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MACHINE DREAMS

Alexei Taylor, Author

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Dis-Armor user:new observer

Dis-Armor project challenges and changes understanding of observer. Jonathan Crary argues that, “Though obviously one who sees, an observer is more importantly the one who sees, an observer is more importantly one who sees within prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations.”(Crary 6) The observer perceives everything through his vision. Crary goes even further to explore all the circumstances that influence and shape this particular vision of the observer in a particular way. He contends that numerous machines invented throughout the centuries aimed to structure human vision with the framework of particular set rules, “These apparatuses are the outcome of a complex remaking of the individual as observer into something calculable and regularizable and of human vision into something into something measureable and thus exchangeable.”(Crary 17)


In his Dis-Armor Wodiczko goes even further: acknowledging the existence of this construction of the observer,
he challenges the traditional way in which vision in perceived.Despite the gradual discoveries in history of human vision and
developments of machine and technologies that determine this vision, seeing has always been perceived as essentially 
connected with human body function of seeing through the eyes. Wodicko changes this by placing the user’s eyes on the back. 
He constructs new kind of observer who is able to perceive the world in a different way. The user’s vision is mechanizes 
through the Dis-Armor. He or she gets a chance to see everything around 360 degrees, instead of simple frontal vision. This 
gives the user more power and changes his or her relationship with the present. The user can “look back” immediately and 
literally, unlike people in usual situation, who can only look back after something has occurred and then try to correct it. Thus, 
Dis-Armor user gets the power to control and immediately correct his or her present, and therefore to have power of  
controlling the situation in an encounter with the interlocutor.  

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