Spectral Storytelling

SPECTRAL STORYTELLING. SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT THROUGH TECHNOLOGY IN TRAUMATIZED ENVIRONMENTS

How to responsibly design open transmedia environments engaging audiences and using critical theories, speculative design, and distributed leadership? Can technology work for the benefit of excluded, both human and nonhuman actors, and reveal the essential problems of traumatized places, historically unclear and hidden events? The lecture will be focused on the analysis of two examples from the practice of the Humanities/Art/Technology Research Center: the interactive installation Post-Apocalypsis (2015) dealing with the problem of the spectral nature of the Chernobyl disaster as a multifaceted and long-term cultural trauma, and the Ecological and Social Archive of Lake Elsensee-Rusałka (2018-2021), which is a media platform for social interaction with the historical, urban and ecological problems of this place. Lake Elsensee-Rusałka, located in Poznań, is an artificial reservoir created due to Jewish prisoners’ slave labor during World War II, rebuilt by the Polish communist authorities, currently undergoing a continuous revitalization. Through these processes and repressed stories, the lake as a place itself became a source of social emotions and tensions.

Agnieszka Jelewska is a professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, director, co-founder of the Humanities / Art / Technology Research Center, and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the AMU. Author of books and texts about art and technology and editor of Art and technology in Poland. From Cybercommunism to The Culture of Makers (2015). She mainly examines the transdisciplinary relations between science, art, culture, and technology in the 20th and 21st century, their social and political dimension. She is also a curator and co-creator of art and science projects: Transnature is Here (2013); *Post-Apocalypsis *(2015) – awarded a golden medal from PQ 2016; Anaesthesia (2016); PostHuman Data (2019).

Michał Krawczak is an associate professor at the Anthropology and Cultural Studies Department at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, and co-founder and program director of the Humanities /Art /Technology Research Center. Author of texts about media arts and editor of the book Post-Technological Experiences. Art-Science-Culture (2019). He is a researcher, designer, and curator of art and science projects, such as Transnature is Here (2013),* Post-Apocalypsis* (2015), Anaesthesia (2016), and Anthropocene (2017). His main research fields are media and performance art, ecology of sound, social robotics, artificial intelligence, and technological natures.

Website: artandsciencestudies.com/en/

metaLAB is partnering with the Mahindra Humanities Center to sponsor the Transmedia Arts Seminar, chaired by Magda Romanska, and Hana Worthen.