The name of the publishing house “Rozdzielczość Chleba” (Resolution of Bread), established in December 2011, bears reference to the first act of piracy—described in the New Testament—committed by Jesus Christ himself, who multiplied bread for the needs of the people gathered around him. The blasphemous interpretation of the events from the shores of the Sea of Galilee—marking an analogy between the Son of God and the activity of an anonymous Torrent user—has strong appeal with online users who propagate it by means of anonymous memes and images. The artists state: “Succumbing to the power of the emerging heresy, we want to imitate Jesus—He, the first pirate, who copied food beyond its mainstream circulation. We hereby undertake the obligation to provide you with the fresh bread of literature, baked at possibly the highest resolution”.
Leszek Onak (Rozdzielczość Chleba), John Pegasus II Dropped Short Statuses, 2015–2016, installation
John Paul II is on Facebook and posts frequently about solidarity on the web and hunger for aesthetics; he greets all users from the Polish territories and endorses the website “Knees that look like babies.” This text generator, which is the result of experiments by the collective Rozdzielczość Chleba (Resolution of Bread) with the #ZUSwave aesthetic, marks an attempt to define the ethics of the web community. The virtual Pope warns against egoistic web moderation, preaches respect for users without a profile image, and encourages subscriptions.
Let us take in his homilies, deeply moving, and allow ourselves to be guided through sceneries of snow-white fanpages, domains showered with flowers, and manifold likes and online streams that adorn the web of our fatherland.
On another level, the project examines the public presence of John Paul II, providing a character radically different from the omnipresent monuments as well as squares and primary schools named in honour of the Pope. The presented text generator operates on likely the only dimension of the Pope’s legacy that remains open to reinterpretation and updates his postulates to the needs of the ever-changing world.
