January 2018-January 2020, “The Aesthetics of Postdigital Imagery – Between New Materialism and Object-Oriented Philosophy” (National Science Center Poland).

I served as a principal investigator.

I was interested in how the production of images is getting transformed in the conditions of what Berry calls the postdigital constellation. Since my basic assumption was that coming up with unifying theory of visuality is not possible in the age of proliferating digital images, I focused on a few specific areas where interpreting image production on the ground of representationalism becomes misleading and does not allow for fully grasping the nature of such processes (imagery produced within the sensing technology circuits in art and environmental management as well as the then nascent popular technologies of VR). Therefore, I undertook the theoretical task to re-examine the notion of representation so that it acknowledges the post-digital imagery production, with its shift towards automatic and quasi-automatic data flows, often directly connected to the physical environment.

The outputs of the project were presented at:

2018, SLSAeu Green Conference, European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts – University of Copehagen (a paper “>>Graying<< the green”);

2018, Politics of the Machines – Art and After, Aalborg University Copenhagen (a paper “The politics of ontological coalitions – bonding across realms”);

2018, Transient Topographies – Space and Interface in Digital Literature and Arts, National University of Ireland, Galway (a paper “Post-digital imagery and its hybrid materialities”);

2018, Cultures of Participation – Arts, Digital Media and Politics, Aarhus University (a paper “VR – the culture of (non)participation”);

2017, Re:Trace – 7th International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology, Danube University Krems | Goettweig Abbey | Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna  (a paper “The post-digital imagery as relational object”);

2017, “Virtualities and Realities”, 2nd Open Fields Conference & Festival, RIXC Center for New Media Culture, Arts Academy of Latvia, Riga (a paper ” Between “dance of agency” and distributed agency of techno-ecological artistic practice”).

Publications:

Anna Nacher, VR – the culture of (non)participation? Reframing the participative edge of virtual reality, [in:] Cultures of Participation. Arts, Digital Media and Cultural Institutions, eds. B. Eriksson, C. Stage, B. Valtysson, Routledge, New York and London 2020.

Anna Nacher, “Techno-ecological media installations as the strategy of network”, “Acoustic Space” vol. 17, “Virtualities and Realities. New Experiences, Art, and Ecologies in Immersive Environments”, RIXC Center for New Media Culture, Riga 2019.

Anna Nacher, The Techno-Ecological Practice as the Politics of Ontological Coalitions, Proceedings of EVA Copenhagen 2018 – Politics of the Machine – Art and After (open access), Electronic Workshops in Computing, British Computer Society, dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/EVAC18.17

Anna Nacher, In Praise of the (Post) Digital, Electronic Book Review, 5. Aug. 2018 (open access).