Forgotten Pioneers of Media Art: Laboratory of Presentation Techniques

The year 1989—the year of political transformations in Poland—was not a breakthrough date for Silesian media art. The real breakthrough came more than a decade earlier. In the mid-1970s, students of the Faculty of Graphics of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice—Grzegorz G. Zgraja (born 1952), Jacek Singer (1950–2020), Jadwiga Włodarczyk (later Singer, 1952–2008), and Marek Kołaczkowski (born 1952)—founded a scientific circle that became the leaven of an artistic group: the Laboratory of Presentation Techniques (abbreviated as the LPT) [1]. The laboratory’s video equipment (i.e., the CCTV camera and the MTV-20 video recorder) as well as the Soviet monitor, were borrowed from the Center for Technical Progress [2]. Thanks to this equipment loan, from December 1975 to 1978 the students were able to conduct formal experiments and research in the laboratory, exploring the potential of film, performance, and a new medium: video. The LPT was therefore the first in Silesia, the second in Poland, and one of the first artistic groups in Europe specifically dealing with video art.

As early as 13 March 1976, the members of the group organized the first public presentation of their activities as a multimedia event. Modernist interiors of the Academy of Fine Arts building in Katowice, particularly the impressive foyer and staircase, were transformed into the space of the LPT “action-exhibition”: The First Show [3]. It was a spatial installation, creatively using existing architecture and enriching it with large-format graphics and photographs constituting the background for “tautological film projections, performance, and music-sound collage” [4]. The presentation included enlargements of photographs exposing the raster; the correspondence of pop-art style graphics with a checkerboard floor in the staircase and large-format photographic portraits cut into stripes and presented on two different surfaces of the stairs (one portrait on a vertical surface, the other on a horizontal surface), the perception of which depended on the viewer’s perspective (Fig. 1); mobile elements constituting a series of spatial screen portraits in the form of cubes; as well as an acoustic-visual experiment and projections. According to today’s terminology, it was a multimedia installation, although prepared by analog, predigital means. Young artists opposed the traditionalism and academicism of artistic education of that time, and they did so through openness to interdisciplinarity, multimediality, and experimentation in both media techniques and perceptual-intellectual dimensions.

The public defense of Zgraja’s diploma, Video Transmission and Aesthetic Message on the Basis of My Own Audiovisual Compositions (15 June 1978), supervised by Gerard Labus in the Chair of Spatial Graphic Design at the Academy of Fine Arts, constituted a precedent at the national level [5]. According to witnesses, it was revolutionary, and therefore faced resistance on the part of professors, including the renowned Silesian painter Jerzy Duda-Gracz, who called it a scandal. However, students rewarded it with applause [6]. It was the first diploma thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice (and possibly the first in Poland) that used video—a new medium. The diploma project was conducted within the field of spatial graphic design [7]. Zgraja treated video as a multidimensional experimental space of both visuals and sound. Such a research approach was present not only in Zgrajas student works from this period but also in his subsequent visual, acoustic, performative, and audiovisual activities. They were appreciated by the artistic scholarship of the Ministry of Culture in 1984 [8], but soon the artist began artistic studies in Germany, which initiated his permanent emigration.

It is worth adding that the experience of emigration was shared by many people in the 1980s in Silesia—including nearly the entire LPT collective (except for Jadwiga Włodarczyk-Singer). Only Zgraja managed to continue his artistic and academic career. From the perspective of the artist, the access to equipment necessary for work and a creative environment open to media experiments was at least as important as better economic conditions in Germany [9].

At the turn of the decade (1987–1991), the artist developed his understanding of media and learned new techniques thanks to his studies in Gerd Büttenbender’s Laboratory of Experimental Film and Video at the Brunswick Academy of Fine Arts [10]. Zgraja was admitted immediately to the fourth year of the course without a practical exam, solely on the basis of his portfolio, including boards and video works. After only a year of study in the laboratory, he became permanently associated with it professionally. It was there that Zgraja created most of his mature artistic projects, exploring various connections between sound and technical image.

However, he did not cut ties with Poland, and he would regularly return to his homeland. In 2008, the artist obtained a doctorate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław in the field of art and media theory, and then an honorary professorship. The subject of his doctoral dissertation, State of the Borderland. The Historical Outline of the Borderland between Visual Arts and Music in the Aspect of the Development of Media Art [11], accurately describes Zgrajas creative search beginning during his studies in Katowice and continuing in Brunswick. Today, Zgrajas works can be found in the National Museum in Warsaw, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Silesian Museum in Katowice, and others. They were presented at significant Polish contemporary art festivals (e.g., Warsaw Autumn, WRO Media Art Biennale) and in leading contemporary art galleries, and constituted separate artistic events (exhibitions, video performances, and multimedia concerts) [12]. Zgrajas artistic activity places him among the pioneers of video and multimedia art in Poland and Europe.

The works of Silesian experimenters concentrated in the LPT, although poorly described in the source literature, do not differ in quality from the works of other video artists of that time, headed by Józef Robakowski or Zbigniew Rybczyński. And yet, much attention has been paid to the latter, whereas the beginnings of Silesian media art have not been sufficiently addressed. The Workshop of the Film Form, a student association established in 1970 at the Academy of Fine Arts and Television in Łódź [13], preceded the LPT by a few years. Still, their film works were not known to students from Katowice until Zgrajas trip to Kassel for the Documenta 6 1977 Festival. There he, for the first time, saw the works of Wojciech Bruszewski, Józef Robakowski, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, but also those of the avant-garde world of video art, including Bill Viola and Nam June Paik, and European experimenters such as Gina Pane or Joseph Beuys [14].

On the one hand, the scale of activities of the students from Silesia was considerably smaller; on the other, the lack of an appropriate creative environment interested in the new medium or the theoretical support that would see the potential in these activities turned out to be crucial. Undoubtedly, galleries and academies, including the Film School in Łódź and the film studies department at the University of Łódź, significantly promoted the activities of the Łódź video-art artists. When writing a book on early Polish media art, Ryszard Kluszczyński noticed the existence of the Silesian environment but did not pay much attention to it. Instead, he focused on the Łódź environment, where he had closer contacts [15].

Meanwhile, Silesian film studies began to emerge at the University of Silesia, solidifying in the 1990s when the Institute of Culture Studies was established. Silesian film experts of the first generation, Eugeniusz Wilk, Tadeusz Miczka, Andrzej Gwóźdź, and Agnieszka Nieracka, cooperating with Alicja Helman, did not deal with the phenomenon of video art. They recall extensive contacts with the film community from all over Poland, including the Workshop of the Film Form, but not with the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice [16], which was perceived as a breeding ground for propaganda craftsmen of the state apparatus of that time. Younger Silesian researchers from the field of film studies did not undertake research in this area or documentation of this work either [17], probably due to the ephemerality of Silesian video art.

The poor promotion of the first Silesian multimedia creators perhaps results from the lack of close bonds and even from a certain sense of competitiveness between the circle of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice (struggling to form its own separate identity at that time [18]) and academics associated with the University of Silesia scattered in various institutes, who had ambitions to not only develop media theory (film studies) but also to create a “Silesian film school” or the Faculty of Arts. It seems that there were some unsuccessful attempts at such cooperation or even closer contacts: Alicja Helman reviewed the theoretical work of Grzegorz Zgraja [19]; after graduation Jadwiga Włodarczyk was an assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts in the Studio of Woodcut Techniques, supervised by Wojciech Krzywobłocki [20], for a year (academic year 1980-1981); and Jacek Singer—until the imposition of martial law—was an assistant at the Faculty of Radio and Television (WRiTV) at the University of Silesia, established in 1979. There he taught art classes but did not share his film experiments with his colleagues [21]. It should be added that WRiTV, created for propaganda purposes like the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, naturally gravitated towards documentary film production and the support of local mass media (i.e., radio broadcasting and television stations) and not toward an artistic deconstruction of regime mass media messages characteristic of the LPT collective. Therefore, links existed but they were not permanent or strong. The goals of the LPT members and the institutions in which they worked were not substantially convergent [22]. Perhaps this was the reason why the Singers shifted their attention to developing their own advertising agency.

These were not the only causes for the weak propagation of the LPT artists’ achievements. Upper Silesia was not very friendly to young experimenters, and their group was relatively small and poorly associated with influential centers with a nationwide reach. Yet, the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice was changing as well [23]. Although the defense of Zgraja’s diploma in 1978 was turbulent, a year later the diploma of Jacek Singer (presenting similar experiments) was selected by academy authorities as one of the three best diplomas from Katowice for a prestigious national exhibition, Diploma ’79 in the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw [24]. However, the academy did not foster the development of the young artists’ talents in new media experiments. The emigration of Zgraja and his artistic and academic career to Brunswick, as well as the complicated biography of the Singers, disintegrated the Silesian creative collective. Relationships still existed, but they were relatively loose. Examples include individual exhibitions of works by Zgraja at the Kronika Gallery in Bytom and Galeria 6 in Gliwice, as well as a multimedia performance at the Gliwice Musical Theatre [25].

Meanwhile, the early works of Zgraja and the Singers, carried out as part of the Laboratory of Presentation Techniques, deserve attention. The works include graphics, serigraphs, photographs, video works with documentation, TV broadcast projects, posters, and ephemeral prints [26]. These exemplify the multimedia attitude of young artists who were attentive to graphic and typographic elements in visual messages, and both image and sound in audiovisual messages. The artists themselves expressed their interests in their manifesto:

The works of the LPT members fall within the trend of analytical film, focusing on the internal relationship between elements of an audiovisual message and its external conditions, such as television broadcasting. The artists were interested in the matter of film and video, especially the relationship between image and sound and the juxtaposition of images and sounds coming from various ontological sources, as well as the manipulation of image and sound and the recipient’s impressions (especially the impression of realism).

This approach is perfectly illustrated in the 1976 film 12 Sounds of Coca-Cola, in which sound manipulation subtly manifests itself. For some recipients, it may be surprisingly obvious, for others it remains barely noticeable. It depends on the state of focus and competence of the viewers. In the visual plan, a young man (artist) slowly drinks Coca-Cola from a bottle and after each sip he blows into the bottle and thus makes a sound (Fig. 2). According to the rules of acoustics, after each sip the tone should be lower, while in Zgraja’s film the opposite happens: the sound was manipulated, suggesting the opposite (i.e., the tone rises).

Another interesting work created by Zgraja in this period (1977) is the video diptych Audiovisual Experiment I and Audiovisual Experiment II. In the first video, the image of the metronome was combined with a soundtrack that suggests the existence of two metronomes (two soundtracks were used concurrently: an audiovisual recording of the metronome and a recording of the sound of the metronome previously recorded on a tape recorder and reproduced asynchronously) [28]. At one point, the image shows two metronomes, but one of them is only a reflection in the mirror. Meanwhile, the manipulation of sound—its noticeable multiplication—creates an illusion of the existence of two independent mechanisms operating at a certain time interval. Only one soundtrack was used, mixed to create a sound illusion. This sound illusion supports the optical illusion, and vice versa. Thus, the viewer is condemned to a perceptual error. The second film also uses the image of a metronome, this time zoomed in and out, suggesting the monumentality of space by shortening the perspective, positioning the camera at an extremely low-angle shot, and using a wide-angle lens as well as sound manipulation (multiplication of metronome ticking). The illusion, being the result of artistic interference in the audiovisual message, is created by simple means and the collision of audio with video.

Apart from the multiplication of sound and contrastive juxtaposing with the image, the artist used other means that evoked reflection on the film matter and the nature of the message in his works: silencing the sound (Etude for Gels), multiplication of camera perspectives (Distance), combining images that were ontologically different (Head, Transformation—this work very early thematized the basic elements of the image: raster and bits; see Fig. 3), or combining sounds that were ontologically different (Quartet for Two Performers and Video Equipment, Quartet for One Performer and Video Equipment). He boldly juxtaposed music and video performances and played with the audience’s expectations. This often had an ironic dimension, as in Etude for Gels, when the recipients’ musical expectations were subverted by contrastive sound editing. Instead of the sound of cymbals, which traditionally marks the climax in music, there was silence. Similarly, the multiplication of the image created a humorous effect. In the film Distance, for example, the artist’s brother playing ping-pong was filmed from two perspectives. The image was assembled with a certain time shift, creating an asynchrony typical of the pace of table tennis. The perspectives of filming the player were selected to simulate the gameplay between the artist’s two images. As a result, Distance shows the artist’s play with himself, and can be read philosophically or as a joke, a mockery of our perceptual habits. Some films by video artists from the Łódź circle were similar in this respect [29].

The films of the LPT members explore de facto limits of the medium: possibilities and limitations of film and video messages. Short videos directed by Jacek Singer, made jointly by the Singers and recently found along with the rest of their archive, present experiments in the field of modification of such elements of the film’s language as the rate of image recording (variable number of frames per second), the rate of travel (variable speed of a car and its impact on filming), and the pace of movement of the filmed objects in front of the lens. For her part, Jadwiga Singer was interested in the photorealistic nature of film performances and the viewer’s susceptibility to perceptual errors. Together they conducted creative research on the basics of audiovisual communication, as well as on the problem of the language of propaganda and media manipulation. The authors undoubtedly posed questions about truth in the film’s message and about ways to achieve a persuasive effect on the viewer. They were aware of these issues as graphic designers, photographers, filmmakers, and authors of visual advertising projects. Unlike their slightly older colleagues from the Workshop of the Film Form, they did not reject ex definitione commercial activities, although, of course, they did not assume them in their artistic aspirations. However, Silesian artists stemmed from a school created for the needs of political propaganda of the People’s Republic of Poland, in which graphics were treated not only as a means of artistic expression but also as a type of applied art and a way of communication. Such an approach must have had some impact on the way of thinking of the young artists, although not necessarily the one assumed by the political decision-makers of that time.

Unfortunately, many of the group members’ works have not survived. Some of them, such as Jacek Singer’s works Inward (1978) and Outward (1978), were television broadcasts and, as such, were intrinsically ephemeral. They survived only in the form of documentation. These broadcasts by Singer combined performance with video transmission. In the first, the figure of the artist (standing and revolving around his own axis at the central point of the stage) was simultaneously filmed from six cameras set at different angles around him. The final film record consisted solely of the en face images of the artist, evoking reflection on the manipulative aspect of the mass media [30]. In the second, the setting of the artist and the cameras was the opposite—it was the artist who circled the cameras that filmed him “from the inside.”

Today, these projects, like a significant part of the artists’ works, are available only in the form of documentation presented on boards with photographs accompanied by their descriptions.

The artistic fate of the group turned out to be quite complicated. Only Zgraja remained connected with an art school, which ensured his permanent presence in the European creative environment. Other artists took up various professional tasks, including those related to graphics and film production (e.g., Jacek Singer cooperated with Silesian cultural institutions and produced commercial projects). According to curator Marika Kuźmicz, artists from the LPT, despite the short period of the group’s activity, managed to appear in the art world, where they took part in, among others, the sixth International Biennial of Graphics in Krakow and I Am, International Artists Meeting and Performing Arts Festival in Warsaw (Fig. 4, 1978) [31]. While still studying in May 1977, the group had an individual exhibition in Krakow in the Mały Rynek Gallery [32]. Therefore, it can be concluded that the LPT as an artistic collective achieved some success, and its works were recognized in the creative environment.

Undoubtedly, the audiovisual experiments of Zgraja, the Singers, Kołaczkowski, and their programmatically analytical approach to the medium place them among the pioneers of video art not only in Poland but internationally. Therefore, it is all the more important to fully reconstruct and recall the achievements of the Laboratory of Presentation Techniques.

The innovativeness of the LPT can only be properly assessed, however, when one considers the atmosphere of those years more broadly, and even more so, the next decade—not only in the region but also in the whole country and generally in this part of Europe. This atmosphere was not conducive, to put it mildly, to experimental activity either in the field of art or in new technologies and digital media. Thus, media art faced strong resistance. In Poland there was no such technical potential or humanistic engineering thought that would provoke new questions. The 1980s were rather coarse in terms of aesthetics. Society was tired of the difficult economic situation and political uncertainty, and social communication in many areas was subject to censorship. This affected the cultural sector and art, especially their institutional dimension. Negative phenomena in cultural management increased until the breakthrough of 1989 and did not disappear immediately afterward. The mentality of artists, curators, and recipients of art needed to transform. The process of changing the “Silesian mentality” with its problems and complexes defining Silesia as an industrial space that was degraded on many levels, a so-called cultural desert, took another two decades. Progressive artists who took their first steps in the art world in the 1970s and experimented with new media either emigrated in the 1980s, like Grzegorz G. Zgraja, Zbigniew Rybczyński, and Lech Majewski, or were laboriously building creative niches, like Marian Oslislo and Marek Król, who, thanks to their activities at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, contributed to the revival of media art in Silesia in various dimensions, continuing in a sense (although indirectly) the work and thought of the creators of the LPT.

For their substantial help, I thank one of the leaders of LTP, Grzegorz G. Zgraja, who was available for extensive interviews from February 2021 to October 2023 and patiently answered all my questions. I also thank the professors of the University of Silesia who were willing to recall the early years of Silesian film studies and film school: Krystyna Doktorowicz, Tadeusz Miczka, Andrzej Gwóźdź, and Agnieszka Nieracka. I am also grateful, for help in my archival research, to Joanna Grabowska of the Archives of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and Dorota Spyra of the Archives of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. For the translation I thank Justyna Kucharska.

The research activities were co-financed by funds granted under the Research Excellence Initiative of the University of Silesia in Katowice, 2023.