About
The Blue Humanities Archive is a transdisciplinary project at the intersection of digital art, environmental humanities, and emerging eco-technologies to enhance and support the protection of the depleting biodiversity of salt and freshwater.
The Blue Humanities Archive combines artistic documentation of environmental degradation—such as extinction, pollution, and aquatic violence—with practices focused on care, immersion, responsibility, and embodied co-existence with water. Through digital art projects and experimental formats, BhA fosters hydrofeminist networking and imagines multispecies futures grounded in interdependence and fluidity.
As a digital platform, BhA explores the material and environmental costs of media infrastructures themselves. This concern is reflected in the archive’s sustainable design and execution: a minimalist visual language, reduced color palette, 8-bit aesthetics, and the conscious rejection of image-heavy interfaces.
In 2025, BhA co-curator Justyna Górowska, in collaboration with Thomas Heinis (Imperial College London), expanded this inquiry by transferring the Blue Humanities Archive into a biological medium: DNA. Using a bit-pair mapping method, the archive’s data were encoded and chemically synthesized into a DNA strand, shaped into the letters “BhA” and suspended within a transparent capsule. By translating digital information into DNA, the project speculates on alternative, more sustainable models of digital preservation and reframes data as a living, fluid, and environmentally interdependent substance—a literal drop of encoded memory for the Blue Planet.
The Curators
Justyna Gorowska
Justyna Górowska (she/her) is a hydrofeminist and performative artist, and collaborator in interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of art, technology, and social activism. As a child, she fell in love with the aquatic creatures of the Skawa River in Poland. She has exhibited in Berlin, Jakarta, Warsaw, and New York. She received her PhD at the University of Fine Arts in Poznan in 2020. She is currently based in Krakow and she teaches at The Intermedia Department at Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts.
Ewelina Jarosz
Ewelina Jarosz (she/they) is a hydrosexual researcher, queer blue posthumanities scholar, performative artist, and collaborator in interdisciplinary projects on hydro-art. They are children of the Baltic Sea where they grew up with cyanosis and algae. She received her Ph.D. in humanities at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. Ewelina was twice awarded The Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship. She is currently based in Krakow and teaches at The Department of Media and Cultural Research at The Pedagogical University.
Sponsored by
The BhA is part of the "STUDIOTOPIA. Art meets Science in the Anthropocene" project supported by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union