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Józef Robakowski is a prolific experimental artist who has worked across multiple media including experimental photography, film and video, video installation, video performance, experimental television, artistic documentation, curating and other activities from the 1960s to the present. Recent publications have shed some light on the Polish Workshop of Film Form he was a founding member of but it is still necessary to underline Robakowski’s distinctive contribution to this collective project. Moreover his creative activity has extended well beyond this and has as much to do with the creative use of video, which he pioneered in Poland from the 1970s, in a creative trajectory that calls into question stable distinctions between film, television and video. While his early video work can be characterised as having largely formalist concerns with the nascent medium, its evolution via video performances points to dimensions beyond any mere medium specific formalism. Significantly, across all his work there is an attention to the relations between energy and technical images, that gives both these aspects of his work consistency. This article will present several examples of Robakowski’s works, as well as several of Robakowski’s artistic statements which taken together articulate an approach to artistic practice that is non-illusionary and bio-technical-energetic, drawing on and extending the legacies of avant-garde precursors into the contemporary multi-media digital present.

Obviously, we face an economic crisis that dominates the headlines of daily newspapers, academic journals and features as the title of TV-and-radio casts alike. And, not withstanding political differences, there is widespread consensus that the economic crisis is only the tip of an iceberg. However, there is little readiness to go beyond the inherited fundamental assumptions of a “modern industrial capitalist market society”. The article argues that all the categories are increasingly under threat. The social quality, the quality of life and the noosphere paradigm of global social development offer space for considerations that question societal developments not only on the phenomenological level. Instead, the authors ventilate gnoseological, ontological and axiological prerequisites of sustainable global social development. The noosphere paradigm is enriched with the theories of social quality and the quality of life, thus contributing to the wider and diverse debates on what can be called people's humanistic socialism. In view of the complexity of the impending transition from the present to a future global society with people’s humanistic socialism, it is necessary to plan it thoroughly, beginning with the support of the processes and institutions that currently provide a seedbed; developing new transformational forms of the future features of global society has to go hand in hand with this. It makes sense to carry on with the conceptualization of questions bearing on the formation of nooshpheric social quality and its design.

The article ponders upon the potentially discriminative attitude towards Orthodox identity as a comparative impediment towards socioeconomic progress in 12 countries where such identity is believed to be shared by the majority, developed in political economists’ academic discourse. The current data provide no confident or decisive evidence for judgments of this kind. One might look at other sources for modern Orthodox nations’ relatively laggard development pattern.