The Plaintext Bureau

  • The Plaintext Bureau

    Illustration courtesy of polishboy08

The Plaintext Bureau is an interdisciplinary collective, a pseudo-start-up and research group analyzing the role of new media in the current crisis of communication, including the politics.‬ ‪It has taken its name from the field of cryptography, referring to a message that has not yet been converted into a cryptogram, or one that has just been decrypted.‬ The main goal of the Plaintext Bureau is to initiate a longterm exchange of knowledge between programmers and humanists, and totry to answer the question of how to promote objective content in a time of disinformation, interpretational abuse and rhetorical games.

Invited artists: Norman Leto, Iwona Kurz and Hotel Cisza, Gregor Różański and Wiktor Stribog (Kraina Grzybów TV) will present their internet projects of many kinds: avatars, cyber land art, fake news and post-truths to test critical aspects of dispersed information. Such interventions will appear autonomously on various media platforms and channels of distribution. A material counterpoint to this ephemeral digital interventions are: The Office, an installation on order and transparency by Zuza Golińska and a performance by avatar polishboy08.

The Plaintext Bureau also includes theoretical seminars, screenings and workshops with the participation of Irmina Rusicka and Kasper Lecnim, Jakub Majmurek, Józef Robakowski and others. Our guests will take part in the discussion on how to counteract the total collapse of communication and understanding in an era of post-truth, the domination of emotional subjectivity, and distrust towards experts.‬ 

Events from that cycle: