KAROL JWIAK

University of d
INVENTING THE SENSES. POLISH NEW MEDIA ART AND SYNESTHESIA IN '60S - '80S
DIGITAL SENSES
I would like to begin with a very simple observation from Lev Manovichs famous The Language of
New Media. As the editor claims on the back cover of the second edition of the book, it offers the
first systematic and rigorous theory of new media [2001]. Indeed, Manovich formulates a fleshed
out theory of new media, relying on the long history of traditional media such as photography,
cinema, and computing machines. What makes the media new is their convergence. Particular
media which were separate suddenly intermingled at the end of the 20th century, creating new
devices with unprecedented possibilities in the communication, creation of the illusion of reality,
representing space. That convergence, Manovich says, happens in the abstract sphere of digits. He
writes:
All existing media are translated into numerical data accessible for the computer. The result:
graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts become computable, that is, simply sets
of computer data. In short, media become new media [Manovich 2001: 25]
In another fragment he claims:
Different media elements graphics, photographs, digital video, sound, and 3-D worlds were
embedded within rectangular surfaces containing text [Manovich 2001: 75].
The idea is simple, it is the rectangular surfaces containing text where different sensual
experiences meet. As the users of everyday digital devices, containing and processing all kinds of
data, we are no more astonished by that remark. Nevertheless I found it extremely inspiring and
relevant to the questions of synesthesia. It is a digital device which is a good model, or a parallel, of
synesthetic experience where all visuals, shapes, sounds and space equal becoming nothing but
digits. Thus, let me propose a possible result of a reading of the Manovichs remark: synesthesia is
the basis of the new media. In other words, what differs media from the new media is a synesthetic
convergence of all the variety of senses. Moreover, it is not only the fact of convergence but also the
case of transposing all kinds of sensual experience into one single binary code. Synesthesia is quite a
similar convergence of all different sensations unified into a single experience. In cases of both the
experience of synesthesia and digital data, the same process appears: the visual, sound, and spatial
experience becomes a universal data.
Let me go back to the concept of the digitality as a synesthetic device. It is not surprising to find some
premonition of a digital convergence of senses in the very prophetic text of new media, namely
McLuhans Understanding Media. The book published as early as in 1964 had already expressed a
similar idea. In the chapter Number McLuhan compares the abstract number to the sense of touch,
or rather declares number is an extension and separation of our most intimate and interrelating
activity, our sense of touch [1994: 107]. Moreover, he acknowledges the fact that the artists have
tried to meet the challenge of the electric age by investing the tactile sense with the role of a
nervous system for unifying all the others [McLuhan 1994: 107]. Thus, it is a sense of touch and the
number as its extension, playing the synesthetic role of unifying different senses.
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ROMANTICISMS SYNTHESIS OF ARTS AND ITS CONTINUATION

The way I put the question of synesthesia is utterly opposite to the one most commonly used in the
history of art namely the Romanticisms theory of the synthesis of art, or correspondance des arts.
It takes the imagination, or the state of soul [Sand, after Starzyski 1965: 190] as the central point
of the convergence of senses, thus, the concept is highly individualistic. The most known example is
the output of the French painter Eugene Delacroixe [Starzyski 1965: 21]. In that time the
comparison of the color palette and the music score became quite common [Starzyski 1956: 45].
Georges Sand, describing a fruitful friendship between the painter and the Polish musician Fryderyk
Chopin, and their intermingling artistic paths, often uses such a poetic phrase as for example
sounding blue tone [Starzyski 1965: 46]. Delacroixe in his theoretical deliberations referred to
music and its features such as harmony, tone, chord. Nevertheless, the Delacroixes idea of
correspondence between music and painting was most directly expressed later, by a poet of the next
generation, Charles Baudelaire. Had anybody before [Delacroix K.J.] allowed the painting to sing
more capricious melodies, more incredible chord of new, yet unknown, subtle, enchanting, tones?
[Baudelaire, after Starzyski 1965: 75]. French poet elaborated on the theory of color based on
music: In color we can find harmony, melody and counterpoints. The theory of color is based on
harmony. Melody is the unity of colors, or the universal color [Baudelaire, after Starzyski 1965: 76].
This idea, starting from the very core of romanticism, lasted till the avant-garde art in the first half of
the 20th century. The most clear example is the one of Vasilly Kandynsky and his abstract art
accompanied by his theoretical remarks on the correspondence between music and painting. In his
best known book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and Painting in particular, he writes about the
harmony in paintings, claiming that particular colors have their tonal equivalents [Kandinsky 1996].
Kandinsky speaks of the internal voice of the color [1996: 65]. Similar interests appeared in the
avant-garde music of the 20th century. In 1960 one of the most important Polish composers of the
second half of 20th century, Penderecki claimed: For me the most important issue is the problem of
solving colors, color concentration, as well as operating texture and time [Mirka 1997: 329]. I am
looking for deeper interconnections between painting and music he continued. The task of music is
to transplant all these elements of time and space, color, and texture onto music [Mirka 1997: 329].
Nevertheless, in the second half of the 20th century the situation in the aesthetics is way different
comparing to the Kandinskys time. The issues of imagination, internal experience, beauty and
spirituality play less important role. Penderecki and a number of progressive artists of the time are
concerned with the mechanical and technical aspects of the experience. Pendereckis composition of
that time include Psalmus, his major work of electronic music [1960]. To compose the music he used
only a human voice which he electronically manipulated and rendered artificial:
Working with the basic elements of speech vowels and consonants the composer and engineer,
Eugeniusz Rudnik, recorded, filtered and processed the sound of two human voices, a soprano and a
baritone. These treatments produced long notes which shifted in pith and color. A natural
capacity, the human voice, was rendered artificial and given task of delivering sounds rather than
singing words. Here the composer was sounding the body electric [Crowley 2012: 19-23].
That example shows the displacement of the area where synethesia takes place. It is no more the
imagination and fantasy where the phenomenon happens, but rather the technology. Synesthesia

becomes a product of such mechanical devices as synthesizers, transistors and oscillators, of

manipulation of everyday experience rather than a spiritual vision.
MECHANICAL SENSES AND THEIR CONVERGENCE IN THE ARTWORK THE CASE OF POLISH NEW
MEDIA ART '60s-'80s
McLuhan claims, that the unity of different senses paradoxically has been achieved by abstract
art, which offers a central nervous system for a work of art, rather than the conventional husk of
the old pictorial image [1994: 108]. The statement probably confirms the success of the Kandinskys
idea. While not being an art critic McLuhan intuitively used abstract art as a clich. What played
more important role in the '50s and '60s, though, was related to a conceptual art rather than the
abstractionism. The movement I mean began as early as in the '30s with such musicians as Nicolas
Cage in The United States or Lev Teremin in USRR, and their fruitful relations to visual arts. New
sounding technologies led to various experiments and the so called intermedialism, where all, the
visual artists, technicians, and composers met. Drawing the context of that phenomenon David
Crowley claims that the movement almost simultaneously became a common interest of both East
and West: kinetic art, actions and happenings, graphic and event scores, experimental films and
environments formed an international archipelago where sound and image combined and
composers and artists could work together [Crowley 2012: 11-13]. Although the movement was by
all means international, I will pay most of my attention to the specificity of the Polish, or Eastern
Europe context.
In the Eastern Bloc the new technology gained a particular freedom and it was to a large extent
supported by the State. In the aftermath of Stalinism, Moscow declared a Scientific-Technological
Revolution. It was the sign of a cool technocratic rationalism after the paranoia and brutality of the
gulags and show trials [Crowley 2012:17]. Crowley sees it as a part of both the transformation of the
new world and shaping a new Soviet consciousness [2012: 17]. Nevertheless, the art of that time
managed to defend itself from that ideological content. In the following text I will show how the
synesthetic aspects of art practice allowed and served artists to create a double layer messages
criticizing rebours the propaganda and system, despite being under a constant censorship control.
In the communist regime based on lies and manipulation, by paying attention to the message behind
the surface and problematizing the issue of perception synesthesia became a serious political device.
It questioned the status quo of the distorted and simplified reality.
VISUAL SCORES
Although the timeline is 60s-70s, I would like to begin much earlier. What happened in the art of new
media of that period was, to a certain extent, anticipated by Wacaw Szpakowski as early as in 20s. As
an engineer and architect, he spent all of his life as an ordinary designer in different studios and
construction sites. Simultaneously, from the age of 17 till the end of his life, he was obsessively
occupied by the question of the geometry and the line in particular. In dozens of his sketchbooks he
elaborated on the idea of rhythmical line (see photo ), which he emboldened to publish as late as
being 80 (1969). He attached a huge significance to the line and its composition, relating it to both
nature and culture, philosophical aspects of time and eternity, human expression. Let me quote from
his article, apologizing for the loss of the poetic value of the original:

The line ideas are way different from any kind of decoration, due to their simplicity pushed to its
very limits. The line ideas are similar to music, especially to a melody due to the rhythm imparted by
the author (they are regular, that is they are liable to a monotonous rule). They are similar to the
geometrical art due to e.g. symmetry, commensuration etc. They have an internal content which we
can recognize by reading the lines dictum, analogically to the writing [Szpakowski 1969: 9].
Szpakowski had a number of features of a new media artist: technical education, wide variety of
activity, devotion to a scrupulous process of experimentation, a balance between science and
philosophy. He seemed to invent a new logic of communication, new codes. Although he was
contemporary to Kandinsky, Szpakowski with his highly conceptual considerations, belongs rather to
the art of second half of the century. Thus, for a long time he has been forgotten, and only recently
acclaimed as one of the key figures of abstract art by being included in the MoMAs famous
exhibition Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925. One can perceive his rhythmical lines as a premonition
of Manovichs rectangular surfaces containing different kinds of sensual experience.
It is worth to mention that the idea of rhythmical lines served to Szpakowski as a visual score for
performing music. Thus, Szpakowskis sketches take part in artists search for a new music score,
fitted to the new music and new experience of mechanical and technical reality surrounding modern
man. Just to give a few examples, let me list such names as Szablos Esztenyi and Krzysztof Wodiczko
(photo 2), or Bogusaw Schaeffer (photo 3).
SPATIAL SOUNDS
Oskar Hanses was an architect but in the history of art he is remembered for his idea of the open
form which actually affected more the visual arts than architecture. According to this idea, a piece
of art or an artifact doesnt have one single meaning but it always gains new meanings by the
changing external contexts and different interpretations. The artifact works as an empty form always
open for gaining independently different contents. Hansen used this theory for abolishing rigid
disciplines borders and involving painting and sound experience to the spatial question referred to
architecture. One of the examples is a design of the Pavilion of Music at the Warsaw Contemporary
Music Festival in 1958, My Place, My Music (photo 4). The Pavilion was equipped with dozen or so
speakers emitting pre-recorded audio material. The visitor was to move freely inside the
construction, controlling the sounds reaching their ears and at the same time observing changes in
nature [Muzyczuk 2012: 135]. The Pavilon has never been constructed, probably due to its political
message. The design of the public space, where a random passerby was able to choose whatever
sound he/she decided, was against the idea of a single and preconstituted message coined by the
state. In this sense a later work of another artist, Krzysztof Wodiczko, is quite similar. His Personal
Instrument, 1969 (photo 5) was a device worn on head and hands. Responding to the movements of
the wearer, the device made it possible for the individual to amplify or diminish the flow of sounds
from the environment [Crowley 2012: 85]. One can hardly understand the message of this work
outside the context of communist regime and its permanent state of surveillance. Nevertheless, what
became more evident here was a new sensibility towards a peculiar blend of technology, personal
experience of a number of senses. After moving to USA Wodiczko still, despite a different political
context, elaborated on this aspect of visual/sound/body communication (photo 6).
VISUAL SOUNDS AND SOUNDINGS IMAGES

The video artists were interested in a particular way in the electronic relation between sound and
image. In Poland the movement of video-art began quite early, at the beginning of 70s. Established in
1972 at the d Film School artistic group Warsztat Formy Filmowej is considered a leading video-art
group in Central Europe at the time. Warsztat gathered such artists as Jzef Robakowski, Wojciech
Bruszewski and Pawe Kwiek. Each of them had his own original attitude to the synesthetic issues
related to the video-art.
Jzef Robakowski is often considered as one of the pioneers of the video-art in Poland although he
he started his research in the field of film. First, before even the video appeared, he was agitating for
the idea of pure film: through various kinds of research, attempts, suggestions I will be able to
free film from the ballast of habits brought over from literature [Robakowski 1971]. The medium of
video appeared to be a perfect tool for autotelic research within the film form. In this sense, the
sensual and synesthetic experience played an important role. A number of Robakowskis works
include a purely formal experimentation on the relation between sound, image and movement. One
example is Dynamic Rectangle [1971, see photo 7], where purely sensual message is composed of
colors, shapes and sounds, intermingling together in the whole work. The art-piece is an effect of a
cooperation of the artist and an already mentioned musician Edward Rudnik, apioneer of a electronic
music in Poland. Other works, such as Exercise [1972-73], Test I [1971], show an in-depth research in
film form as a perfect device for achieving the upper state of perception, synesthetically combining
various kinds of experience.
Another Warsztats artist, Wojciech Bruszewski, was more involved in the technical conditioning of
the medium of film and video. He was interested in the technical possibilities of the new media in
questioning the rigid borders of different disciplines. One of the examples could be the Sound
photography [1971 see photo 8].
Pawe Kwiek,on the other hand, was an artist of pragmatic current of the Polish neo-avant-garde
[Ronduda 2009: 13]. As an art theoretician ukasz Ronduda claims, the main goal of that art was a
constant deconstruction, a constant challenging of seemingly unshakeable truths and critical
approach toward extant socio-symbolic orders, ideologies that organize perception and colonise the
imagination [13]. Let me pay particular attention to one of the Kwieks art-pieces, Video and Breath
[1978, see photo 9]. In this installation artist controlled the TV image brightness with his own breath,
by means of the wires connecting his body and TV set. The image on the TV varies between darkness
and lightness, having in the middle the auto-referential image of the process itself. The work
presents the blurred boarders between the human body and technology. The senses smoothly
transpose to the electronic device. The physiological body process transmutes into the electronic
message.
SUMMARY
I was trying to investigate an alternative art history thread of the synesthesia which is most
commonly connected with the Romanticisms synthesis or correspondence of arts. Although I
connect it with Romanticism, the phenomenon is much wider: to some extent it consists of such
distanced phenomena as the Antic Pythagorean theories, Hermeneutic theories of Renaissance, up
to the contemporary art. What I was interested in was a completely different phenomenon. The new
media to some extent are per se synesthethic. Thus, with the appearance of new media artists were
provided with unprecedented technical possibilities. In my presentation I tried to pay attention to
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those artists who being conscious of that possibility, treated such new media in an auto-referential
reflection. Especially in communist country such as Poland was, those interests were of the special
meaning, because they served to escape from a distorted, manipulated and simplified reality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
CROWLEY, David. 2012. Sounding The Body Electric. [in:] Sounding The Body Electric. Experiments in
art and music in Eastern Europe 1957-1984. Muzeum Sztuki d
MANOVICH, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. The MIT Press.
MCLUHAN, Marshall. 1994, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. The MIT Press.
MUZYCZUK, Daniel. 2012. Exhibition. [in:] Sounding The Body Electric. Experiments in art and music in
Eastern Europe 1957-1984. Muzeum Sztuki, d.
STARZYSKI, Juliusz. 1965. O romantycznej syntezie sztuk. Delacroix, Chopin, Baudelaire. PIW,
Warszawa.
SZPAKOWSKI, Wacaw. 1978. Linia rytmiczna. Muzeum Sztuki, d
ROBAKOWSKI, Jzef. 1871, Jeszcze raz o czysty film. d
RONDUDA, ukasz, 2009, Sztuka polska lat 70. Awangarda. CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, Warszawa

ILLUSTRATIONS:

1. Wacaw Szpakowski, Rhythmical Line, 1924, Muzeum Sztuki collection.

2. Krzysztof Wodiczko i Szabolcs Esztenyi, score for Just Radio Transmitters, drawing, 1969.

3. Bogusaw Schaeffer, Visual Score, sketch on paper, 1972

4. Oskar Hanses, My Place, My Music, design for the Pavilion of Music at the Warsaw
Contemporary Music Festival, 1958.
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5. Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal Instrument, photographic documentation of the performance,

1969

6. Krzysztof Wodiczko, Porte-parole, piece of equipment for a stranger, instrument, 19931997.

7. Jzef Robakowski, Dynamic Rectangle, still from film, 1971.

8. Wojciech Bruszewski, Sound Photography, photography 1971.

9. Pawe Kwiek, Video and Breath, installation 1978.

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