I CHARM OF THE ANALOG MEDIA

Dariusz Brzostek

Audiophile’s perversive delight. In between retromania and object-sexuality

Mateusz Curyło

We’ve never been digital

Magdalena Zdrodowska

#occupywallstreet. From twitter to the street – analog forms of protest

Ewa Wójtowicz

Emulation as a method and as a metaphor. (Neo)analog contexts of post-digital culture

Wioleta Ferenc-Stadnik, Karolina Zawadzka, Izabela Majos, Izabela Porębska, Iwona Jeszka

Retro-nostalgia – describing postcrossing

Konrad Wojnowski

Disaster as a message in a world of a physical theory of information

Monika Górska-Olesińska

Writing hand nostalgia. Handwriting in analog-digital continuum

Michał Choptiany, Joanna Walewska

Merciful history and digital suicide. Archive at the crossroads of digital and analogue

Karolina Robaczek

Triumph of retro-hatred? Vinyl LP – back to the digital reality

Michał Żmuda

Vinyl scratch as a source of hip-hop poetics

Anna Mazela

Positives of a negative – analog photography according to Andrzej Różycki

II CULTURAL STUDIES WORKSHOP

Ewa Domańska

Affirmative humanities: post-Butlerian and post-Foucauldian approaches towards power and gender

III LIBRARY OF “CONTEMPORARY CULTURE” SERIES

Ewa Rewers

Cultural city studies. A project of transdisciplinary research

Andrzej Gwóźdź

Sierek reads Warburg

Kornelia Kończal’s interview with professor Bogumił Jewsiewicki

Comparative history of memory

IV REVIEWS

Dobrosława Wężowicz-Ziółkowska

Understanding animals and people

Jan Potkański

Cinema without an audience? Faces of queer cinema by Małgorzata Radkiewicz

Małgorzata Radkiewicz

„SportsMEN” and „sportswoMEN” – body games and sports

Roch Sulima

Popular culture: stand-up comedy, stage and feminist narratives

The draft takes into account rhetorics and semantics of audiophile discourse, which may be observed within the internet discussion boards, which are related to Hi-Fi audio devices. The problem is analyzed within the psychoanalytic concept of a perversive subject treated as a subject which is permanently unsatisfied (S. Freud, J. Lacan) and psychological theories of object-sexuality, related to intimate erotic relationship between a man and an object. Retromania remains the basic concept for the study – which can be, in essence, treated as an obsessive return to aestheticized forms of the past (design, fashion etc.). Roland Barthes’s Theory of “love discourse”. The area of the study is concerned with the selected audiophile internet forum, topic area of which is concerned with analogue sound amplifying systems.

According to Bernard Stiegler, the most important issue taken into account by digital studies is the grammatization of digital script, meaning the ways in which digital script changes our social and cognitive structures, including the measurable activity of our Central Nervous Systems. In the present article neolithic roots of digitalization and roots of writing within the processes of early digitalization of the world. In case of the original ways of digitalization, such as Jetons, design concept is used as designification, as originally created by Vilém Flusser. Next the article deals with the issue of the way, the question regarding de-signifying of the media – how this is complementary in relation to the script proposed by Jacques Derrida’s work Signature Context Event. Designifying, as an indispensable part of creation of digital representation, is a proposition which may be used to understand the meaning.

This text has been inspired by a blog post written by Nathan Jurgenson, who carried out a participant observation among the Wall Street occupiers and participants of that event in other cities. Contrary to the popular rumours of cyberactivist revolution, which was present in the West after the Arab Spring, Jurgenson notes that #occupy acts against hi-tech, which has been identified with the system and forces the occupy protest acted against. The article is an analysis and contextualization of the use of simple technologies and DIY noted by Jurgenson and other observers. Additionally, the analytical procedures try to decipher the political declaration stated by the participants of the #occupy movement.

Media become older and older, that means that the perspective of nostalgia, which we use to look back in the past becomes shorter. At the same time, history is becoming flatter in its constant mutual linking of a variety of aesthetic conventions. Return of analogue looks of perfect digital images, computer games which are build as a wooden and paper form or various forms of cultural nostalgia – all of that is a proof of the ongoing game with emblematic elements of visual culture. Need of attaining a commonly-creative generational experience is the basis for transforming the popular culture themes in the lo-fi spirit. This may be spotted in works by Arcangel or by the Paper Rad collective. At the same time, remediation and (re)materialization of the signs coming from a digital repository with the use of 3D printers and DIY method result in increase of material artifacts of neo-analog character. In consequence, transfer of analog media threads into digital visualisation, such as for example the omnipresent theme of bent corners of a sheet of paper occurs. Metaphor of emulation, understood not as a technical solution, but as a type of a creative stance may be helpful in an attempt to describe various aspects of presence of analogue media in reality. Neo-analog creative stances are often characterized with aesthetic chaos, which often gets them close to art with a post-internet, or even post-digital character, which is visible in projects created by Pamela Rosenkanz. Can the neo-analog art be treated as a form of resistance which is similar to slow movement in its logic, or should it be treated as technonostalgia, which goes up to the borders of Siegfried Zielinski’s necroromanticism.

The author tries to define disaster as a message, at the same time going away from metaphysical theories which focus on inability of presentation and communication of the unexpected. Contrary to these theories, the author shows that if we have a closer look at the catastrophes and disasters, using certain physical theories, which do not differentiate between information and energy, one may treat a disaster as a source of information. When looking from that perspective, it may turn out that events which are not very probable, may be, within certain contexts, very beneficial. Catastrophes require adaptation and change, while dedetermining the mechanism that produce information creates new options.

Presence of handwriting in contemporary culture which is shaped and defined by the digital media. Artistic initiatives which are an expression of nostalgia and longing for physical and material aspects of analog handwriting have been analyzed in a form of a case study. These initiatives are the Infinite Writing/Ecriture Infinie project, created by a Portuguese artist, Bili Bidjocka, and an Instagram gallery named The Art of Handwriting, which has been created by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Projects of typographic reconstruction of handwriting of well-known historic figures have also been taken into consideration. These projects aimed at creating so called (digital) personal fonts, which are based on fascination of the individual writing character, which is to be treated as an expression of recognition. These projects are being analyzed within the context of the contemporary literature on the subject, which covers the issue of transformation of the cultural perception of handwriting, which is achieved under the influence of new writing media, which are being more and more commonly used.

This article is written in order to expose tensions between the ways that digital and analog archive function. Starting from work methodologies used with archives, which are used to document intellectual history, such as books of friendship and large corpus of correspondence, the authors show in what way, nowadays, within the scope of projects which aim at digitalization of those sources, metadata contained in the documents is used to reconstruct the past. Fragmented character of those sources is being confronted with total character of the contemporary archives of every-day life, which can be found on the servers of the existing social networks. The article indicates both cultural and theoreticallyhistoric implications of such situation and show an ambivalent character of both historical archives, as well as modern digital archives. The authors are placing themselves in the shoes of a historian who will, in a few hundred years, deal with the history of the first decades of the 21st century and indicating that there is an option of avoiding a perspective of total archiving of our actions.

The article covers the phenomenon in which the analogue medium – a vinyl LP – returned into the reality of the modern phonographic market, after the revolution brought by the fact that music can be now distributed in a digital form via the Internet.