Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Mouthpiece


This is a picture of Mouthpiece from media.rhizome.org

The Mouth piece was cfreated by Wodiczko in 1993. A immigrant would wear it over their mouth. There is a video monitor and loud speakers over the wearer's mouth. The Mouthpiece is used to replace the immigrant's use of speech. It does this by showing a video of the immigrant's mouth moving on the monitor and prerecorded messages play from the speakers. It plays statements, questions, answers, and stories that are edited and electronicly perfected. The immigrant wearing it can be pulled out of isolation by expanding his/her narrative outward into a collective experience. Between 1993 and 1997 13 people wore them in  Paris, Malmö, Helsinki, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Trélazé, and Angers.

Alien Staff


Here are two examples of Alien Staffs form stuff.mit.edu

Wodiczko created the Alien Staff in 1992. It was made for immigrants for storytelling and legal and ethical communication. It gives the holder a chance to directly address whoever is attracted by it. The Alien Staff looks like a shepherd's rod with a mini video monitor, a loud speaker, and electrodes. It also has containers to hold green cards and other important documents. It is connected to a laptop, field sensing circuitry, and a battery that are all held in a shoulder bag. the laptop is used for video indexing and retrieving. The mini monitor is small and at eye-level. This not only makes it easy for the user to view it but it requires whoever the immigrant is talking to to come closer to the staff and the immigrant's face. a picture of the immigrant's face is on the monitor which gives an imagined or experienced perception like a character or an actor. Imagination and the actual experience start to increase and the program shows unexpected aspects of the immigrant's life. This makes the immigrant's presence legitimate and real. This change in perception might make a stranger talking to the immigrant have more respect for him/her.

Personal Instrument


This is a picture of Wodiczko's Personal Instrument from ionoi.com

The Personal Instrument was made in 1969 and was Wodiczko's first work shown in public. It was based of of the saying by the poet and artist Vladimir Mayakovsky that goes "The streets our brushes, the squares our palettes." It consisted of a microphone to pick up sounds, photo-receivers inside gloves to isolate and filter those sounds through hand movement, and headphones that limited the sound to only the wearer. It emphasized selective listening which polish citizen needed to have at the time because of authoritarian restrictions. It was a crack at censored speech. Wodiczko said on the matter "dissent of a system that fostered only one-directional critical thinking – listening over speech.”

Sunday, November 11, 2012

The Homeless Vehicle



These are pictures of the Homeless Vehicle from designboom.com

This was a vehicle made by Krzysztof Wodiczko in 1987. Wodiczko worked with a group of Homeless in New York City to create a shopping cart like vehicle that a homeless could use to sleep in and also use to collect bottles. It is an "an instrument of survival for urban nomads" as Wodiczko said. It was not made just a mobile shelter though, it was made to call attention to the rising problem of Homelessness in modern society.

Krzysztof Wodiczko

Krzysztof Wodiczko is an artist whose most famous work are his slide and video projections on architectural buildings and monuments. He was born April 16, 1643, in Warsaw, Poland and was the son of Bohdan Wodiczko who was a Polish orchestra conductor. Wodiczko was born during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He grew up in the post war of WWII. He went to school at the Academy of fine arts in Warsaw and graduated their in 1968 with an M.F.A. in industrial design. For the next two years his job was designing electronic products for UNITRA. After that he worked for the Polish Optical Works for seven years. In 1977 he emigrated to canada.
Some of Wodiczko's first works were expertly designed and made, but had no function. They were a response to modern technology in an ironic way. In 1969 he colaborated with Andrzej Dluzniewski and Wojchiech Wybieralski. They were to design a proposal for a memorial to the victems of a concentration camp in poland called Majdanek. In the same year he performed in the streets with another of his works called the Personal Instrument. Also in 1971 he was the leader of a group architectural movement in the Biennale de Paris. He taught in the Acadamy of Fine Arts from 1969 to 1970 and then at the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute until 1976. In 1971 he started on the Vehicle, a machine made of wood and bycycle wheels that was set into motion by unproductive means. He created his first solo instilation in 1972 in Corridor at Galeria Wspolczesna, Warsaw and exhibited in Galeria Foksal, Warsaw in 1975. In 1974 he experimented with the relationship between real objects and visual perception. He did this by projecting a drawing of a stool on a wall which produced a 3d illusion. 1975 Wodiczko traveled to America and worked at the University of Illinois, Urbana as the artist-in-residence and also exhibited at the N.A.M.E. gallery Chicago. In America he started his work with slide projection. His projections, which were large-scale projections on public buildings, were ironic to the architectural structure it was shown on. Wodiczko started an artist-in-residence program in 1976 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada. In 1977 he emigrated to Canada and started teaching at the university of Guelph in Ontario and also started working with Hal Bromm. He taught at Ontario College of art in Toronto in 1979. He was artist in residence at the South Australian School of Art from 1981 to 1982. In 1983 Wodiczko moved to New York City nd taught at the New York Institue of Technology. From 1987 to 1988 he worked with a group of homeless in New York to make the Homeless Vehicle. It was made not only for the transportation of homeless but also to draw attention to the problem of homelessness.