Krzysztof Wodiczko

Krzysztof Wodiczko
Personal Instrument, Warsaw, Poland, 1969
Born	1943 (age 73–74) Warsaw, Poland
Occupation	industrial designer, tactical media artist
Years active	1968–present

Krzysztof Wodiczko (born April 16, 1943) is a Polish artist renowned for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. He has realized more than 80 such public projections in Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.

War, conflict, trauma, memory, and communication in the public sphere are some of the major themes of an oeuvre that spans four decades. His practice, known as Interrogative Design, combines art and technology as a critical design practice in order to highlight marginal social communities and add legitimacy to cultural issues that are often given little design attention.

He lives and works in New York City and teaches in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is currently professor in residence of art and the public domain for the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Wodiczko was formerly director of the Interrogative Design Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he was a professor in the Visual Arts Program since 1991. He also teaches as Visiting Professor in the Psychology Department at the Warsaw School of Social Psychology.

Wodiczko, son of Polish orchestra conductor Bohdan Wodiczko, was born in 1943 during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and grew up in post-war, Soviet-occupied Poland. In 1967 while still a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, he began collaborating with director Jozef Patkowski and the Experimental Studio on sound performances. He graduated in 1968 with an M.F.A. degree in industrial design and worked for the next two years at UNITRA, Warsaw, designing popular electronic products. From 1970 until his emigration to Canada in 1977, he designed professional optical, mechanical, and electronic instruments at the Polish Optical Works.

In 1969, Wodiczko collaborated with Andrzej Dluzniewski and Wojchiech Wybieralski on a design proposal for a memorial to victims of Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. He also performed with Personal Instrument in the streets of Warsaw and participated in the Biennale de Paris as a leader of a group architectural project. He was a teaching assistant for two years, 1969–70, in the Basic Design Program at the Academy of Fine Arts before moving to the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute, where he taught until 1976. Throughout the 1970s he continued his collaborations on sound and music performances with various musicians and artists.