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.”