with the technological acceleration of the 20th century:
The dynamics of the development of civilization is causing a dangerous imbalance. … The “growth” and “existence” of the human is threatened by uncontrolled development of the technological-industrial civilization.6
The turn of the 1970s in the US saw the development of conscious artistic-scientific practices which consisted in reclaiming military technologies and systems, in order to use them socially and for communication purposes, or for the sake of a critical reflection on the relationship of nature, humans, and technology. At the same time, interest in the same topics in Poland was in decline. The 1968 government-led anti-semitic campaign was a sign of a new propaganda, and a restriction and expansion of forms of censorship. Once again, tanks appeared on the streets, and the everyday social experience of technology became tainted with negative connotations. The disappointment of artists and scientists, who had hoped for the possibility of establishing relationships between art and technology, came with a loss of belief, on the part of society, in the possibility of changing and redefining elements of the system as promised by the authorities following Stalin's death. This was also true for new experiments in the field of education, or new cultural initiatives. As Joanna Kordjak-Piotrowska writes:
The end of the Gomułka era put an end to the Thaw-period myth of artists designing the new neo-technical reality in close collaboration with engineers, industrial designers, and mathematicians. A space for criticism or irony towards technological progress appeared in the works of artists and opinions of art critics, which showed a conviction about a crisis in the conception of science as a “universal remedy for all of mankind's problems,"7 an idea fundamental for the previous decade.
In the later 1970s, the idea of combining art and science (more in the conceptual and formal dimension than the cybernetic or computer science one) was realized by artists associated with the Workshop of the Film Form in Łódź (1970-1977), including Józef Robakowski, Paweł Kwiek, Wojciech Bruszewski, and Zbigniew Rybczyński. These artists valued the constructivist tradition, the works of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson, but also the ideas of Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro, especially their understanding of abstraction, their approach to research and art, and to form as a medium of depiction. The aversion of these artists to traditional film plots, traditional character construction, and a linear sequence of events pushed them, each in their own way, to the meta-cinema level. Their artistic statements are not so much an attempt to tell a story to the world as a way of describing new ways of perception, new systems and technologies of registering reality. Some members of the WFF circle, like for instance Kwiek and Robakowski, treated art as a trans-disciplinary form. They combined performative and filmic activities, studied the interactions of the body and the registering machines, searched for “inhuman,” non-traditional forms of registering reality, and kept track of the new models of interdependence between human somaticity and its images, generated by technology. Others, like Wojciech Bruszewski, experimented with generativity, recursiveness, and randomness, laying the foundations for the development of Polish developmental art.