In the course of over five year philosophical studies at the University of Warsaw, I especially valued the opportunity to improve my writing, communication and rhetorical skills. I have put a lot of energy into improving the accuracy of my thinking by attending not only the basic, obligatory logic classes, but also an additional, more advanced course.
I was particularly interested in the philosophy of art
– and more specifically the influence of how we create, perceive and communicate beauty on our daily lives. At the university, I have also attended a variety of, often extracurricular, interdepartmental classes – from the history of the Inca state, through learning about the African-American musical tradition, to comprehensive classes at the Department of Physics (and many others). I use this acquired knowledge, as well as the writing and analytical skills in everything I do – from writing theoretical papers and film scripts to pop culture articles about games and my other creative work.
Most of my written work is in Polish. Through the years I had many opportunities to write in English as well – for example here you can read a paper of mine in English about the ontology of "art acenes". If you are interested in more information about any of the Polish papers below feel free to contact me about it.
Do only humans have consciousness? Are we the most perfect species? How do religious tradition and culture determine our perception (and evaluation) of the author's control over his work? In my most ambitious theoretical work so far (and at the same time my master's thesis), I have attempted an interdisciplinary analysis of the interplay between evolution and religion, between art and our everyday life, between thought and linguistic practice. I am trying to cross-sectionally and critically present the role of non-human animals and artificial intelligence in these domains. I look for self-distance and answers not only in classical European philosophy, but also in Vedas, Taoism, Buddhism, shamanism and animistic concepts.
This frame of mind – this perception of a selected fragment of reality as something special, but also as a message, as a specific narrative and as an external fact about the world – we can potentially assume in relation to any observed thing. In order to enjoy a book or a movie, to understand it as an event in your life, you do not need to have a coherent theory of reality, and in particular you do not need
a coherent theory of art. Music played "live" is happening right here and now, but so is the perception of monuments, architecture and images. Their "perpetuating" character is no more, no less than a comforting mirage that covers the real evanescence. The impressions they evoke are "burned" just like the Vedic fire mentioned in the third chapter, and just like that fire they leave a mark – both in our subjective memory and in the objective reality.
My passion for the art of horror has also found its
way into my philosophical and theoretical works. Among laymen and according to some stereotypical views, horror is sometimes regarded as something primitive, designed to trigger the simplest physiological reflexes, and sometimes even as something unworthy of serious consideration. Therefore, in this paper I investigate the value of the genre, its theoretical background and the approaches to its creation – based on specific examples. The whole is juxtaposed with a background of three orders: the body-physiological, the analytic-philosophical and the psychoanalytical. I argue that the art of horror is not only a “guilty pleasure” or a drug for “adrenaline junkies”, but also an important medium stimulating human intellectual development.
In addition to my written work in 2022 at the Pyrkon festival in Poznań, I gave a thematically similar lecture. It was recorded and can be viewed in this video (in Polish).
Admitting the Real and one's own fallibility is a big blow to a human ‒ it is evidence of a necessity to adapt. While experiencing a thing that comes from the outside is traumatic, it ultimately leads to emotional progress and the assimilation of this new space in a broader sense. In such sense, the experience
of horror can be transgressive. It also contains an element of the Nietzschean affirmation that teaches us not to wage a "war against ugliness" and “to see
what is necessary in things as beautiful".
This work (as my bachelor's degree final paper) was primarily an act of rebellion against the persistent (especially in some academic circles) elitism and pretentiousness in speaking about art. In it I claim that the fetishization of the "timelessness of works" and "immortality of great masters" is based on
a basic fear of passing away ‒ ours as individuals, but also as a species. I argue why any kind of immortality or timelessness of art is "an illusion for short-sighted and short-lived minds," and then
I attempt to present a more egalitarian view of art as an organic game between the viewer, the artist, and the critic. I rely largely on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the pragmatic concepts of John Dewey equating art with experience, and in my bibliography I refer to both scientific works and pop-culture sources. Here you will find atemporalism, comics, music, but also a pinch of Nietzscheanism.
When a tourist goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he faces
a challenge ‒ the museum's collection is too extensive to be explored in one day; it is perhaps even too large for a week tour. Therefore, she usually adopts one of two tactics: (a) she sets out on a frantic chase through the halls of the museum in order to "score" as many exhibits as she can, which can only end in breathlessness; (b) she checks the locations of the most popular or critically acclaimed works. The first solution means that one does not really experience any particular artwork, while the second dogmatically perpetuates the cult of sacred artifacts. It might just happen, however, that an atemporal tourist enters the museum. She does not choose any of these tactics and she walks between the rooms without respecting any chronology of the exhibits. She juxtaposes the works of civilizations thousands of years and kilometers apart as if they were one and the same. For no apparent reason, she will stop for a moment at the terracotta Greek vases, she will spot the ornate Colt revolver and then head towards a series of vintage pictures taken in old photo booths that she had previously checked on the Internet. She will also take notice of how the security guard is dressed, what color are the curtains and what the museum bathroom looks like. One of her fellow visitors will tell her that she must under no circumstances miss the collection of Picasso's paintings in the neighboring hall, but she is already bored with the museum. She will go outside, but her "tour" is not over, because now her admiration turns to a metal hot dog booth covered with advertisements that stands in front of the entrance to the museum. In this sense, the museum and the outside world become one.
Wyjdzie w Graniu was not only a chance to make fun, narrative films about games, but also to write thematic articles and short entries. Sometimes I sat down to them by myself, tried to reach under the surface a bit more analytically or to write something unobvious, such as this seemingly absurd comparison of board games with video games. Sometimes I allowed myself to touch on serious topics, as in the case of this article about the conclusions about wars one can find in board games.
Sometimes, together with Madzia Małachowska, we wrote lighter, less theoretical entries, which allowed us to bring out the most interesting games ‒ as for example in this list of the 10 most creative board games we know. Regardless of what we wrote, we tried to maintain as consistent style as possible with what we were doing audiovisually. That is why we often used a deliberately informal language or stylized our writing as spontaneous dialogue.
During my master's studies, I was particularly interested in a tension between the author's narrative and the interactivity. So I researched this subject in one of the final annual papers.
I looked at what forms can narration and interactivity take in various media of artistic communication – video games, role-playing games, board games, theater, stage improvisation, but also how it can manifest in traditional literature, film, painting, and, finally, stage illusion. The latter turns out to be of particular importance, as it represents a historical prototype for manipulating the viewer's attention and slipping in carefully planned content under the cover of “free”, individual reception.
It seems obvious to us that we are interacting with the physical world. We are not surprised when a ball pushed by us starts to roll and a wall resists our bodies.
On the other hand, the sensual experience of this world is usually something that is laid on us, something external to us, something that does not depend on us. There is a reason that once upon a time magic was something that must have come from some outer, supernatural world and something that is in conflict with experience. Nowadays, magic has become illusion and it has the power to provide tangible evidence for the existence of a bridge between what we have so far called the real world and the subjective, interactive imaginary space.
