CONTENTS Introduction .............................................................................................................. 7 MARTHA C.C. GABRIEL – Art and Life in Second Life ..................................... 11 LANFRANCO ACETI – Instantaneously Mediated Virtual Visions: The Trans- media Circuit of Images, Body, and Meanings .................................................. 29 MARCIN SKŁADANEK – Hybrid Spaces of Human-Computer Interaction in View of Ubicomp Postulates ............................................................................. 51 JOANNA KRYSA – Experiments in (Social) Software Curating: Reprogramming Curatorial Practice for Networks ....................................................................... 63 GRAŻYNA GAJEWSKA – Man as an Electro-Mechanical Art Project ................ 85 JEAN M. IPPOLITO – The Search for New Media: Early Avant-Garde Momentum for the Digital art Pioneers of Japan ............................................... 97 ANTONI PORCZAK – Art as Technology ............................................................. 113 RYSZARD W. KLUSZCZYŃSKI – Interactive Art: Aspects, Histories and Strategies ............................................................................................................ 119 PIOTR ZAWOJSKI – The Archivisation, Presentation, and Dissemination of Cyber Art on the Web ………………………………………………………… 147 MACIEJ OŻÓG – Observing Observation: Visions of Surveillance in Media Art . 167 MICHAŁ OSTROWICKI – The Electronically Incarnated Human ........................ 187 BYUL SHIN – Virtual Reality in Science Fiction Films ......................................... 201 6 Spis treści INTRODUCTION The development of communication technologies has resulted in the emergence of media realities. Their appearance has created areas of interaction and inter- penetration of the media worlds and the actual reality. The boundary between these two basic domains of life – the virtual reality of media and the reality of the physical world – has become both the source of and the model for all other boundaries whose existence has been caused or modified by the media. This boundary is neither stable nor unalterable, and it is as much spatial as temporal (although one could claim that it actually goes beyond both space and time, since – as a sui generis mental phenomenon – it does not possess these two dimensions but only refers to them). It is a process within which we can observe a constant exchange of qualities, shifts and displacement of positions, changes of values and meanings. Due to its aforementioned mental character it is an intangible boundary in progress, a kind of nomadic concept, which always moves with us and is constantly transformed in time and space, which accompanies us constantly in its inconstancy. It is the environment of the contemporary existence, our world in statu nascendi. The omnipresence of a boundary defined in this way makes for the fact that our life occurs in some kind of inter-spaces and inter-times, in a hybrid world "in- between"; not only in-between different cultures, but first of all in-between reality and virtuality. This can be seen as the new foundation of the invincible polymorphism of reality, one of the sources of pluralism, and the cause of constant ontological transgressions. Alternatively, following Jean Baudrillard, one can also view it as the source of homogenization, and claim that the more often we visit both of those worlds, the more inseparable and indistinguishable they become. Seen from the latter perspective, reality and virtuality combine into qualitatively new realities that have been called simulacra. According to the supporters of that concept, the entities that constitute them no longer have the qualities that would allow us to differentiate between the virtual and the real forms. Of these two competing viewpoints, it is the former, i.e. the one offering the image of a profoundly diversified world that seems to me more convincing. It appears to be more effective and useful in describing the complexity of 8 Introduction contemporary culture, and it is far more efficient in the analysis of the most recent art. Moreover, the dynamism and flexibility of the boundaries of reality interpreted in this way suggest the perception of these boundaries as a reference system and a system of interrelations rather than the traditional set of stable divisions. Today the boundaries between various spheres of reality are not seen as dividing them, but rather as establishing their interrelations. Wolfgang Welsch has pointed out that the dynamics and intensity of the relations between the actual reality and the media worlds crucially transforms the character of the interacting domains. It leads, on the one hand, to the virtualization and de-realization of the real, and on the other hand, to the revival and intensification of values ascribed to non-electronic experiences of reality. One side effect of the aforementioned processes – besides the multiplication and differentiation of the experienced worlds – is the revilement of the basically constructive character of each reality. Looking from a different perspective, we can observe that the development of media has brought about the development and transformation of the techno- sphere. Initially it was perceived in opposition to the biosphere. Today, together with the proclamation of the birth of a post-biological world, it is believed that the boundary between these spheres is becoming as fuzzy as the boundary between the actual reality and the virtual reality of media. Both domains have jointly created the biotechnosphere, thus internalising their interrelations and dynamizing their boundaries. These changes also affect the character of human identity, which takes the open form of a variable process that transforms relationships between the bodily and the mental spheres, between the reality of the body and the virtuality of the imagination. New technologies become the expansions and extensions of the human body, and thus influence the structure of any individual identity. The body itself, its definition, history, its substance and gender also undergo various trans- formations, which consequently influences the way of understanding identity. The human becomes traveller, in all the senses of the word. The ease and speed of travelling (physical and virtual) makes it possible for the traveller to experience the places that used to be out of reach. On another level, media connect in the experience of their users distant places, elements of various cultures, and diversified contexts. Such an experience becomes a kind of mosaic or palimpsest. On yet another level, contacts, co-operation or even co-existence within virtual communities, the dynamic development of these environments and links between them and the real world(s) deeply change or even undermine the traditional real communities. Tele-work, tele-study, tele-entertainment or tele-sex become significant part of human activities. Human experience changes into Introduction 9 telematic and, more and more often, individual achieves the status of a psychical nomad, which nowadays means both, cultural- and cyber-nomad. Generally speaking, contemporary nomadism may take two forms. In the first case, the individual can move within a complex and internally diversified reality accepting its discontinuity and diversity as its characteristic features, and inter- connecting (or trying to interconnect) the various encountered and seemingly incompatible elements. The product of such activities would be a cultural and ontological mosaic, very fragmentary and with blurred boundaries, but despite its dispersion still paradoxically hanging together and therefore unitary, common to all the subjects of those practices. The richness, variety, processual nature and inherent non-finality of such a world, as well as its relativisation to an individual, shifting perspective of a moving subject does not allow us to impose a universal network of co-ordinates upon it. Each individual in the course of his or her history creates its character spontaneously, since each individual experiences the whole world as his or her own construction. The other type of contemporary nomadism is connected with the theory of multiple worlds. It claims that an individual, due to the number of the social roles he or she plays, and to their functioning in various actual and virtual realities, experiences reality in such diverse forms that he or she is unwilling (or even un- able) to perceive them within the frame of just one system. What is the most interesting about this concept is not its claim that each of us lives in different worlds, but that we usually remain on their borderlines, or even in-between these worlds, and our main object of experience is the multiplicity and variety. The new quality of the human situation in the world – the expanded and trans- formed environment in which, as I have already said, the biosphere with techno- sphere jointly constitutes the biotechnological syndrome – clearly influences the shape of contemporary culture. It introduces numerous forms that together make up a structure referred to as cyberculture. I understand ‘cyberculture‘ as a multifaceted complex structure that grows out of the social experience of living in a world dominated by information and communication technologies. Cyberculture emerges as a process through which the information and network society can express as well as understand itself. It consists of an internalised layer