Ryszard W . Kluszczyński
Prof. Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, PhD, media art scholar, writer and curator. Full Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Lodz, Poland, Chair of Department of New Media and Digital Culture. Full Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz. Investigates the issues of new media arts and cyberculture, contemporary art theory, experimental cinema and video art, and recent art practices developing at the crossroads of art, science, technology and politics. Artistic Director of the Art and Science Meeting Program in the Center for Contemporary Art in Gdansk.
less
InterestsView All (81)
Uploads
Books and Catalogues by Ryszard W . Kluszczyński
broad spectrum of pieces the pair has produced during thirty years of shared artistic activity to identify the sources of their exceptional artistic value and show how these two artists address in their work issues of particular
relevance to the world of today. I will tie together my reflections on individual pieces to provide a holistic view of Mignonneau and Sommerer’s art. However, to analyze and interpret these works with due regard for their overall complexity, I will identify and describe several critical artistic, theoretical and philosophical contexts expressed in them. I will also attempt to identify, indicate, and characterize the properties and tendencies that produce these contexts and play a key role in Sommerer’s and Mignonneau’s art.
It is only by combining these two perspectives — one focused on individual works of art and their properties, the other directing attention to the relations linking the works with broader processes—that we can grasp the specificity of this oeuvre as a whole.
The overarching framework for all contexts reflected in this oeuvre is new media art. Mignonneau’s and Sommerer’s work essentially falls entirely within this #eld. My definition of new media art — a vast and internally diverse current in contemporary art that has been developing since the early 1950s — situates it at the intersection of three defining aspects: new-mediality, transmediality, and transdisciplinary. These aspects will provide the primary contexts guiding my considerations here, both in themselves and as sources of other essential frames of reference.
by researchers who attempt to collect its basic features and define the concept
are caused by the number and variety of events and tendencies that underlie interactive
art. These phenomena affected the conditions of its birth, they influenced the
selection of basic attributes, and they determined the dynamics and directions of
its development. It could be assumed that as a result of this complex genesis, the
history of interactive art does not lie in linear order but follows several individual
paths, usually parallel and entangled in some areas. As a result, it takes on the form
of a complex, multidimensional system. The multitude of beginnings implies a multiplicity of histories. Consequently, we have a number of histories of interactive
art, complementary and sometimes conflicting. Their shared map takes on the form
of a continent with ragged contours, blurred borders, perhaps even with the shape
of an archipelago or a form of a rhizome — because of its mobility, changeability,
and vagueness of contours — which may only be described temporarily and in movement, never definitely. I would like to call it a rhizomatic archipelago. The history of
interactive art mirrors its characteristic features in a very intriguing way: nonlinear
construction, fluidity, transformation in many planes and directions, open architecture,
and the multitude of perspectives, occurring in configurations that are always
individualized.
I shall take on the job of archeologist and cartographer to describe this complex
phenomenon in order to distinguish several areas: the most important sources of
interactive art in my opinion and the outline of their mutual map. Then I will identify
and describe the most significant artistic achievements that began shaping the different
tendencies in interactive art and the various sources they developed from, describe
the factors and properties of each of these courses, provide the key to the matrices for
artworks that were created in their influence, and bring together the interactive situations
characteristic of all of them, thus determining the areas of interactive artistic
activities.
historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde. I will also address the role of the art world and its institutions in establishing their mutual relationships.
Ziarno piasku w źrenicy oka. Wideoinstalacje 2000-2015
A Grain of Sand in the Pupil of the Eye. Video works 2000-2015
Concept and edition of the catalogue: Ewa Gorządek and Anna Konik.
Essays: Waldemar Baraniewski, Holk Cruse, Judy Fudge, Marcin Giżycki, Ewa Gorządek, Patrick Harries, Anna Konik, Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, Bernhard Waldenfels.
At the centre of Konik’s attention is the human being – virtually all of her works are a process of ‘approaching’ the Other, resulting from encounters with other people and their realities. Taking the perspective of subjective experiences as her point of departure, the artist highlights their social aspect, and the viewer is confronted not only with an individual story but with broader contemporary issues.
However, the work of Anna Konik refuses to be easily inscribed in the paradigm of critical art. It offers much more than just a critical description of reality or comments on the contemporary condition. Konik uses the language of video to convey her protagonists’ experiences and mental states, seeking formal solutions to translate complex mechanisms of memory work, retrospection, emotions, elusive intuitions or impressions into the syntax of video installation and the structure of exhibition space. In her works form and content always complement each other and are equally important.
From the perspective of the fifteen years (2000-2015) it is clear how consistently the artist sought formal solutions for every topic that became the intellectual material of her successive works.
(Ewa Gorządek)
Graphic Design: Grzegorz Laszuk
304 pages, soft cover, texts in English and Polish
ISBN 978-83-65240-07-1
Warsaw 2016
http://csw.art.pl/index.php?action=publikacje&id=185&lang=eng
Meeting, carried out by the Laznia Centre for Contemporary
Art in Gdansk since the beginning of 2011
(I developed the concept in autumn 2010 and run until now), by first discussing
its framework and the context which shaped
it, then describing its essential characteristics and,
finally, up-to-date history and completed projects.
I analyse protest art in the paper, taking it from a twofold perspective. First, looking at its various manifestations in the first transhistorical one, it does not have any genre or media designations that would allow us to describe it as a separate art genre. Instead, we are dealing with protest expressed through the means of art. In the second, I turn my attention to its contemporary, latest manifestations, concluding that protest art takes the form of transdisciplinary art and its most prominent form is a current or variety of new media art.
the world of contemporary artistic creation thanks to the
emergence and spread of the internet as an environment for
artistic practices, in particular, for the presentation of art.
He looks at the changes concerning the status of a work of
art as well as the ways of making it available to the public.
He reflects on the consequences of the contemporary
networking of art – in the context of the transformations
of art that are unfolding as a result of ever changing and
developing technologies and media, and in relation to
the concepts of Walter Benjamin and Bill Nichols. Three
concepts of the artwork emerging from the processes
indicated here are presented: the mediated, the replaced,
and the multiplied artwork. The COVID-19 pandemic
provides an additional context for considerations.
This is a speculative text, a creative essay in which I present ideas about our time
and the surroundings in which we find ourselves. As an artist-researcher I crave for a dialogue among scientists, humanists, and artists to address pivotal issues. Art
might address the past, the present, or even the future, but it is always close to
the ways in which things evolve.
The category of new media art came into general use in the mid-1990s (Tribe, Jana, 2006, 7). The forms of artistic activity associated with it, whose beginnings I trace back to the 1950s in the development of cybernetic and oscilloscope art, and in the academic and critical studies that followed these transformations in art, have their own, even longer history. The theoretical approaches to new media art developed by scholars and critics feature a relevant concepts and terminology (Burnham, 1968; Reichardt, 1971; Nake, 1974; Popper, 1975; Druckrey, 1996; Sommerer, Mignonneau, 1998; Manovich, 2001; Wilson, 2002; Tribe, Jana, 2006; Shanken, 2009), proposals for a historical ordering (Youngblood, 1970; Rush, 1999; Grau, 2003; Frieling, Daniels, 2004; Wands, 2006; Grau, 2007; Cubitt, Thomas, 2013), and monographic studies dedicated to numerous trends in and types of new media art (Franke, 1971; Kahn, 1999; Goldberg, 2000; Weibel, 2001; Ascott, 2003; Paul, 2003; Green, 2004; Kac, 2005; Dixon, Smith, 2007; Raley, 2009; Menkman, 2011). Many books on the work of selected artists and analyses of individual works have also been published. In conjunction with the development of new media art and scholarly reflection on it, a number of university courses and programmes in art colleges were established. An institutional and exhibition system also developed, supporting the production and presentation of works and the realisation of artistic and research projects (such as Ars Electronica Center, Linz; ZKM ‒ Media Art Center, Karlsruhe; InterCommunication Center, Tokyo). The first new media art exhibitions were held (Cybernetic Serendipity, 1968; Software, 1970), and new media art magazines (such as Leonardo, Neural, Artnodes), internet sites (such as Rhizome; Netzspannung.org; ADA: Archive of Digital Art) and festivals (such as Ars Electronica, Linz; European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück; Multimediale, Karlsruhe or Transmediale, Berlin) emerged. New media art thereby acquired a full-fledged institutional framework.
In the following paragraphs, I will analyse the concept and multiform phenomenon of new media art on four levels.
I will first consider it in terms of the interaction between art theory and the related conceptual understanding of this medium as an artistic discipline and a material; and media theory, and its approach to the medium as a technical means of communication. In doing so, I will make an effort to avoid privileging either of these two contexts, and explain why a definitional balance and consensus should be sought instead.
Secondly, I will point out and analyse the properties that characterise new media and new media art, and the consequences of trying to define them by assigning them a set of defining characteristics. In doing so, I will draw attention in particular to the possibilities that emerge from defining new media and new media art without placing them on a historical timeline.
Thirdly, I will provide both an overview of the history of new media art and examine the complexity and multiplicity of its types, revealing their diverse status.
Fourthly, I will highlight three basic factors of new media art: newmediality ‒ referring to the “technical-new media” properties of new media art that emerged as a result of the introduction of new technical means of communication into the field of art as tools for creative work; transmediality ‒ referring to the interaction between new and traditional media, whereby art utilising old and new technical means enter into a meaningful relationship or are even integrated into traditional fields of art, creating transmedial forms; and transdisciplinarity ‒ referring to the relations between artistic new-media and transmedia disciplines and other, non-artistic disciplines of social practice, such as science, the humanities, politics and social activism. These relationships result in the construction of transdisciplinary artistic forms.
I will also explain how changes in the hierarchy among these three factors have over time shaped new media art history. I will construct my position both through the use of and in discussion with a number of concepts found in new media art theory.