Piotr Marecki is the co-founder of Korporacja Ha!art – a publishing house famous for its promotion of young writers and counterculture. He is also a publisher, editor, writer and creator of experimental literature. Marecki was born in 1976.
Marecki graduated with a degree in Polish literature from Jagiellonian University. He currently teaches there. His research interests include digital culture, Polish cinema and experimental literature. Marecki runs UBU lab – a laboratory that not only researches, but also produces digital culture.
In 1999, whilst still a student, Marecki became one of the co-founders of Ha!art. Initially, Ha!art was a student magazine. Later on, it also became a publishing house. The organisation is one of Poland's most distinct literary institutions, promoting counterculture, experimentation, young writers, camp and pop culture. As Ha!art turned 20 years old, Marecki told Dziennik Polski:
We still want to closely inspect reality and describe it critically. It's important to us to speak about significant matters: climate change, urban pollution, platform capitalism and mental health.
Marecki popularises electronic and conceptual literature not only as an academic and a publisher, but also as its creator. In 2017, he published Wiersze Za Sto Dolarów ($100 Poems, trans. NS) – a book written by the Mechanical Turks. The Turks are people who perform tasks that are low-paid, yet impossible to automate, for Amazon. They mostly verify translations, write product descriptions and the like. Marecki decided to spend $100 total to give the Turks the task of writing poetry… in Polish.
At the end of 2017, Marecki published Sezon Grzewczy (Heating Season, trans. NS). As we read on the cover, the book was co-authored by Piotr Marecki and… the city of Kraków. The work consists of unedited found texts about one of Kraków's biggest problems: smog.
In 2018 Marecki, Wojciech 'Bocianu' Bociański, Piotr 'Kroll' Mietniowski, and Krzysztof 'Kaz' Ziembik created the book Robbo: Solucja – the first Polish work entirely generated by an 8-bit Atari computer.
In October 2018 – right before the 100th anniversary of Polish independence – Ha!art published Marecki's Niepodległa Google (Google Independent, trans. NS). It is a Flarf poem – composed of search engine results with no editing. As Marecki himself explains in the introduction to the book: he did not write one word of it. A similar work that Marecki published a year later is Cenzobot – a book that is composed of tweets made by a bot.
Marecki also translates conceptual literature. He translated Nick Monfort's World Clock – a piece inspired by the work of Stanisław Lem, Poland's most famous and acclaimed sci-fi writer. Another notable work that Marecki translated is Ubu the King – a piece quite famous amongst Polish literature scholars as it features Poland. Aleksandra Małecka was the co-author of the translation, but it is worth noting that in fact the book was translated using Google translate. Marecki also translated Pad by Steven Zultanski and Shiv Kotecha's Pain the Rock.
In 2020, Marecki published Polska Przydrożna (Wayside Poland, trans. NS) – a book that is seemingly traditional. It is a non-fiction book reporting Marecki's two-week-long journey through Poland's towns and villages, richly illustrated with pictures he took. This rather familiar motif of an urban intellectual travelling the country was treated with irony by Marecki – in his book, he catalogued not only the numerous quirky names of Polish small towns, but also his middle-class, pro-ecological habits.
