Humanities/Art/Technology Research Centre
The centre founded in 2011 at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań on the initiative of Professor Agnieszka Jelewska and Doctor Michał Krawczak is a pioneer modern institution in Poland to realize transdisciplinary researches and artistic projects. HAT cooperates with theoreticians, artists, designers and engineers of various competencies and specializations. As a scientific-artistic hub it engages in programs that are hard to define in a conventional range of existing artistic and research disciplines. The centre uses art as a tool of scientific cognisance whereas science as an artistic experiment.
In the first few years of existence Centre realised numerous scientific, artistic and educational projects. Next to the open lectures with worldwide recognizable media and art & science artists, like for instance Steve Dixon, Roy Ascott and Jill Scott, an important element of the centre’s doings are art & science curatorial projects and the festival of experimental art Performing Media.
In 2013 Jelewska and Krawczak curated the exhibition Transnature is Here that was organized within Malta Festival. The idea of the project depends on translations and artistic interpretations of the newest researches on biosemiotics and different forms of communication between life forms within interactive works that implement viewers powerfully into the process of cognisance and experience. Most of the presented works focus on projecting micro biospheres where a coexistence between nature and technology is possible. The biochemical and electromagnetic incentives generated by life forms were transformed by cyber algorithms creating an interactive art. Transnature is Here was coorganised by Przemysław Jasielski, Rafał Zapała, Marek Straszak, Tomasz Gęstwicki, Patryk Lichota and Szymon Kaliski.
Another important work of art was the interactive Post-Apocalypsis, a Polish exposition at Quadriennale in Prague curated by Agnieszka Jelewska and done by a team of programmers, researchers, composers and architects (Paweł Janicki, Rafał Zapała, Michał Krawczak, Michał Cichy and Jerzy Gurawski). The installation was awarded a Golden Medal for sound design, and so became the first Polish exposition in 36 years to gain the prize at Quadriennale. The project referred to the contemporary post-technological culture and a vision of the global world. Agnieszka Jelewska stated:
The viewers enter here directly into a stiff area of weather casts’ data transmitted life from, for instance, the places of ongoing energetic threats and past catastrophes (Chernobyl, Los Alamos, Fukushima). The actualised data is artistically converted through sonification – this is the way the installation is filled with audio sphere reacting to human presence.
Post-Apocalypsis creates ecosystemic conceptions of environmentalism as visions of the technologically mediated nature. MIchał Krawczak explains:
Elements of nature, such as technologized trees, are implemented into the structure of the installation through the interfaces of bony guidance and communicate romantic and political confessions carrying a local, national and identitarian potential that breaks under the influence of transmission disorders. Mistakes and power surges that come out during the act of communication between a viewer and the techno natural setting, combine well with dynamic atmospheric states creating an impression of high state of emergency.
HAT Research Centre leads also a comprehensive scope of workshops and projects from a range of experimental education that employs electric art and new and interactive media. As a good example of it may serve two projects done in 2014 by Agnieszka Jelewska and Michał Krawczak: Emotional Urban Weather (with The Zbigniew Ramaszewski Theatre Institute in Warsaw) and My, Dzieci z Projektu Ziemia [We, the Children of the Project Earth] (within the programme Wielkopolska Rewolucja [Greater Poland Revolution] curated by Agata Siwiak) which used such tools as hacking, sound design, creative coding in the context of hearing, Anthropocene theories and media archaeology. Other workshop projects additionally used interactive techniques, physical computing for artists, recycling design, circuit bending and many more.
The centre coordinates strict research projects as well. First and foremost we should take a closer look on a research on art of technology in Poland that ended up with the bilingual publication ‘Art and Technology in Poland. From Cybercommunism to the Culture of Makers’ (2004) [1] and ‘Post-technological Experiences’ that focuses on studying European art & science projects. Both projects were financed thanks to funding from the National Science Centre.
Author: Michał Krawczak, translated by Antoni Wiśniewski, March 2016