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Bartosz Frąckowiak (PL)
Bartosz Frąckowiak (he / his) is a strategic foresight consultant and speculative futures advisor at 4CF The Futures Literacy Company, as well as an art, tech, and society curator at the Biennale Warszawa Foundation. At 4CF, he is responsible for designing and implementing foresight projects for major clients. His research focuses on the design processes of sustainable and ethical technologies, the relationship between technologies and spatial practices, and the potential of ethnographic methods in exploring futures. A co-founder of Biennale Warszawa, a transdisciplinary institution at the crossroads of art, research and social activism, and deputy director of this institution from 2017 to 2022. In this role, he oversaw international cooperation, communication and research, and curated exhibitions that explored planetary challenges at the intersection of art and emerging technologies. He was one of the curators of the 2019 Biennale Warszawa edition, “Let’s Organize Our Future!”, as well as the 2022 edition, “Seeing Stones and Spaces Beyond the Valley”.
Keywords: director, consultant, art, technology, science trajectories, curator
Morning topic: Deep Travellers
The speed of time and the length of the journey are only relative parameters of the expedition. On his journey, the pilgrim discovers other dimensions, experiences encounters with unpredictable phenomena, environments, natural elements that transcend him. The traveler consciously steps out of the comfort of his home ecosystem and sets up a traveler's ecosystem that has different rules. The artist explores the course of the journey, constructs scenarios of personal experiences, establishes imaginative spaces of fantastic dreamscapes, residues of our predecessors, centuries passed and great hopes. Civilizations have been shaped by journeys and social changes are happening continuously, it is not easy to notice because we are part of them. Whether it's a walking pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela or an ambitious flight to Mars, however significant the destination seems, the essentials are likely to happen along the way. That is why we set the journey as the motif of our artistic research and as its main goal.
Morning topic: Machinery Missionaries
The boundary between human and machine activity is increasingly blurred with each technological advancement. What techno-human ecosystems are we creating? Are these ecosystems intentionally designed, or are they merely accidental consequences? What are the opportunities and limitations of collaboration between humans and machines? What are the dynamics of this collaboration in creative and artistic processes? How can interdisciplinary cooperation support innovation in policy?
The parallel world in the form of machine and robot systems generates in society not only ambivalent feelings of oscillation between utility and threat, but also a never-ending series of outstanding works of art in literature, film and visual arts. The tension that arises between the living human and the "animated" machine is one of the most topical lines among the energetic themes in art. At a time when control over many vital resources is being handed over to data centre algorithms, there is an almost parallel increase in the level of anxiety, fear, or feelings of loss of control over the previously valid ecosystem. The works presented in the chapter Machinery Missionaries refer precisely to this ambivalence of autonomous machines and at the same time insistently recall the old Faustian question of the possibilities and limits of human knowledge.
