We got into Wrocław around 4:45am, a bit ahead of schedule. Justyna, our local contact, came by a bit later. We all jumped in cab and headed for our hotel. Most people decided to take advantage of the offer to sleep in and begin our programming at 1pm. I took the opportunity to get my blog worked on and catch up on my tape labeling before it got out of hand and impossible to figure out. I joined Joanna, Laura, Koby and Sheila of breakfast at 8am. We headed off on what was billed as a 10-minute walk, but ended up taking closer to 40. I was happy to have some exercise and to have a sneak peek tour of the city. Joanna and I headed to an Internet café after breakfast while the others headed back to the hotel.
Early morning sights around Wrocław. A dragonfly on the WRO building, a bear whose tongue you are to rub for good luck in the rynek, a strange sock display and some groovy 60's blocki with modern round curves.
We all met up again to head over to WRO, a center for media art. They had a small office on the third floor of a building with a giant dragonfly sculpture stuck to it. The WRO folks had just finished up a new media festival in June. We were shown a number of video pieces. There was a particularly hilarious one from a local group called Arroyo that involved it’s members documenting trips to various art galleries and museums. They showed them arriving at the various facilities and then leaving. Their conversation after each visit involved them each extolling in turn about how much they liked the exhibit. It got funnier and funnier after a couple of visits and then turned to absurd when they were met with a gallery that was closed, but all peeped in the window and continued with their usual prattle about how much they liked it.
WRO Center.
We were also shown a Stellarc piece and a couple of pieces by Piotr, one of the WRO staffers. Piotr is a member of the 8bit Orchestra, which plays compositions on GameBoys. We also saw another piece of his that was a duet with a stand up bass sampled with a MAX patch that send packets of the sound out as Ping messages and then played them back in the order they were returned. This caused the sound to become heavily distorted as the packets came back at wildly varying times, if at all. I asked if any of their materials were for sale there and was handed one of their books with two DVDs. Needless to say, I was thrilled.
By this time I was completely out of tape, so headed over with Asia and Koby to visit MediaMarkt. I was a little worried at what the prices for MiniDV tape would be. Wojciech had bought a tape from a gentleman in Szczecin that cost almost $7. I was happy to find a three pack of Sony tapes for close to what I had paid for Panasonic tapes back home. Again, Koby took off and Asia and I rejoined the group after getting a bite to eat. Our meeting point was the Wega restaurant at the Rynek (main square.) Joanna had extolled it’s virtue as being an exclusively veggie restaurant. It would have to wait until another meal.
Vega, a vegetarian restaurant right in the center of the rynek.
Our next destination was the train station to meet with Ad Spectatores. They are a young theater group that is apparently well connected. They scored some abandoned space at the train station. At first it looked pretty meager, several small rooms with low ceilings, but they showed us a second space with a huge hall and a number of other rooms up above that were being restored. The best was yet to come though. We jumped in their cars and were taken over to an old water tower. We ogled over the massive pumps and were then ushered into their performance space. It was a cavernous space with a horseshoe shaped seating arrangement and a couple of spiral stairs in the corners as well as a door onto a smaller room. The real highlight was the huge metal plate covering a subterranean level. The group had staged a piece about a dead pope and the disposition of his remains in the space. The piece included a highly transgressive section where several volunteers were called for from the audience. After they had volunteered, the plate was pulled back and they were instructed to descend into the pit. Awaiting them were a number of cast members who were barely visible behind bright lights. The cast members began to interrogate the volunteers in a number of different languages, stepping up the speed of their inquiries until the volunteer broke. Maciej, the artistic director, said he was taken aback by how easy it was to break someone. After one of the performances, one of the volunteers produced a gun and started waving it around, pointing variously at cast and audience members and threatening that the cast had screwed him up and what did they expect to happen. It turned out to be a prop gun and the situation diffused itself.
Ad Spectatores, Maciej and Bartek
Details of the abandoned Water Tower that Ad Spectatores uses as a theater space.
We rode back to the Rynek with them, with lots of jokes made about being nervous to be going anywhere with them. We settled in a restaurant that they suggested. I enjoyed a beer with ginger with my stir-fry vegetables and rice. The others left after dinner and Asia, Alicia, Laura and I hung out and eventually ended up at an arty bar with the two Ad Spectatores gentlemen, having given a pass to another bar that was presenting video of runway models on monitors throughout their space. We had a couple of rounds of Apple Pie, while Maciej and Bartek began with coke and had beers later. Asia started in with the personal questions and found out that the two gentlemen were in their early twenties and that the group employed both of Maciej’s parents. His father was an architect and his mother was in the theater. Maciej eventually offered to drive us back to the hotel. We had an exhilarating ride, listening to a rendition of O Furtuna from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana done by the Swedish Death Metal band, Therion. With true dramatic flare, the track ended just as we pulled up outside the hotel.
Early morning sights around Wrocław. A dragonfly on the WRO building, a bear whose tongue you are to rub for good luck in the rynek, a strange sock display and some groovy 60's blocki with modern round curves.
We all met up again to head over to WRO, a center for media art. They had a small office on the third floor of a building with a giant dragonfly sculpture stuck to it. The WRO folks had just finished up a new media festival in June. We were shown a number of video pieces. There was a particularly hilarious one from a local group called Arroyo that involved it’s members documenting trips to various art galleries and museums. They showed them arriving at the various facilities and then leaving. Their conversation after each visit involved them each extolling in turn about how much they liked the exhibit. It got funnier and funnier after a couple of visits and then turned to absurd when they were met with a gallery that was closed, but all peeped in the window and continued with their usual prattle about how much they liked it.
WRO Center.
We were also shown a Stellarc piece and a couple of pieces by Piotr, one of the WRO staffers. Piotr is a member of the 8bit Orchestra, which plays compositions on GameBoys. We also saw another piece of his that was a duet with a stand up bass sampled with a MAX patch that send packets of the sound out as Ping messages and then played them back in the order they were returned. This caused the sound to become heavily distorted as the packets came back at wildly varying times, if at all. I asked if any of their materials were for sale there and was handed one of their books with two DVDs. Needless to say, I was thrilled.
By this time I was completely out of tape, so headed over with Asia and Koby to visit MediaMarkt. I was a little worried at what the prices for MiniDV tape would be. Wojciech had bought a tape from a gentleman in Szczecin that cost almost $7. I was happy to find a three pack of Sony tapes for close to what I had paid for Panasonic tapes back home. Again, Koby took off and Asia and I rejoined the group after getting a bite to eat. Our meeting point was the Wega restaurant at the Rynek (main square.) Joanna had extolled it’s virtue as being an exclusively veggie restaurant. It would have to wait until another meal.
Vega, a vegetarian restaurant right in the center of the rynek.
Our next destination was the train station to meet with Ad Spectatores. They are a young theater group that is apparently well connected. They scored some abandoned space at the train station. At first it looked pretty meager, several small rooms with low ceilings, but they showed us a second space with a huge hall and a number of other rooms up above that were being restored. The best was yet to come though. We jumped in their cars and were taken over to an old water tower. We ogled over the massive pumps and were then ushered into their performance space. It was a cavernous space with a horseshoe shaped seating arrangement and a couple of spiral stairs in the corners as well as a door onto a smaller room. The real highlight was the huge metal plate covering a subterranean level. The group had staged a piece about a dead pope and the disposition of his remains in the space. The piece included a highly transgressive section where several volunteers were called for from the audience. After they had volunteered, the plate was pulled back and they were instructed to descend into the pit. Awaiting them were a number of cast members who were barely visible behind bright lights. The cast members began to interrogate the volunteers in a number of different languages, stepping up the speed of their inquiries until the volunteer broke. Maciej, the artistic director, said he was taken aback by how easy it was to break someone. After one of the performances, one of the volunteers produced a gun and started waving it around, pointing variously at cast and audience members and threatening that the cast had screwed him up and what did they expect to happen. It turned out to be a prop gun and the situation diffused itself.
Ad Spectatores, Maciej and Bartek
Details of the abandoned Water Tower that Ad Spectatores uses as a theater space.
We rode back to the Rynek with them, with lots of jokes made about being nervous to be going anywhere with them. We settled in a restaurant that they suggested. I enjoyed a beer with ginger with my stir-fry vegetables and rice. The others left after dinner and Asia, Alicia, Laura and I hung out and eventually ended up at an arty bar with the two Ad Spectatores gentlemen, having given a pass to another bar that was presenting video of runway models on monitors throughout their space. We had a couple of rounds of Apple Pie, while Maciej and Bartek began with coke and had beers later. Asia started in with the personal questions and found out that the two gentlemen were in their early twenties and that the group employed both of Maciej’s parents. His father was an architect and his mother was in the theater. Maciej eventually offered to drive us back to the hotel. We had an exhilarating ride, listening to a rendition of O Furtuna from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana done by the Swedish Death Metal band, Therion. With true dramatic flare, the track ended just as we pulled up outside the hotel.
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