(im)perfection subverted, reloaded and networked: utopian ...€¦ · the architectural mode gives...

Utopian Reconfigurations in the Culture of Convergence BARBARA KLONOWSKA ZOFIA KOLBUSZEWSKA GRZEGORZ MAZIARCZYK

The desire for a better existence – being and living – has been an inherent feature of human culture. As an expression of this desire, utopia “is analogous to a quest for grace which is both existential and relational” (Levitas xii-xiii). Ruth Levitas argues in Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society that an analytic definition of utopia in terms of desire generates a method of inquiry where existential and aesthetic concerns are not an end in itself, but rather point to the social and structural domain (xiii). Thinking about utopia means attempting both to imagine and make a different world. Utopian studies are mainly concerned with intentional communities that inhabit enclaves or create heterotopias even if some of those are clearly intended as “prefiguration[s] or instantiation[s] of a transformed world” (Levitas xiii).

Prefigurative practices are often embedded in social practices which, it is hoped, will transform social relations. Mundane or everyday utopianism – considered a way of fostering alternative or oppositional social practices in order to create “new, or at least slightly different” (xiii) social institutions – has recently become a focus of political attention and an object of study. Levitas emphasizes that while socialist and environmentalist politics easily lend themselves to being designated as utopian, it is important to discern the utopian character, often shot through with nostalgia, of right-wing politics, in particular at the level of the state and the global market. It thus comes as no surprise that a concept of what a good society would be and propositions how to bring

8 (Im)perfection Subverted, Reloaded and Networked

such a society about underpin numerous social practices and most political programs (xiii).

A more holistic approach entails outlining an alternative society where abstract principles such as equality and justice are instantiated in specific social institutions, which are described as an integrated whole. A restrictive version of the holistic approach confines the term utopia to “accounts of alternative social arrangements and the lives lived within them” (xiv). Nevertheless, proponents of this narrower definition, such as Lyman Tower Sargent, also recognize a broader category of utopianism, understood as a vehicle for the longing and for anticipated redemption diffused throughout culture (Levitas xiv).

The approach which Levitas identifies as the more holistic is the cornerstone of the method of utopia that may be referred to as the “Imaginary Reconstitution of Society.” Thus understood, utopia “intrinsically necessitates thinking about the connections between economic, social and political processes, our ways of life, and what is necessary to human flourishing” (xv). The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society has three analytically separable but intertwined aspects: the archeological mode, the ontological mode and the architectural mode. The architectural mode gives utopia a literary form and lends it its sociological character. It describes institutional design, delineates a good society, and provides (partial) concrete instantiations in the case of intentional communities or prefigurative practices (xvii). The archeological mode, in turn, excavates forgotten fragments and rejected shards of political, literary and artistic accounts in order to identify absent or implicit elements of the model society underlying them and thus make this model “open to scrutiny and to public critique” (xvii). The ontological mode pertains to the subjects and agents of utopia, “the selves interpellated within it, that utopia encourages or allows” (xvii).

Levitas points out that utopian thinking as a method is less constrained by what appears to be possible at present. Because it is explicitly hypothetical, utopia is marked by provisionality, reflexivity and the dialogic mode. These features help reveal the models of society implied in existing political programs, construct alternatives, and explore what kinds of people we want to become and what forms of society will promote or inhibit the desired subjects (xviii).

Utopian Reconfigurations 9

The history of utopia as a literary genre, philosophical concept and social practice is inextricably connected with the history of media, where media are understood as technologies, devices and practices of communication as well as recording, storing and retrieving information and memory. In The Art of Memory Frances A. Yates makes a connection between utopia, the art of memory and cabinet of curiosities when discussing Thomas Campanella’s City of the Sun. A kind of encyclopaedic lay-out of a universal memory system was depicted on the walls of the ideal, utopian city in Campanella’s novel (Yates 377). The rise of the modern literary utopia is inseparably linked with the technology of print, while the invention of radio and television contributed to the bleak dystopian visions of omnipresent surveillance and total control, where the connection between utopia and retrieval of memory gives way to the dystopian practice of erasing memory and to the perverse mutability of ever re-written archives, famously exemplified in Orwell’s 1984.

Digital media increased the complexity of the relation between utopia and technology. Utopian hopes raised by the birth of the internet were soon transformed into dystopian fears of Orwellian total surveillance coupled with an explosion in the popularity of the clearly nefarious Deep Web. On the other hand, the social connectivity offered by the net makes it a potential site of ideal social relations and fosters utopian possibilities dormant in forming intentional communities as desired good societies. The construction of such communities involves both prefigurative and transformative utopian practices. Often, dystopian social relations inherent in the reality represented in films or computer games provide an occasion for the rise of an actual utopian community of fans, viewers, players and supporters.

As the editors of Mediated Utopias note, artistic utopias tend to portray either perfect, or initially only better spaces and communities, using formulaic topoi of a journey to and a visiting of a remote ideal place, a subsequent guided tour of which allows the reader to be exposed to and accept the principles of its organisation as the embodiment of perfection (Blaim and Gruszewska-Blaim 8-9). In contrast, literary dystopias, i.e. artistic portrayals of a world which the reader perceives as considerably worse than his/her one (Sargent 9) tend to avoid elaborate framing, eliminate the motif of a guided journey and start in medias res,


privileging narrativity and action over description and explanation (Blaim and Gruszewska-Blaim 10). Thus, the differences in persuasive aims – promotion vs. warning – are reflected in the poetics of works which artistically render political ideas.

Interestingly, this poetic blueprint of fictional utopias and dystopias has changed relatively little over time. Different incarnations and practical implementations of utopian ideas variously define perfectibility and produce sometimes drastically different visions of perfect and imperfect communities. In contrast, their fictional form has proved relatively stable. The traditional artistic form of utopias and dystopias, until the 20th century, has been literature and in particular, different variants of the novel of ideas. Most classics of dystopian literature belong here (suffice to mention Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-Four), together with many utopian texts (News from Nowhere, Looking Backwards). However, the 20th century brings a radical change to literature’s monopoly on the artistic representations of utopia and a gradual move towards other media: primarily to film and, towards the end of the century, to other audio-visual forms: comic books, TV series, computer games and web projects. This gradual extension of the repertoire of available artistic forms of utopia and dystopia may be variously explained. Firstly, it reflects a more general broadening and diversification of forms of cultural production, in which literature becomes merely one form of artistic communication – and not even the main one at that. Artistic plurality, then, necessarily affects utopian and dystopian narratives, too. Secondly, with the popular appeal of audio-visual culture and the simultaneous growing elitism of literature, this broadening of artistic scope reflects the gradual move of utopian and dystopian fictions towards more accessible and thus more persuasively effective forms of communication. The growing democratisation of forms of cultural production makes new artistic forms an attractive and promising vehicle to reach wider audiences and promote utopian/dystopian ideas on a wider scale. Thirdly and lastly, the shift from literature to audio-visual forms can be interpreted as an exploration of new possibilities in the artistic rendering of utopian and dystopian projects, and thus not merely a challenge but also a potential opening up of new artistic horizons. The growing plurality, democratisation and inclusiveness of media, then, seems a particularly favourable and


tempting situation for the narratives of (im)perfection whose main raison d’être, apart from their aesthetic function, is persuasion.

The medium has been a notoriously slippery category ever since Marshall McLuhan defined media as “extensions of man” (3) and included in his analyses money, clocks and bicycles, among other things. The current use of the notion is perhaps not as extensive as that suggested by McLuhan, but it is far from uniform, as it is applied to TV and the press, words and images, clay and watercolour. The medium can be construed either narrowly as “the physical means by which some system of ‘signs’ (pictographs, alphabet characters, etc.) for recording ideas can be actualized” (Danesi 2) or broadly as

a conventionally and culturally distinct means of communication, specified not only by particular technical or institutional channels but primarily by the use of one or more semiotic systems in the public transmission of content that includes, but is not restricted to, referential “messages.” (Wolf, “Metareference across Media” 14)

The word media, broadly understood, functions as an umbrella term not only for the technological means of transmission such as TV and radio that are usually associated with the term, but also for traditional arts, including literature, music and painting, as well as recently invented digital forms of expression and communication.

The medium is thus an inherently polyvalent term which can be approached – as noted by Marie-Laure Ryan – from three major perspectives: semiotic, technological and cultural. The semiotic approach tends to divide media on the basis of the codes and sensory channels they rely on into three broad families – verbal, visual and aural – corresponding roughly to basic art types – literature, painting and music. While the semiotic approach to media construes them as abstract semiotic systems, the technological/material approach focuses on the material support of a given semiotic system. This support can take the form of either a raw substance, such as clay or the human vocal apparatus, or a technological invention like print or film. Finally, Ryan distinguishes media as cultural practices to account for the fact that “some ways of disseminating information are regarded as distinct media from a cultural point of view, despite their lack of a distinct semiotic or technological identity” (Ryan 23). The press, which shares with literature the same verbal semiotic channel and the technological support


of print, is commonly regarded as a medium in its own right and juxtaposed with other mass media, such as TV and radio.

Irrespective of the perspective from which it is construed, each medium presents its own affordances and limitations as regards the encoding of meaning. Ryan argues, for instance, that language can easily “represent temporality, change, causality, thought and dialogue,” while images can easily “immerse [the] spectator in space, map [a] storyworld or represent [the] visual appearance of characters and setting” (Ryan 19). Still, these distinctions are primarily heuristic tools because a particular medium construed in technological and/or cultural terms can allow simultaneous use of various semiotic channels, as happens, for instance, in print or film. This is also often the case with the broad family of digital means of expression and communication that goes under the admittedly contingent but widely recognised label new media. One icon of digitality, the computer, has been described as a metamedium, which “is simultaneously a set of different media and a system for generating new media tools and new types of media” (Manovich, Software Takes Command 102). On the one hand, the basic operational mode of digital media is thus remediation, “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” (Bolter and Grusin 273). On the other, they exploit the expressive affordances which are peculiar to digital technologies. These distinguishing qualities of new media – their being “digital, interactive, hypertexual, virtual, networked, and simulated” (Lister et al 13) and their reliance on numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding (Manovich, The Language of New Media 43–66) – have allowed them to refashion older, analogue forms of communication and develop new cultural forms (from computer games through machinima to fan fiction), new ways of representing the world (immersive virtual environments and 3-D reconstructions), new relationships between subjects and media technologies (users as producers), new forms of knowledge assembly and dissemination (Wikipedia) and a new sense of time and space (the Internet as McLuhan’s “global village”), to mention but a few effects of the digital revolution.

As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin assert, remediation is not peculiar to new media but rather the defining feature of all media: in contemporary culture each medium “appropriates the techniques, forms


and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real” (Bolter and Grusin 65). Remediation, they argue, ties in with two complementary strategies whereby all media operate: transparent immediacy and hypermediacy. The goal of the former is to make the viewer forget the presence of the medium; the latter reminds the viewer of the medium. By foregrounding its distinctive features and representational capacities each medium thus asserts its position in contemporary media-saturated culture. This media rivalry is counterbalanced in contemporary culture by a twin process of media convergence, in which “multiple media systems coexist and where media content flows fluidly across them” (Jenkins 282). Diversity thus reigns supreme in the field of contemporary intermedial relations, which range from transmediality – that is, the migration of concepts and formal devices across different media – through intermedial transposition, in which one medium functions as the source of a particular structure or content for another medium, to plurimediality (Wolf, “Intermediality” 253–254). Conventionally, the last category denotes the co-presence of heteromedial signifiers within a single semiotic entity (Wolf, “Intermediality” 255); however, in contemporary media, this multiplication of semiotic channels has recently begun taking a new form, tentatively called polymorphic fictions (Dena 185) or transmedia storytelling:

A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best – so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels and comics; its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction. (Jenkins 96)

Grounded in both media convergence and medium-specificity, transmedia storytelling thus becomes an embodiment of the interplay between various semiotic channels and the multiple ways in which motifs, concepts, and narratives flow across diverse media in contemporary culture.

The change of medium from literary to audio-visual, from high-brow to low-brow, and from erudite to popular, naturally requires a series of adjustments and modifications. It entails, most broadly, a systematic change from one semiotic system to another, a re-coding of ideas which,


traditionally expressed by words, are now transmitted with the help of images, sounds and interaction. This remediation is a complex process with serious ramifications but one of its most immediately apparent consequences is a broadening in the scope of narratives of (im)perfection and growing variety in their artistic expressions. However, other consequences are equally profound. Foremost among them are the relocation of utopian communities from fictional realms to spaces created by the authors and recipients of thus produced narratives, and the change of scale from meta-narratives of whole societies to small micro-communities. These systematic ontological, epistemological and ideological shifts accompany and result from the opening up of new channels of artistic expression available to narratives of (im)perfection at the turning of the century.

Not only do transmediality and remediation, which underpin contemporary culture, broaden the scope of the means of expression but they also metaleptically extend the persuasive effect of transmedia narratives. These narratives incorporate and assimilate actual social and political practices, thus giving rise to an assemblage cutting across different channels, different semiotic systems, and actual and possible worlds. Such a change in the perception of relationships between virtual and actual reality calls for new ways of understanding the genealogy of new media and relationships between interacting entities. The relocation of a utopian impulse from the level of representation to that of the interacting and sharing community of authors and recipients is perhaps most productively explored in the light of the affective turn and an alternative view of the genealogy of the new media.

By employing the concept of the baroque fold Anna Munster offers in Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics an alternative “creative genealogy for the digital that deliberately disturbs the idea that there is one history or one set of values embedded in its technologies, spaces or aesthetic manifestations” (8). She is interested in transcending the differences of Cartesian interpretation of the media and the very duality of the debate on the new media which replicates the dualities of Descartes’ own doctrine where the extension of matter is pitted against spiritual development over time. Munster’s approach goes beyond an unquestionable faith “in the foundational place of classical rationalism and visual perspectivalism as the genesis of digital culture”


(2-3). She believes that the birth of digital culture need not be celebrated or denigrated as “one that has been shaped largely via a binary logic” (3); nor should the disembodied gaze and the transcendence of dematerialized information be regarded as “salient features of digital aesthetics” (3) irrespective of whether they are viewed as such favorably or disparagingly .

Munster proposes a different view of the genealogy of “digital engagement with the machine” (3), one that demonstrates an interplay between body, sensation, movement, time/duration and space/place. Thus contextualized, digital aesthetics are situated on the cusp of a “baroque event” inflected by popular uses of new media technologies and emerging ideas about post-human identity. Baroque event “summons specific aspects of the culture and thought of the European early modern period and allows them to produce flow-on effects in the contemporary moment, expanding our limited preconceptions about the aesthetics of digital culture” (5). The view that differential relations between embodiment and technology shape the digital unfolds from the baroque flow where the binary pairs that have for a long time determined “our understanding of digital culture and new media technologies—physicality and virtuality, analog and discrete states, real and hyperreal—can be seen to impinge upon each other rather than being mutually exclusive” (5).

Not unlike baroque spaces, digital aesthetics seduce the viewer by means of exuberant visuality and floating affect (6). Digital spaces “induce participation” through scenarios of unfolding differential relays such as: simultaneously being aware of and losing one’s “proprioceptive sense” of space; focused and purposeful information search and “the meandering stroll through avenues of meaningless yet intriguing data-based information” (6); the actual here and now of the user’s embodied engagement of interfaces and virtual environment in its all-encompassing timelessness. Munster is fascinated with the fold as an aesthetic and historiographic device because it evokes digital sensory experience with its discontinuities and connections (8). The baroque focus on the continuity and variability between the organic and the artificial and between thought and affect, as well as its focus on art and science provides a perspective for comprehending the ambivalent


distinctions of connectivity and disconnection currently permeating digital aesthetics (185).

New genealogies for the new media are thus sought for because the rise of neoliberal economy paralleled by the development of digital technologies changed the ways in which lived experience is produced and articulated (Shaviro 2). Steven Shaviro investigates cultural expressions and media representations of “free floating sensibility” which permeates contemporary society, but can be associated with no individual subject (2). As “machines for generating affect” (3) new media not only give expression to and rearticulate complex social processes in the form of what Steven Shaviro refers to as “blocks of affects” (2), but they also actively participate in and shape those processes. Instrumental in the production of model subjectivity and playing an essential role in “the valorization of capital” (3), new media are thus situated in the very hub of cultural exchange, economic circulation and distribution of capital. That is why editing methods and formal devices at the disposal of those media match, and are part of, current digital technology infrastructure and modes of production associated with neoliberal economy – circulation of information, generation of affect, production of simulated reality (3).

Contemporary social change is best conceived in terms of Brian Massumi’s distinction between affect and emotion. Massumi proposes that affect precedes subjectivity. It is non-signifying, unqualified and intensive. (Massumi, 23-45 qtd in Shaviro 3). Emotion, on the other hand is derivative; it can be understood as affect captured by an already-constituted subject. Whereas subjects have or possess emotions, they are engulfed by affects. (Shaviro 3). Shaviro considers film, music videos and digital works to be affective maps whose role is not descriptive or representational but rather performative. They actively shape the social interactions and feelings which they seemingly only represent (6).

The thus shaped environment gives rise to a new media ecology where all activities and events take place under visual and aural surveillance due to the omnipresence of cameras, screens, moving images speakers, microphones and synthesized sounds (Shaviro 6-7). The distinction between “reality” and its multiple simulations has been blurred because in digital ecology no phenomenon can omit the stage of


being digitally encoded (7). They are all part of one tapestry. In this environment computer gaming has become nearly ubiquitous and, according to McKenzie Wark, has overshadowed cinema and television (7). In an environment where digital transcoding constitutes the common base for multiple articulations of sound and image the utopian desire finds expression in works which “explore the possibility space of globalized capitalism” (135) by engaging new technologies and media forms no less than in their explicitly prefigurative or transformative content. Both the affective paradigm and the perspective of the baroque fold make it possible to capture the transformation of expression of utopian desire in the age of digital culture.

With Mediated Utopias Artur Blaim and Ludmiła Gruszewska-Blaim devoted a volume of essays to the mediation of utopias and dystopias in audio-visual culture, focusing on film adaptations of their literary instances. The present volume is a continuation and extension of their research. Apart from film, it analyses other artistic shapes of u/dystopian narratives connected with the 21st-century explosion of media and their increasingly participatory and convergent character. Based on the research of the Lublin Utopian Research Group, the study aims to look closely at instances of utopian and dystopian ideas filtered through various media, starting with relatively traditional ones (song lyrics, comic books, films, documentaries and television series), and moving on to increasingly virtual and participatory media, such as Internet fan fiction, web comics and fan-interactive community projects, to end with trans-media hybrid art and computer games. Accordingly, the study is divided into three parts, Tradition, Transition and Transposition, while the arrangement of chapters reflects the chronological development of media and their growing democratisation and inclusiveness. Like any division, this one, too, is to some extent arbitrary, since many of the works analysed in the study traverse the borders of genre and medium, combining various aspects rather than dividing them neatly, and splicing media instead of representing only one of them. We contend, however, that precisely these features are emblematic of the contemporary culture of convergence, and the division introduced is intended to delineate the directions rather than strictly categorise its instances.


The study opens with “Tradition,” focused on non-literary but already well-established and familiar media used as vehicles for representing u/dystopian discourse: lyrics, comic books, television series, feature films and documentaries. This section shows how, filtered and transformed by audio-visual media, utopias and dystopias try to address contemporary problems and target contemporary audiences using language closer to their sensibilities than the by now quite elitist literary idiom. The study opens with a chapter by Artur Blaim exploring the diverse uses made of both the name and the idea of utopia in popular music, and focusing on the ways in which the new medium determines the character of the utopian construction. According to preliminary estimates the word utopia appears nearly 5,000 times in the names of groups, or as album and song titles. It is often used in accordance with More’s formula of “strange barbaric names,” or simply as a synonym of nowhere, rather than bearing any significant relation to the actual content, e.g. Frank Zappa’s The Man from Utopia, or various albums of instrumental jazz such as Stan Getz’s Utopia. Less frequent, though not uncommon, is the use of utopia as a motif organising particular songs, or entire albums (Bernd Kistenmacher’s Utopia), in which they rely on the traditional modes and conventions of utopian fiction-making.

Barbara Klonowska’s chapter reads the Persepolis comic series by Marjane Satrapi as a filtering of the dystopian story through the medium of the comic. The very form, the artistic style, the rhetorical devices and the pervading sense of irony and humour contribute to the therapeutic function of the series which, despite its grim portrayal of Iran under the rule of Muslim fundamentalists, records the overcoming of dystopia. In the third chapter, Andrzej Sławomir Kowalczyk explores a television (stop-motion) animation for pre-school children, Bob the Builder. Project: Build It! (2004-2009), in the contexts of ecotopia and intentional communities – two vital aspects of twentieth-century utopianism. Kowalczyk’s detailed analysis of the utopian and environmentally-friendly foundations of the Sunflower Valley community, on which the Project: Build It! episodes are focused, shows this colourful, socially-diversified organism in terms of the ideal(ised), harmonious co-existence of human, machine, and nature. Apart from entertaining the young viewer, the animation intends to serve as a model for cooperating, creative problem-solving and helping others, as well as


promoting a broadly-understood ecological attitude towards one’s surroundings. The latter feature, Kowalczyk argues, pertains to both the fictional and empirical worlds, since, as proved by psychological research, they frequently tend to blend in young viewers’ minds.

Katarzyna Pisarska’s chapter investigates the interrelationship of science and power in the context of the utopian society presented in the Appleseed franchise from Japan. According to Pisarska, the Appleseed comics and animations show science as a utopian force which liberates humans from their biological restrictions and underlies the social welfare and advancement of the city of Olympus. Science also functions as a tool for maintaining peace and social harmony, as it provides the means for monitoring and controlling the population’s psychological condition. On the other hand, Pisarska observes, the utopian quality of science proves ambiguous, as it also underlies the paternalistic nature of Olympus, where humans are disempowered, relinquishing their freedom and forsaking action in their growing dependence on the state and its “benevolent” policy. Drawing on the ideas of Karl Popper, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Pisarska argues that science becomes a medium of large-scale social manipulation and control, foregrounding the distribution of power in Olympian society. As a result, humans, cyborgs and “bioroids” are caught in the dynamics of domination and submission, which breeds internal conflicts within the posthuman utopia, intended, after all, as a peaceful refuge for the survivors of the Third World War. Pisarska concludes that the continual undermining and re-negotiation of the utopia of Olympus in the Appleseed texts gives the city the characteristics of a critical utopia; even though Olympus is repeatedly compromised as a social model, it retains its utopian quality as an embodiment and generator of humanity’s dreams of a better world.

In the fifth chapter, Marta Komsta examines three documentary films about Nowa Huta, Poland’s “first socialist city,” as an urban eutopia/utopia embedded within the ideological framework of Polish socialism after the Second World War. The two earlier films, Destination – Nowa Huta! (Kierunek – Nowa Huta! 1951) and A Day in Nowa Huta (Jeden dzień w Nowej Hucie, 1974) expound the political and cultural premises of post-war Poland where the city became the embodiment of a specific utopian paradigm developed in the context of socialist realism. The chronotopic and semiotic dimensions of the works


in question foreground the evolution of the ideological agenda based on intense spatialisation; the change from the dominant/dominated space in Destination to appropriated space in Lefebvre’s understanding in A Day reflects the shift in dominants effected by economic and political transformations during the first half of the 1970s in Poland. In the third item, Nowa Huta – The Labyrinth of Memory (Nowa Huta – Labirynt pamięci, 2009), the overarching utopian project is subverted by individual stories that had previously been subjugated to the ideological master narrative; Nowa Huta appears here as a place of cultural and political dissent against the authoritarian discourse. The purposeful contrast between the expository mode (as defined by Nichols) used in the first two films and the participatory mode used in the last work accounts thus for the multilayered perspective associated with Nowa Huta, both a socialist urban eutopia and counter-city structured on resistance to a quasi-utopian regime.

The first part of the study closes with a chapter by Patrycja Podgajna examining ways to project utopia by neutralising the violence in the Nazi totalitarian system. This projection is achieved by means of humour and slapstick comedy in Juliusz Machulski’s recent film Embassy (2013). Set alternately in contemporary and wartime Warsaw, the film exemplifies a historical counterfactual: the alteration of real-world history and the projection of radically alternative events. In Juliusz Machulski’s film, the subversive substitution of the factual involves creating a counterfactual Adolf Hitler and a different course of history, in which the atrocities and mass violence of World War II never occurred. A central part of the argument is that the projection of this utopian vision is realised by the use of slapstick comedy and humour, which serve a two-fold function. Intratextually they facilitate the projection of a better but counterfactual future world and extratextually the neutralisation of violent actions and symbols through slapstick and ridicule serves an educational purpose: it counteracts diffusion of fascination with pro-Nazi ideology and organisations.

The next part of the study, “Transition,” presents utopian and dystopian themes filtered through and modified by newer media and forms of expression: 3-D technology, fan fiction, multimedia series and web interaction. These relatively recent forms of artistic expression and interpersonal communication modify traditional utopian and dystopian


paradigms, extending their potential audience and democratising them by opening the channels for more active audience participation. They still refer to traditional forms and themes – comic series, documentaries or writing – but they modify them with recent technologies and the possibilities offered by web communities. This part opens with a chapter by Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga, who analyses two contemporary digital 3-D films about the Warsaw of the past: The City of Ruins (2010), a five-minute recreation of a plane flight over the city destroyed during the Second World War, and Warsaw 1935 (2013), a digital reconstruction of pre-war Warsaw. The former is shown as part of the exhibition of the Museum of the Warsaw Rising; the latter, produced by a group of enthusiasts, is shown in selected cinemas. Both films are computer-generated, three-dimensional images of a city that no longer exists; they reconstruct a past that can no longer be found. They return to different moments in time, addressing urban memory in different ways. The City of Ruins reconstructs the apocalyptic landscape left after the near-complete destruction of the city in 1944. Warsaw 1935 counteracts these memories with hopeful visions of a utopian moment of urban glory and narratives of alternative history. When considered together, the two films illustrate an interesting interweaving of utopian and dystopian visual and discursive codes that recreate the structure of classical utopia.

In the second chapter of this part, Justyna Galant interprets Richard Kelly’s graphic novel and film Southland Tales as Menippean satire. An amalgamation of the satirical genre and an end-of-the-world ambience results in an original transmedial work with distinctive dystopian overtones. As a metatextual work and a transmogrification of the Bible, the project comes across as a hybrid utterance, explainable in view of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, which foregrounds the nature of Menippean satire – its provocation of interest through the use of the changeable, grotesque, hyperbolised – and its engagement with the immediate reality.

Defining fan fiction as a form of adaptive practice, in the third chapter Ludmiła Gruszewska-Blaim acknowledges, after Henry Jenkins and others, a utopian dimension in fandom and fan activity – two phenomena typical of participatory culture as opposed to the traditional literary system. In her preliminary study of fan fiction based on canonical dystopian novels, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George


Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Gruszewska-Blaim focuses on those tendencies and techniques observed in representative fanfics which disrupt the classic dystopian paradigm by “pacifying aggressive turns in dystopian narrative.” Exemplifying the argument with selected fanfics, the chapter reveals the creative and, by the same token, redemptive potential of “wreaders” who reduce white male violence by introducing conventions of popular romance, elements of psychoanalysis, womanising, transworld identities, wider multicultural nets, parody, pastiche, and metafiction.

This part closes with a chapter by Elżbieta Perkowska-Gawlik which examines Barry J. Gardner’s website, focusing on its most prominent part: a webcomic entitled Hyperbolic Dystopia. Her analysis of the reader’s cognitive process of domesticating dystopian issues while surfing Gardner’s website scrutinises two kinds of interrelated frames – graphic frames, which not only entice the reader to immerse themselves in Gardner’s dystopian world, but also provoke him or her to (re)tell and visualise the narrative progression of the story presented; and the invisible frames provided by common knowledge, the reader’s experience of totalitarian systems, and finally the reader’s ability to trace intertextual echoes of classic dystopian novels, such as Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Taken together, the studies in this part point to the growing participatory aspect of contemporary utopias/dystopias, their increasing saturation with new media (often several at once), and the creation of transmedia works. In the complicated structure of the latter, web communities and computer-generated forms and genres tend to play an increasingly important role.

Thus, the final part of the study, “Transposition,” focuses on utopias and dystopias as filtered through and presented in artistic forms inseparably connected with web culture and computer technology, namely social media projects and computer games. This part opens with a chapter by Zofia Kolbuszewska exploring the emergence of global internet community support for the alternative animation filmmaker M dot Strange, seeing it as a utopian transmedial extension of his exploration of the dystopian electronic world of an apocalyptic computer game featuring the perennial struggle between good and evil, remediated in the film We Are The Strange. M dot Strange wrote, directed and


produced the film himself, but the completion of the film and release of a DVD version by an independent label were possible only due to the emotional and financial support offered him by the internet community. Friends, fans and adherents of the view that alternative aesthetics are an important vehicle of the utopian impulse in a world of global capitalism encouraged M dot Strange and donated money to help finance the production of We Are The Strange after he presented excerpts of the film on the YouTube service. M dot Strange’s personal history of emotional recovery from childhood abuse and his support program for those who want to make their lives more meaningful through art, as well as the fact that he tried out various identities before directing the film (reminiscent of a game player’s choice of roles) make him part of a continuum including characters and players in the film, viewers and the network of supporters. Dystopian worlds represented in aesthetic objects are thus instrument in the rise of a utopian desire in the real world.

In the next chapter, Mateusz Liwiński traces the ambiguous character and critical potential of nostalgia in the computer game Papers, Please. Stemming from the choice of vintage graphic design reminiscent of the 8-bit era of video games, Lucas Pope’s game plays with the notion of nostalgia as a return to an idyllic past. Despite the game’s promise of a nostalgic return to a utopian place and a time of innocent play, the player enters a virtual world where the choice of action becomes ethically fraught. The dystopia of the game unfolds on a twin track: on the level of the represented world and externally in the ethical dilemmas the player has to face. In the first part of the article, the analysis focuses on the notion that expressive processing is an internal operation of the computer program and on the dystopian implications of this. The second part analyses the problem of the player’s immersion in the virtual world framed by Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil.”

Finally, this part and the whole study closes with a chapter by Grzegorz Maziarczyk examining the interplay between interactivity and narrativity in the video games BioShock and BioShock Infinite. They are construed as playable dystopias; that is, dystopias that can be interacted with. On the one hand, the range of actions available to the player in the games is to a large extent determined by the generic conventions of the first-person shooter. On the other, by constructing the highly immersive environment of the underwater city of Rapture in BioShock and the


floating air city of Columbia in BioShock Infinite respectively, both games invite the player to explore the fictional universe and thus recognise its dystopian nature, signalled via a number of visual cues. Concurrently, they exploit his/her narrative desire for a story, which he/she simultaneously participates in and gradually reconstructs as he/she progresses through the gameworld. Central to this process are micro-narratives embedded in the primary fictional universe in the form of multiple media objects – audio recordings and propaganda films – that the player is supposed to collect and consume. Using multiple semiotic channels, BioShock tells the story of the degeneration of an Objectivist utopia into a post-apocalyptic dystopia, while BioShock Infinite depicts a theocracy based on the peculiar combination of religion and American exceptionalism. What makes these games playable dystopias is ultimately the manner in which the player’s reconstruction of a dystopian narrative ties in with his/her exploratory interaction with and immersion in the gameworld.

Utopian and dystopian discourse filtered through a wide spectrum of both older and recent media emerges as an increasingly plural and multifaceted phenomenon. And while the utopian/dystopian paradigm seems relatively stable, often even reminiscent of classical utopias and dystopias, the new artistic forms of expression considerably extend not merely the potential audience of thus told tales, but above all the possibilities of utopia itself. It is perhaps one of the paradoxes of the contemporary culture of convergence that transmedial artefacts, often telling dystopian stories, have become a site of hope, where trauma can be worked through. They are places of communal support and collaboration, and thus one of the new vehicles of utopia.

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