W. Bruszewski's 'Big Dick' and AR Storytelling

Piotr Marecki Wojciech Bruszewski's ‘Big Dick’ and Augmented Reality Storytelling

Source of Image: http://culture.pl/pl/tworca/wojciech-bruszewski

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

Piotr Marecki

Wojciech Bruszewski's ‘Big Dick’ and Augmented Reality Storytelling

Abstract:

Jay David Bolter defines Augmented Reality (AR) as a ‘term for a constellation of digital technologies that enable users to display and interact with digital information integrated into their immediate physical environment’. The development of portable devices is causing a surge in the development of mass-market AR technology; it is used in geolocation applications and is widely used in sports to measure precise distances. Augmented Reality is also often used in preparing modern museum displays. In the field of contemporary literature, AR books have a short tradition, and this approach to modelling books that interact with virtual reality is used only sporadically. Considered among the most important works written in this convention is Between Page and Screen, by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse, a collection of poetry that is a conversation between two characters, P and S, which takes place through a traditional book printed with QR codes. When scanned by a computer camera, they call up a text. Most of the other AR books on the market are in the vein of illustrated (and digitally remediated) pop-up books, mainly for children. The publishers themselves call them ‘virtual interactive pop-up books’ or ‘virtual 3D pop-up books’. The body of the paper is an analysis of how AR poetics are used to create a story that mixes media and is based on media.

The aim of this paper is to present the storytelling capabilities of AR books, which are equally based on print and digital media, suspended between the physical book and the electronic library, as visual artist, filmmaker, and writer Wojciech Bruszewski conceived and executed

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

in his Polish-language novel Big Dick. The author uses a ‘half-print, half-Internet’ construct to mix digital and print storytelling in this novel of the 20th century. The work’s protagonist, the stateless Richard von Hakenkreutz, is an amalgam of historical facts, sliding through history like an éminence grise, a supporting character, through the offices of the most important leaders and businessmen, participating in major historical events.

Piotr Marecki Piotr Marecki is Assistant Professor at the Department of Contemporary Culture at the Institute of Culture at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, lecturer at the Polish National Film, Television and Theater School (PWSFTviT) in Łódź. He studied at the Jagiellonian University (film studies, media studies, cultural studies) and Andrzej Wajda Master School of Directing in Warsaw (Creative Producing).

He holds a PhD in cultural studies from the Jagiellonian University. He has been Visiting Fellow at universities and cultural centres in Europe and the United States, including MIT (USA), The University of Bucharest (Romania), Institute of Arts (Czech Republic). Since 1999 he has been the co-founder and editor-in-chief of ‘Ha!art’ magazine, website newspaper and the Publishing House and chairman of the board at Korporacja Ha!art Foundation. His interests include Polish literature after 1989, independent culture, new media literature, experimental writing, cultural margins, film adaptations and screenwriting.

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

1. Augmented Reality Jay David Bolter defines Augmented Reality (AR) as a "term for a constellation of digital technologies that enable users to display and interact with digital information integrated into their immediate psychical environment."1 Further on in his article, Bolter states that AR is the technological equivalent of VR, although VR is more widely known and described. Paul Milgramoth has classified both VR and AR as examples of Mixed Reality. In the range of possibilities for interaction between computer and physical reality he describes two extremes: on the one hand, a lack of computer output data, which stresses the physical environment, and on the other, the computer fills in a virtual reality. In this spectrum, AR falls precisely in the middle, taking into account both the physical input of the user and the surroundings, and the computer-generated information. If, therefore, VR entirely removes the user from the real and social world, the AR is based on this relationship.

The development of portable devices is causing a surge in the development of mass-market AR technology; it is used in geolocation applications, and is widely used in sports to measure precise distances. Augmented Reality is also often used in preparing modern museum displays. As an example, Jay David Bolter uses the Gunnar Liestol Museum in Oslo, which uses simulations to depict the lives of the Vikings in Norway, in which the real world mixes with a virtual, created one. As such, AR is an ideal fit for location-oriented projects, and can be used in literature for performance experiments, where often the interaction between the physical and the device is what counts, as is the case in "AR books."

1 Jay David Bolter, "Augmented Reality." In: The John Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, M.-L. Tyan, L. Emerson, B. J. Robertson (eds.), John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore 2014, p. 30.

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

The aim of this paper is to present the storytelling capabilities of AR books, which are equally based on print and digital media, suspended between the physical book and the electronic library, as visual artist, filmmaker, and writer Wojciech Bruszewski conceived and executed in his novel Big Dick [1].

In the field of contemporary literature, AR books have a short tradition, and this approach to modeling books that interact with virtual reality is used only sporadically. Considered among the most important works written in this convention is Between Page and Screen, by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse [10], a collection of poetry that is a conversation between two characters, P and S, which takes place through a traditional book printed with QR codes. When scanned by a computer camera, they call up a text. With Borsuk and Bouse's book we have a kind of interface exchange; the reader reads the text with a computer, and not simply with the traditional book. The project was so conceived that the book does not exist alone, without a computer (as the reader cannot read it); nor does it work with only the computer application, without the physical book. Although the content is a conversation stretched through time and space, and it can be seen as a kind of QRtechnology digital story, the book remains poetry, firmly rooted in the search for linguistic roots to explain the story of printed media, and the new dictionaries used to describe digital media. Between Page and Screen is also a brilliant synopsis of how the publication and preparation of contemporary literary works function from a material angle, and the major role played by both the digital and material aspects of the publishing process. Most of the other AR books on the market are in the vein of illustrated (and digitally remediated) pop-up books, mainly for children. The publishers themselves call them "virtual interactive pop-up books" or "virtual 3D pop-up books."

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

1 Digital pop-up book: Between Page and Screen - http://www.betweenpageandscreen.com/

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

The body of the present article is an analysis of how AR poetics are used to create a story that mixes media and is based on media. Because Bruszewski's work is part and parcel of his previous pieces, it is impossible to have a proper understanding of it and its method of creating a narrative without considering the idea for a work of art, which was also a scientific project, using a machine to establish what exists.

2. Setting Traps for What Exists Wojciech Bruszewski's work is regarded as technologically diverse. It is difficult to pin down his profession and pigeonhole him to a specific field. In various information about him we find such categories as visual art, film, literature, music, radio, performance, and photography. It is sometimes also stressed that the Łódź author demanded the same things from art and science. Art, in his opinion, should use all possible means of exploring reality. This explains his work in sound, words, pictures, and his simultaneous use of computers, ultrasensitive electronic devices, acoustic generators, and modified cameras. The artist used these devices to obsessively, consistently examine the world. They also allowed him to depict it in a hallucinogenic fashion. These devices make Bruszewski an engineer artist on the one hand, and on the other a research artist. Ryszard Kluszczyński, an expert on his media work, has said: "Bruszewski has insightfully resolved the problem of the relationship between reality and its audio-visual representation, as well as between the viewer and reality and its representation (these analyses were then carried over into video art). He especially stressed the dualism between the concept of reality, distinguishing between its material (what exists beyond us) and psychological

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

(what it is for us) dimensions. He treated the latter as a product of culture, a collection of conventions, which then led him to the thesis that our contact with reality is not direct, but mediated through language. Bruszewski also noted that mechanical and electronic media (photography, film, video etc.) partly function according to rules independent of our minds, that the image of the world they communicate is not identical to the way we see it, which is unambiguously subordinated to the reigning cultural cognitive conventions." [5] Wojciech Bruszewski began as a film and visual artist. He took a route common for filmmakers in Poland, graduating from the cameraman (1970) and director (1975) departments at the Leon Schiller Film School in Łódź. He and his visual arts colleagues brought an interest in form and the avant-garde to the famous film school.

He was one of the pillars of Łódź's Film Form Workshop group in the 1970s, which also included Ryszard Waśko, Józef Robakowski, Paweł Kwiek, and (Oscar-winner) Zbigniew Rybczyński. The Film Form Workshop was perceived as rebelling against educational institutions and academic programs. Its postulates were, to a large extent, revolutionary (the students proclaimed a system of self-education).

Bruszewski noted that his work had always dealt with "man-like" machines. He wrote: "For instance, the camera, which sees and which we see, or equipment that hears and which we hear. In researching these machines I began to wonder about my own self… Everything which I value in some fashion has always been an attempt to understand the consciousness, the hypothetical consciousness of machines..." [3] The Film Form Workshop's interests included analyzing the medium of film itself, joining the conceptual movement and discarding aesthetic and literary perspectives. Working in this avant-garde Łódź group, Bruszewski signed aboard structural cinema, which was sweeping the world at the time, while proposing a

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

variant: the analytical film. Encyclopedia entries mention that Wojciech Bruszewski was a Polish precursor of video art. While he began, like every film student, with etudes on tape, he was the first in Poland to propose a video work (Pictures Languages, 1973), and took part in Poland's first museum presentation of video art, at the Art Museum in Łódź in 1973. When computers appeared in Poland, the artist began using them immediately, not only for his own work, but also to develop educational institutions, as a professor. In an interview for Amiga fans, he said: "I'm a professor, I lecture at an arts academy. I was one of the first in Poland, I believe, in 1983, to found a Computer Graphics Workshop, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań. First we worked on Ataris, then on Amigas. I spent thirteen years there.

Then, for eight years, I worked at the Copernicus University in Toruń, making part of the Intermedia Arts Institute program. There had once been Amigas, but when I got there they already had PCs. At present I lecture at the Art and Design Academy in Łódź. On PCs." [8] Although the word and the text were his media of choice from the very beginning, it was only at the end of his life that the literary world took an interest in Bruszewski,2 when he published The Photographer, published as a traditional book and brilliantly received by the literary critics. The same year he prepared to selfpublish another novel, Big Dick, republished in a large print-run in 2013. Since the 1970s Bruszewski had made text generators, ignored by literary critics, but more acknowledged by curators and visual artists. All of his combined works involved searching for the technical ability to create new words. The most spectacular one was created in several installments in the early 1990s. For Sonnets, he used the principles of Polish speech to create countless numbers of correct sonnets written in a machinegenerated language. Invited to show his works in galleries, Bruszewski wrote back to

2

Wojciech Bruszewski passed away in 2009; his novel The Photographer was released two years earlier.

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

curators: "I'm making a revolution in literature, not in the visual arts" [8].

Attached to the Amiga at a moment when this type of computer was losing the battle for the market with PCs, he quit his job as a computer programmer. In the latter half of the 2000s he wrote novels and dramas. He was introduced to the literary world with the novel The Photographer, portraiting the status of the avant-garde artist in People's-Republic-era Poland. And although the book was published traditionally, the form itself did not recall a classical construction. Bruszewski aimed to create a photographic construction, to create a narrative so that the story corresponded to the photographs. The critics received the novel with disbelief and enthusiasm. Tadeusz Nyczek's comment was symptomatic: "I cannot believe my eyes.

Not only is this an utterly normal book, it is even brilliant! A novel clear as a bell, with protagonists, action, anecdotes, historical facts, a touch of the erotic, splendid observations, and written, moreover, with an immeasurable sense of humor. This filmmaker, photographer, and Actionist has shown himself to be a remarkable literary artist, knocking dozens of our frontrunners on their heads, knitting paragraphs together with a sense of a historical mission" [7].

3. "Half-printed, Half-Internet" In terms of its experimental solutions and use of digital media, Bruszewski's second novel, Big Dick, is far more interesting.3 The novel's main protagonist is Richard von Hakenkreuz, who, in the early 20th century, travels from a small African village to Europe with a swastika talisman. The action plays out through the 20th century and the early 21st century, until the Nazi symbol is removed from the Microsoft Word program.4 The author has defined its genre as "documentary 3 The novel is also part of a collection gathering fictional works by visual artists, problematizing the use of the book medium. http://www.thebooklovers.info 4 In 2004 Microsoft retracted the swastika and Star of David symbols from their Office package.

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

fiction."

A master of camouflage, Richard von Hakenkreuz plays a supporting role in the macropolitics of the 20th century, meeting with the affluent of the world (rulers, businessmen). He is also the uncredited sponsor of many institutions, a kind of ĂŠminence grise, pulling too many strings. He is not a figure of flesh and bone, attributed to a particular country, given skin color or psychological attributes; he is more of a protagonist created by historical facts. This goes hand-in-hand with Bruszewski's idea of writing less a novel about the 20th century than a novel of the 20th century. As such, Bruszewski's protagonist has been compared to the figure of Max Aue in Littel's The Kindly Ones.5 By the same token, the book is a voice on the subject of history, how it is shaped, the perception of the past, and what it constitutes.

During US President George Bush's swearing-in ceremony, described in the book, Bruszewski introduces his character as follows: "Unlike the other guests, Richard placed himself so as not to appear too clearly in the television frame. He himself, on the other hand, took reams of photographs with an old-fashioned camera. This time he replaced his trademark round glasses with more serious ones, with rectangular lines and dark frames." [6] Bruszewski's protagonist was born in 1898 in Africa, though no one knows his origins, his biological parents are never found, and his skin is white. As a small boy he was handed over to German missionaries, where he learned German and gained a respect for Wagner. Here, too, he ceased to long for the jungle and the past. What sets him apart is a mysterious amulet stored in a drawer - "the only sign given from God." 5 Joanna Ostrowska, "Big Dick." In: Obsessive Anticipation: Wojciech Bruszewski, Marecki. P., Pisarski M. (eds.), Korporacja Ha!art, Krakow 2013, p. 49 6 Big Dick, p. 15.

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

"Both the children and the adults called him Bwana, which meant 'someone very important,' 'unconquered,' but also "God'."7 After a brief African episode comes a European episode, and further on, other continents and countries appear.

Just as Bruszewski's character is tied down to no place or state, the same goes for the protagonist's language.

"His mind was shaped through the jungle. He knew dozens of 'languages' of wild animals. He knew hundreds of 'dialects' that the colorful birds used to call each other. He brought his 'learning by ear' and no-notes method to the civilized world. He learned English, French, Italian, Polish, and Russian in casual relationships with a series of women. When he mentioned a new girl, his friends quickly knew what language Dick would next be speaking." [8] As the narrator explains, however, this learning of languages by ear does not translate into reading; the narrator calls him a "charming and intelligent illiterate."

"Richard is a linguistic phenomenon. He is capable of mixing several languages in a single statement. In America English is like the broth, the basis for a multinational soup. Dick tosses in Polish, German, Italian, French, and sometimes Russian spices. In extreme situations he mixes in a few dialects of Kiswahili." [9] Statelessness, the Tower of Babel speaking through Big Dick, and the capacity to be in many places corresponds to the form of the book, the way of storytelling and conducting a narrative, both in terms of the written word and the use of AR. Bruszewski claimed to have reinvented the history and historical figures of the 20th 7 8 9

Cf. Big Dick, p. 28 Big Dick, p. 175.

Big Dick, p. 175.

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

century (Bill Gates, George Bush, Lech Kaczyński), and that these figures had nothing in common with the real, existing people. He cites Wittgenstein as stating that it was a matter of indifference "if what he thought up had been invented by someone else before him."10 To Bruszewski's mind this is a historical novel, performed like a play on the verge of dream and waking reality. In the introduction the author calls his novel a "cut-out," and also evokes unsolved mysteries from art history. This sort of tactic is meant to drive the kaleidoscopic mosaic narrative forward. Bruszewski uses Dadaist cut-out methods to create history and the story.11 "The stream of facts before us is a network of information which the author struggles to assemble into a logical structure; it is a puzzle that is first cut out, then reassembled on the axis of time.

Owing to its linear nature, the text is ill equipped to enter a game with the real protagonist of this book, which is unpredictable, multifaceted turbulence."12 To write this global novel stretched out across a century, the author uses the chaos theory as a narrative method, creating order from apparently unconnected events in various parts of the globe. He alludes to the "butterfly effect," which states that the movement of an insect's wings can cause a subtle shift in air relationships, and thus give rise to a hurricane half a world away.13

10 Big Dick, p. 112.

11 Scott Rettberg has written on the use of Dadaist methods by writers of digital literature http://eleven.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-071-dada-redux-elements-of-dadaist-practice-in-contemporaryelectronic-literature/ (access: 14.06.2014) 12 Big Dick, p. 14.

13 Cf. p. 24.

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

2 Wojciech Bruszewski 'Big Dick' Cover

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

3 Wojciech Bruszewski 'Big Dick' Pages: 250-251

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

4 Wojciech Bruszewski 'Big Dick' Website

This is why he situates his character in a proverbial everywhere. Richard appears at very important, decisive, and compromising moments for the history of the world's humanity in the 20th century. It is characteristic that he plants a swastika-shaped forest alongside young Germans from the Hitlerjugend, who resemble protagonists from the films of Leni Riefenstahl,14 or at the age of 108 he looks as though he were sixty, he never falls ill, nor does he ever use e-mail. As a centigenarian he continues to sleep with the stars of La Scala.

Bruszewski was conscious of that fact that, in order to write a novel of the 20th 14

p. 66

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

century, he could not restrict himself to the print medium. Because the 20th century is sometimes called the audiovisual era, based on the media of film and television, Bruszewski tried to make these media, which he had likewise explored in his previous art, an integral part of the narrative and his method. The extent to which Bruszewski was aware of AR methods is shown in a fragment of his novel where we find ourselves in America's famed MIT; the narrator introduces the character of Ian Q, who has been there on scholarship since 1978. There is a fragment significant for Bruszewski's method where he describes the protagonist's scientific interests as determining how a machine can recognize images: "The rapid development of computer science and the military needs. The Cold War, the conquest of outer space, and so on. The Massachusetts institute cast a favorable eye upon his research. They created a small team of young physicists, mathematicians, cybernetics specialists and other "ists."

The Winter Olympics at Lake Placid were drawing near. The boys had installed a high-resolution camera over the ice rinks. They recorded a series of images during the hockey matches and wrote a computer program that could follow the black puck on the white of the rink. The puck is often obscured by the players, but there was always a camera that could see it. When it vanished from all the cameras' field of vision, its position was calculated on the basis of its direction and the speed of its last three movements. After two years of work, before the ceremonial opening of the Olympics, the equipment was ready. They could now record and capture the movement of the hockey puck throughout the match." [15] Bruszewski's novel is a kind of impossible work. The author problematizes it on several levels, beginning with the title, taken from penis-enlargement advertisements.

Used as a title, it condems the book to non-existence (it will simply not get called up in public places like libraries, where the servers will not search for pornographic-

15

pp. 171-172

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

sounding titles). The cover, designed by the author, has several swastika symbols. In carrying out this multi-dimensional and impossible novel, covering the whole of a century, the form of the work comes to the author's aid. This "documentary fiction" is composed of a traditional book, which contains forty-four codes (a significant number for the Polish reader, a key to understanding Polish messianism), which are links to an "electronic library" designed, encoded, and uploaded to the Internet. This libarary has audiovisual files and photographs. Combined with the text, they create the author's vision of a history that never happened.16 The digital archive prepared and catalogued by the artist becomes an integral part of the novel, his audiovisual commentary to the history of the 20th century. The reader/user also receives operating instructions for using the book and the appended library. As such, Big Dick is a kind of "distracted reading"; in certain parts of the book furnished with codes, the reader pauses in the traditional text, and, following the code, makes his way to the electronic library, which allows him to confront the world depicted in the words with the audiovisual evidence. The visual part causes questions to emerge, and gives rise to a sense of a hallucenogeic order in the world. This effect is the artist's intention from the very beginning. It works following the principle that even if there are parts of the text which strike the reader as inauthentic, when seen in the form of photographs, newspaper articles, and films they create a sense of uncertainty, of an unfamiliarity with history.

16 I use this term in the understanding of A. Demandt, History That Never Happened, trans.

Colin D. Thomson, McFarland & Co., 1993.

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

5 Wojciech Bruszewski 'Big Dick' Code: 12081764906

6 Wojciech Bruszewski 'Big Dick' Code: 10050526711

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

With the genre featured in his subtitle well in mind (falsified documentary), Bruszewski freely manipulates historical figures, visual archives, and facts, in order to further distract the reader and increase the sense of uncertainty. This juggling act means that the action leaps from place to place, state to state, decade to decade, from the office of one leader to places connected to other important figures. In Big Dick, Bruszewski is testing historical truth, the facts, characters, and the tales told about them, the historical narratives. He uses anecdotes, narratives of the everyday, but at the same time this narrative is built by photographs and films stored in the digital library.

It might be said that, in terms of the form of his novel, Bruszewski builds a threelayered narrative: 

the novel - this involves reading only the traditional book, the

intelligent, postmodern narrative, which holds the reader's interest without the codes and the web-pages. 

the novel and the digital library - this is the full manner of reading

proposed by Bruszewski, written in accordance with AR, the textual parts being supplemented by the visual parts. For example, writing the code 00111443870 into the window of the digital library calls up a photograph of a swastika-shaped forest planted by the novel's protagonist. 

the novel, the digital novel, and the World Wide Web - this reading goes

a step further than that suggested by Bruszewski himself, and involves constantly comparing the fiction and audiovisual archives with data published on the Internet. Bruszewski's novel includes such a vast number of names,

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

events, and facts from the 20th century that the World Wide Web is the only place to verify them. By the same token, through the content and form of his work, Bruszewski makes reading and checking audiovisual files on the Internet an integral part of the novel.

A wealth of hints are placed in the novel to indicate that the protagonist has all the attributes of the new medium (language-speaking ability, instant traveling from place to place, omnipresence, and a remarkably chaotic narrative). Wiritng, constructing, and reading the historical novel in the 21st century through existing, readily accessible, and mutually undermining facts and their interpretations published on the Internet all go to create a hallucenogenic reading of the past.

Conclusions It is not by chance that the critics have compared this novel to the great postmodern works of Thomas Pynchon or Kurt Vonnegut. Bruszewski's work uses the same kind of irony, irrationality, and intelligence, but is richer for the capabilities afforded by AR. In his final work, Bruszewski seems to sum up his experience with machines over the space of forty years. Like the masters of postmodern literature, he often used self-reflexive tactics to develop the plot; Bruszewski places himself in his fiction as an agent who takes part in the sittings of the commission in charge of the phenomenon of Richard von Hakenkreuz. The narrator notes that the Polish Office of State Defense and Military Information Services were represented by some gloomy "...ski." He only reluctantly and vaguely mumbled his surname.17 Elsewhere, he further clarifies this as "Bzwgrftb...ski." The commission's work itself less serves to solve the riddles than complicates them further. "The illusion that all those gathered

17

p. 230

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

in the balcony suite of the Hotel Kempinski were chatting freely with no need for translators is a literary convention. It ensures a compact narrative and helps combat tedium. In reality the talks in the police Tower of Babel went on three times longer."

[18] As stated by Bruszewski's biographer, Jerzy Zagrodzki, the artist obsessively anticipated things. During his avant-garde and subversive activities, he used machines to test what existed. In his last work, where the form is the most paradoxically invisible, he turned toward the past, toward describing the century he lived in, to speak of it as none before him, creating a unique form of Augmented Reality storytelling.

References 1.

Bruszewski Wojciech, Fotograf, Korporacja Ha!art, Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow (2007)

2. Bruszewski Wojciech, Big Dick, Korporacja Ha!art, Krakow (2013) 3. Fuchs Elżbieta, Zagrodzki Jerzy eds., Wojciech Bruszewski. Fenomeny percepcji, Miejska Galeria Sztuki, Łódź (2010). [p. 175] 4. Bolter J. D., Augmented Reality. In: The John Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, M.-L. Tyan, L. Emerson, B. J. Robertson (eds.), John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore (2014), p. 30 5. Kluszczyński R. W., (2012), Przestrzenie generatywności. Wprowadzenie do twórczości Wojciecha Bruszewskiego, Dialog No. 7/8., (2012) p. 152.

6. Kluszczyński

R.

W.,

Sztuka

interaktywna.

Od

dzieła-intrumentu

do

interaktywnego spektaklu, Wydawnictwa Akademickie i Profesjonalne, Warsaw

18

Big Dick, p. 265.

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X

(2010).

7.

Nyczek T., Czytanie na trawie... czyli fotograf pisze Fotografa, Przekrój No. 26 (2008). p 71.

8. Benedykt Dziubałtowski, an interview with Wojciech Bruszewski, Polski Portal Amigowy,

http://www.ppa.pl/publicystyka/wojciech-bruszewski-marzec-

2007.html (2007), (access: 14.06.2014) 9. Ostrowska J., Big Dick. In: Obsessive Anticipation. Wojciech Bruszewski, Marecki. P., Pisarski M. (eds.), Korporacja Ha!art, Krakow (2013).

10.

Borsuk A. Bouse B., Between Page and Screen, Siglio, Los Angeles, 2013.

Wojciech Bruszewski's Big Dick and Augmented Reality Storytelling / P. Marecki.

CyberEmpathy: Visual Communication and New Media in Art, Science, Humanities, Design and Technology.

ISSUE 10 / 2015. Hyper Visions.

ISSN 2299-906X. Kokazone.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web: www.cyberempathy.com

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 10 / 2015 Hyper Visions ISSN 2299-906X