About the Project

Mediated Environments is a transdisciplinary project implemented under the grant of the National Program for the Development of Humanities by Humanities / Art / Technology Research Center (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań) under the supervision of prof. UAM Agnieszka Jelewska and dr Michał Krawczak.

The main goal of the project is to integrate research derived from humanistic thought and environmental discourses and new artistic practices situating itself within the designated environmental issues, in order to design and test in working groups an innovative cognitive approach to the latest issues of human-environment interrelations. Thus, it is about the collective creation of transdisciplinary research methods to re-form the perspective of looking at environmental problems in which contemporary man is involved in the situation of scientific design and technological acceleration.

The project undertakes three generally described research areas:

The first area deals with the consequences and questions shaped as part of the currently discussed concept of Anthropocene, as the name of a new geological era, during which man transforms planetary resources by making their deep transformations.

The second is the hypothesis of biophilia and its technological mediation, hence the design of new artificial environments and research on ambient intelligence, which transfigurate the relationship human-environment.

The third is the issue organized around a multidisciplinary ecological, technocultural and biological understanding of the affective networks of human and non-human subjects.

These areas are also concepts that do not fit within one discipline, they also contain speculative elements, so they are still open to tests and the results of scientific procedures. Such a setting of the problem avoids colonization practices. Designated concepts give at the same time an opportunity for dialogue and negotiation in space outside of disciplines, on the basis of academic debates and practical activities in seminar groups. Because the issues addressed in the project have a wide substantive scope, the aim of the seminars will not be to provide direct solutions (which would be impossible in such a short time and wide range), but rather to develop new ways of establishing transdisciplinary possibilities for constructing participatory discourses on the example of selected issues. It is also about developing the ability to formulate problems at the interface of disciplines; about asking adequate questions about the problems of contemporary human-environment relations; about skilfully carrying out a transdisciplinary critical reflection on political and economic systems controlling risk, global stress and the sense of environmental apocalypse and affective, situational communication between human and non-human factors in technologically mediated environments.

An integral part of the project are workshop and seminar meetings implemented in a transdisciplinary group of 15 young researchers (up to 35 years of age). Five meetings of the working group have been planned, each meeting will consist of a thematic practical workshop and a seminar. The workshop will be carried out by prof. UAM dr hab. Agnieszka Jelewska, dr Michał Krawczak and three researchers from Poland in the field of climate science, cognitive science, genetics and biotechnology. The workshops deal with specific issues such as ambient intelligence, neurocognitive science, bio-informatics, genetics, Anthropocene, climatology, hearing ecology, environmental studies, transdisciplinary practices and are held in the scientific laboratories of the University of Adam Mickiewicz University, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and the University of Warsaw. As part of the project, a collective book is also planned, in which selected articles will be available. An additional part of the project will be three webinars run by foreign experts. The aim of webinars is to broaden the research perspective of the working group with many years of practical and theoretical experience of recognized world authorities (webinars will be conducted in English).

The results of the team’s work are published on this website.