Józef Robakowski
Józef Robakowski (b.1939) – multimedia artist, experimental filmmaker, performer, art theoretician, and educator. This artist is one of the key figures of Polish avant-garde art after 1960. His practice includes film, video, photography, performance, and installation. Robakowski consistently explores the boundaries of perception, medium, and corporeality, often using his own body as an experimental tool.
Co-founder and member of such artistic groups as Film Form Workshop (Warsztat Formy Filmowej) in the city of Łódź, ZERO-61 Group in Toruń, and the Exchange Gallery (Galeria Wymiany) in Łódź.
His work is characterized by an individual approach to the medium, self-analysis, and subversive humor. Many of his works are commentaries on the relations between art and technology, private and public, individual and system.
I Am Electric
Performance, Single-channel Video, 13min, 1996
Józef Robakowski has long been interested in the concept of energy—understood in its physical, emotional, and symbolic dimensions.
I Am Electric is a radical performance created during the WRO '96 Media Art Biennale "Monitor Polski", in which the artist's body becomes a conductor - literally and symbolically. Robakowski presented a device through which electric current flowed - powered and regulated gradually at his own request, and with the active participation of the audience. This work is part of the artist’s broader interest in energy as a physical, emotional, and symbolic phenomenon – already present in earlier works such as On Feathers (1982) and My Videomasochisms (1989).
During the performance, Robakowski provided ongoing commentary on the course of action, in his characteristically self-ironic and witty manner. He compared electricity to creative work, emotional tensions, and interpersonal relations in the art world. An important layer of the action was also the atmosphere in the studio and the exceptional engagement of the audience – both physically present and those watching the live broadcast on public television.
