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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: advisor, consultant, art, technology, science trajectories, curator
Afternoon topic: Constructive utopia (Play)
Playful interactions, storytelling, and game dynamics are among the most powerful influences on the human mind. Let's step into the impressive dimensions of large-scale installations and immerse ourselves in the connection between cognition, control, and technology.
The phenomenon of play is (seemingly) a light-hearted way of fascination with the world, order, chaos and the joy of the sheer play of forms, but also of cognition. The interactivity of computer games or objects, like the fusion of monumental static architectural structures with moving images, are valuable ways to tap into positive energy. Play is not only a way of education, but also of ancient rituals in which the duality of light and darkness has always played a central role. Fairy tales, stories, metaphors, parables, dramatic light séances lead to a balance of the elements.
Afternoon topic: Into the Universe
Technology enables discovery, exploration, and new understanding of the universe we are a part of. How deep can we go? How does the connection between art and science contribute to discovery? Can the Moon become our next home?
We can understand the dimensions that transcend us with the help of mathematics, physics, computing, statistics and other artificial tools. These not only give us the illusion that we understand our universe, but also the illusion of order that reflects the nightmares of perceived chaos. But we refuse to acknowledge that this illusion has gradually become law. The space we call the Universe seems to have multiple possible interpretations, and meanwhile advanced data systems are gradually building a parallel, virtual, imprint of it. Scientific models and explanations of the nature and origin of the Universe, like other theories, have naturally gone through phases of acceptance and transcendence. Do we now find ourselves once again in a similar era that, albeit without corporal punishment, is moving on to another paradigm of interpretation of the physical nature of matter and the universe? How many more interpretations and plausible theories will have to gradually fall before we finally find the answer?
