Józef Robakowski - The Energy Manifesto!

Józef Robakowski was born on 20 February 1939 in Poznań, lives and works in Łódź. He is an author of films, photographic series, installations, drawings, objects, conceptual projects. Theoretician and academy professor.

He studied art history in the Department of Fine Arts of the Mikołaj Kopernik University in Toruń, and cinematography at the National Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre (PWSFTviT) in Łódź. He teaches at the National Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre in Łódź.

Robakowski made his first experimental film in 1962, "6,000,000", a compilation of fragments of Holocaust-era documentaries. But it was photographic activity that dominated the early period of his practice, also as part of the collective Zero-61.

From 1974, Robakowski also embraced a new medium - video.
The move away from the traditional forms of filmic narration often went hand in hand with a rejection of the representational function as such. Regarded as one of the most radical statements against the narrativity and illusiveness of the traditional filmic message is the non-camera film "Test II" (1971), made by puncturing a dark film tape, as a result of which during the screening the viewer was 'attacked' by a strong beam of projector light, producing the effect of afterimage. During a festival in Knokke-Heist in Belgium in 1971, Robakowski enhanced the effect by using a mirror to reflect the projector light towards the audience ("Test I"). Light also played an important role in many of the artist's later works, such as "1, 2, 3, 4..." (1992), or "Attention: Light!" (2004).