The Society on the Net exhibition at the pf Photography Gallery in Poznań has been organized to mark the 80th birthday of Prof. Stefan Wojnecki, a lecturer at the Fine Arts Academy in Poznań. The exhibition comprises over a dozen experimental works in which the vector technique was used to process original photographs and simple graphic forms.

In some of the works, thermal photography and photographs of electric discharges were fed into graphics software and computers performed other preprogrammed tasks on the images.

Images on display at the gallery show graphs and flowcharts with an entire or partial human outline popping up here and there. This refers to the titular Society on the Net, made up of diverse people who communicate with one another relying on state-of-the-art technology and information that allows them to transcend the limitations of time and space.

The exhibition was inspired by Manuel Castells, one the greatest contemporary researchers into communication, who ponders the condition of contemporary societies as social life is increasingly organized into networks.

A photograph does not have to be strictly linked to appearance, because appearance is relative. If people were, for example, able to see in night vision, their perception of reality would be totally different. Wojnecki is not interested in photography as a means of capturing the way objects look, but as a process where light carries information.

The exhibition comes with a multimedia presentation of Wojnecki's legacy as an artist, from his the debut in the 1960s till today. The presentation clearly shows how his work transformed over the years, includes his experiments with photography, to which he has applied digital processing.

Wojnecki, 80, graduated in physics from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. He was involved in launching photography courses at Polish academies of fine arts.

Dariusz Pietrzak

Zamek Culture Center, 80/82 Święty Marcin St., Poznań, until the end of February