#wodiczko

[hackingmonuments]

A Monument Man Gives Memorials New Stories to Tell

Using video projections, the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko reclaims public spaces for marginalized viewpoints.

[fromdustandrust]

If the peace is to be the one where everybody's quiet and doesn't open up oneself towards others, doesn't share what's unspeakable, doesn't disrupt the others, doesn't offer unsolicited criticism, doesn't defend others' right to speak, that peace is worth nothing.

Krzysztof Wodiczko

[nameless-maiden]

Procrastinating writing my Duchamp presentation by scouring the internet for anything I can find on Krzysztof Wodiczko.

[hyenazforeignbodies]

“Visibility and Equality are Connected”, Krzysztof Wodiczko lecture

Last night at the University of Łódź, the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko gave a lecture as part of the NECS 2015 conference. We are in Poland to finish mastering our second album Critical Magic and our host, the sound artist, culture and media theorist Maciej Ożóg invited us to attend.

Wodiczko has spent most of his career working with people who do not normally have access to the public sphere - migrants, workers - developing projects that remove their invisibility, because, as he quoted the philosopher Hannah Arendt, “Visibility and equality are connected”.

Although he has also created artworks using wearable technology, he is most famous for a set of projects, spanning decades, that involve projections on public buildings and monuments.

One of the first projections he talked about was at the Basel Kunstmuseum in which the lower torsos of irregular migrants were rendered onto the facade, and their voices, stories rang out into square. He explained that, by and large immigrants don't have access to art institutions, so these projections gave them access. And by positioning the migrants in the project up high, it made people, the passing public, look up at them and not down as is so often the case.

He feels that cities are always-already monuments to the victors, the vanquished having no voice, no history, no presence in public architecture, and the works he helps create try to overturn this.

In 2001 he presented in Tijuana Mexico which attempted to give a voice to the teenage and young women who work in "maquiladora" factories assembling goods for export. Over the course of a year, he got to know these women and they wrote their own testimonies which they then performed to a camera strapped to their faces which was then projected onto the enormous dome facade of the Centro Cultural Tijuana. The women narrated stories about the difficulties they face in their lives, including abuse at work or at home. Again, as with the Basel Kunstmuseum, in this setting, for the general public filing out of the Imax cinema, these women were impossible to ignore.

Someone asked Wodiczko about the audience response to this performance. He said that, while this was a good question, a better question was “In what way did the people involved make sense of the project within the context of their lives? Something was born from the development of this project - another public, an inner public, consisting not only of the performers, but also their friends, family, activists, lawyers and so on. The project generates own public which connects with another public.

Wodiczko said he hoped his work had a therapeutic effect - therapeutic for the participants and therapeutic for the viewer, against their own numbness.

More about Wodiczko here: http://culture.pl/en/artist/krzysztof-wodiczko

http://www.art21.org/artists/krzysztof-wodiczko/images

[jkim5]

Encounters with the Material: Krzysztof Wodiczko and site-specific media art

Forthcoming in Discourse.

This article examines media practices that open encounters with the material as a critical intervention into the virtual condition.  It addresses Krzysztof Wodiczko’s site-specific large-scale image projections as an example of this type of media practice.  Wodiczko’s work has been characterized as “interrogative,” that is, critical of social and political problems associated with site.  Building upon discussions of site specificity in art, this article contends that his projections are an interrogative address of materiality and ends with general conclusions about the potential for media practices, like Wodiczko’s, to rupture the virtual.

[barelyconcealednuance]

Asked how the design world has responded to his various Homeless Vehicle [sic], Wodiczko throws back his head and laughs at the pretensions of the so-called "designer decade."…"The minute you present a proposal, people think you must be offering a grand vision for a better future." They can't see a thing like the Homeless Vehicle of the Poliscar as the "concretisation" of the present problem, a makeshift transitional device, or an aesthetic experiment. Instead, "they think it must be designed for mass production, and instantly imagine 100,000 Poliscars taking over the cities."

Wright 1992, 272-273

As quoted in Hertzian Tales, Anthony Dunne, 1999 (from 2009 MIT Press edition).

[westernsurvey]

Style: Political

Date: 1990

Artist: Wodiczko

Name: Homeless Projection

[definedpleasures]

Projection by Kryzysztof Wodiczko of Ronald Reagan's hand posed in the pledge of allegiance onto the north face of the AT&T Long Lines building in New York City, four days before the presidential election of 1984.