Upgrade! Warsaw: Jarek Grzesica: Upgrading Myself (with the Digital Community - Warsaw Electronic Festival) :: October 28, 2007; 5:00 pm :: Dziekanka (dormitory of The Academy of Music), 58/60 Krakowskie Przedmieście, Warsaw, Poland :: informal and free.

“Why is WEF still alive? I need it, I have no time to listen to music on CD and no time to go to a concert. But music and media art is part of my life so I decided that it is much easier to put art on the schedule, to organize concerts and to administrate an online library of free music, to meet artists and to be an artist; this is my way of upgrading myself.

I am influenced by technology and music - these two things push me to get busy with music, jazz and new media art. This is why I had to organize my own art: the Warsaw Electronic Festival, since 2002. The same reason pushes me to promote unknown electronic musicians on the jazz radio program called Future Shock and to work on many other projects connected to electronic culture, some of them you probably know: Future Sessions for Polish National Radio BiS with Mateusz Kwiatkowski, Dresdner Radiostadt #1, Radio Copernicus.

Since 2001 almost 200 performers were invited to participate in many small and bigger events connected to my activity e.g. representatives of Scape Records, Deadbeat and Bus, Tonne from Klitekture Records. Swedish producer Mikael Stavöstrand and Johan Skugge from the MITEK records, projects from the French M-tronic label, many Polish performers-among them Mikołaj Trzaska, GB Productions Team, Rzutnik B9, April Tone, LOF, Qriozum, Game Boyzz Orchestra Project and Kunsbande SLA, Dagiel, Eta Carinae, Zen Lu, Ko On Ten, Markus Reuter, ISAN, Syntetika, Andrey Kirychenko and many others. I am sure that anyone interested could find many interesting projects on www.wef.pl, the home website of the Warsaw Electronic Festival, my primary project. Since 2003 I was honored to cooperate with ‘Zacheta’ National Polish Gallery organizing some new media exhibitions and presentations. Great names were invited to take participation in this program: Sheldon Brown - Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD); Chris Csikszentmihályi, who directs the Media Lab’s Computing Culture group, John Craig Freeman - an artist and educator exploring practices that challenge the function of art and the role of the artist, Jon Cates - an artist, but he also teaches in the Film, Video and New Media dept @ School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

I am also an electronic musician – Seed Project is my solo project, but frankly speaking, at the moment I prefer cross cooperation with other artists like TASEEE (cross project with Mikołaj Trzaska) Send /Recv (Cross project with Robert Jeszke aka Lord Of Flies).” - Jarek Grzesica