KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO
Wednesday, 17th, 19.00–20.30
Keynote 1
Critical Archive
a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko
Interlocutor: Ryszard W. Kluszczyński
Critical archive is possible, perhaps indispensable but on the condition that it is based on things and matters that are most difficult to grasp, comprehend and publicly shared: the unacknowledged and unwanted past, difficult knowledge and experience of the present, and the critical and constructive vision of the future.
Simple acts of collecting and archiving our “heritage” or “legacy” are in themselves boring, mindless and hopeless practices.
In other words, the care and preservation of historical facts, events and places of memory that mark and testify to our great achievements and heroic deads, will be condemned to become a mere contribution to such hopelessness and mindlessness unless we inscribe and project into such monumental archivism things that we do not wish to remember, and speak, and which – sadly and tragically – remain a continuing (historical) part of lived-through human experience.
In the context of such conviction and such concern, in my presentation I will share some thoughts and documentation of my participatory projections-animations of historic city monuments, and elaborate on the design and implantation of related to them “cultural prostheses” which all attempt to inspire, provoke and disseminate the honest discourse in critical memory in the public space.
These projects have been developed and realized thanks to active engagement of people who are themselves the living monuments of the past which should not have happen, and the living archives of the present that must not be allowed to perpetuate in the future.
I would like to believe that in the process of assisting in development of these people’s voice, which enforces their public presence and expression, my participatory projections and communicative devices become useful tools for their own performative artistic acts and through which they can bring openly and in the open, important to us all, new vital narrative, new critical hope and new vision of the future.
Krzysztof Wodiczko is best known for his public projections that give life to monuments and public buildings using images of expressive physical movement, paired with the voices of marginalized citizens: the homeless, immigrants, survivors of domestic violence, war veterans. He has organized and performed more than ninety such public projections in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Northern Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. At the same time, he has been designing and implementing a series of nomadic instruments and vehicles with homeless, immigrant, and war veteran operators for their survival and communication. Wodiczko was awarded the Hiroshima Art Prize in 1998 for his contribution as an international artist to world peace, and has represented Canada and Poland in the Venice Biennale. He is Professor of Art, Design, and the Public Domain at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and teaches at Media Arts department of Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He lives and works in New York, Boston and Warsaw.
Ryszard W. Kluszczyński Chair of School of Media and Audiovisual Culture, University of Lodz, Poland. Professor of the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz. His reaserch concernes new media arts, cyberculture, theory of media and communication, information and network society, experimental cinema and video art. He critically investigates the issues of contemporary art theory, avant-garde, and recent art practices [the list of the publications on his website]. Some of his book publications (in Polish): Interactive Art. From Artwork-Instrument to Interactive Spectacle (2010); Information Society. Cyberculture. Multimedia Arts (2001, Second Edition 2002); Film – Video – Multimedia. Art of the Moving Picture in the Era of Electronics (1999, Second Edition 2002); Images at Large. Study on the History of Media Art in Poland (1998); Avant-Garde. Theoretical Study (1997); Film – Art of the Great Avant-Garde (1990). He is the editor of Towards the Third Culture. The Co-Existence of Art, Science and Technology (Gdansk 2011), Crude Life. The Tissue Culture & Art Project: Oron Catts + Ionat Zurr (Gdańsk 2012), Wonderful Life: Laurent Mignonneau + Christa Sommerer (Gdańsk 2012), Robotic Art and Culture. Bill Vorn and His Hysterical Machines (Gdańsk, 2014), Meat, Metal & Code / Contestable Chimeras: Stelarc (Gdańsk 2014), Ken Feingold: Figures of Speech (Gdańsk 2014).
http://media.uni.lodz.pl/rwk