Since completing her studies in printmaking in Budapest in the late 1950s, Dora Maurer has emerged as one of Eastern Europe’s most rigorously experimental artists of the past fifty years. Her work has alternated fluidly between process-based printmaking experiments and mark-making procedures that favor indeterminable outcomes, on the one hand, and, on the other, formal…
Producing sound effects for radio, film, and television propagated new trends in audio art. Whereas concerts of autonomous music organized by Polish Radio attracted audiences of a few dozen people, popular new movies pulled in far larger crowds.
A galaxy of published materials related to PRES
The word feminism was the subject of a public conversation that took place on November 18, 2014, at MoMA. Under the heading “Translating Feminism,” Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Agata Jakubowska, and Gayatri Sinha discussed the term’s implications for artistic practice in their respective areas of scholarship. In Latin America, Fajardo-Hill argued, feminism has often been regarded as a bourgeois…
Moją specjalnością były filmy o miłości, o macierzyństwie, śmierci, martyrologii czy funeralnym świecie, ilustrowane muzyką konkretną. Ja zilustruję w moim warsztacie dowolny film na dowolny temat. Chciałem wygenerować czy wynaleźć, wymyślić dźwięki, których cechą jest to, że dotąd nigdy nie zaistniały, nie dają żadnych skojarzeń, bo jak ktoś bierze muzykę instrumentalną, to natychmiast słuchacz widzi…
Eugeniusz Rudnik—a lifelong sound engineer of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio—speaks about the early years of Polish electroacoustic music, about his distrust of both musical scores and the deceptive idea of musical and artistic progress, and about the fine line between sound engineer and composer.
This text was originally published under the theme “Polish Radio Experimental Studio: A Close Look”. The theme was developed in partnership with Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (MSŁ). It was edited by Magdalena Moskalewicz, MoMA with Daniel Muzyczuk, MSŁ. The original content items in this theme can be found here. Depending on the type of recording, the whole apparatus changes like a…
Just as alchemists in the Middle Ages were the masters of arcane knowledge, so the core members of the Studio—the sound engineers—were masters of new technology in music.
The Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES), established in Warsaw in 1957 under the auspices of Poland’s official state broadcaster, provides a fascinating insight into the importance of a site as a key catalyst for avant-garde exploration and production.
Inhabiting a space between studios that were dedicated solely to the production of autonomous works, Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES) occupied an interesting position that enabled it to adopt a slightly unusual modus operandi.
How did the infrastructure of the former Soviet Bloc’s socialist states support experiments in the art of sound? What possibilities were created and what were the drawbacks that resulted, for artists and their art, from the desire to create an entirely new, experimental society? This talk was delivered at “About Sound,” a C-MAP seminar on…
Initiated in the late 1950s in Zagreb, in the former Yugoslavia, and dissolved less than a decade later, the Gorgona Group continues to fascinate. Since the group’s first exhibition in 1977, generations of artists and art historians from Eastern Europe have viewed its ephemeral, collective artistic practices as the foundation for the later development of…
