The text offers an analysis of selected works by Władysław Hasior from an ecocritical perspective. The focus is placed on Hasior’s best-known work, The Organ, as well as on several parts of his Photo Notebook. The analysis seeks to demonstrate that an application of an ecocritical perspective to the reading of Hasior’s work may help fill in the blanks in the environmental history of art in Poland. Several recent publications and exhibitions that concern the relationship between art and nature focus on uncovering the “prehistory” of ecological art in Poland or the local tradition of Land Art. The text is meant as a preliminary study of possible research perspectives that the proposed reading may open up, as well as a consideration of whether ecocriticism could serve as an opportunity to bring the tenets of horizontal art history into the practice of rereading the work of Polish artists and their relationship with the landscape.

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This text explores the uses of water metaphors in the discourse of digital media on the example of Leonardo’s Submarine, a three-channel AI-generated video work by the artist and writer Hito Steyerl, presented at the Venice Biennale in 2019, as well as its subsequent installation in a purposefully built virtual reality underwater gallery in winter 2020/2021. The two venues for staging the work are discussed in the context of Steyerl’s writings on the change of the European geographical imagination from the Renaissance up to the present day and the role played in this change by digital technologies. Steyerl’s ideas about the shift from the horizontal to vertical perspective and the present condition of groundlessness are “submerged” in a watery context of the ocean to test how verticality and groundlessness behave in an underwater environment. Drawing on selected concepts developed in the field of blue humanities, this text seeks to investigate Steyerl’s practice as an artist and new media theorist to show how it employs water metaphors to challenge rather than perpetuate our habitual thinking about the ocean and the media used to represent it.

Abstract. In her Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag suggests that contemporary culture draws on photography to a historically unprecedented degree. This ubiquity of images, she claims, especially images of violence, imposes itself even on those who seek to express the specific post-Holocaust nature of reality through textual medium. Her major example is the German writer, W.G. Sebald. In his novels, text is accompanied by images whose role, in Sontag's reading, is reduced to that of an illustration. In my article, I suggest that the position of the photographic image in Sebald's novels cannot be approached from the perspective proposed by Sontag. Rather, it invites reading in terms of the spectral presence of images whose intrusion into textual reality is as haunting as it is unavoidable. Referring to recent theories of photography, I discuss how in Sebald's novels the relationship between text and image can be explained as that of parallel structures whose linearity is always already interrupted (haunted) by past events. I refer to recent theoretical perspectives on photography in order to account for the interactions between different media in Sebald's works and for their visual/textual engagement with the interplay of temporalities that characterizes the working of memory.