This unusual mechanism was very slow – in order for it to move it ten metres, one needed to walk twenty metres across the platform. Regardless of the pedestrian motion, Vehicle could only could only move only in the ‘correct,’ forward direction, just like the economy, according to the propaganda.
Wodiczko's project was not a prototype intended for a mass production and replication. ‘The vehicle is intended exclusively for the use of its author’, the artist forewarned. The same went for Wodiczko's Personal Instrument from 1969. When worn by the artist, this headphone-helmet of sorts, equipped with special microphone-sensors ‘modified the sounds of the surrounding.’ As Luiza Nader noted, ‘the instrument led to a kind of narcissistic regression – an isolation from the external objects and concentration on an illusionary image of oneself.’ Technology and its development were pushed to the extreme.
In 1973, Krzysztof Wodiczko used his Vehicle to cross the streets of Warsaw. Photographs show him strolling on the platform making its way through the borough of Saska Kępa and the nearby Skaryszewski Park. While walking in alternating directions, he assumed the position of an itinerant thinker, who liked to walk while pondering.
What did Wodiczko ponder upon while riding his Vehicle, which Andrzej Turowski wrote, was ‘closer to the dream of Letalin than to the shiny surfaces and aerodynamic shapes of modern race cars’? The inevitable progress? In one of the interviews he gave years later, the artist reminisced:
All the slogans we saw around proclaimed that we will catch up with the West, that we are gaining speed. Progress was guaranteed, as long as everyone, including the intelligentsia and artists, would subject themselves to this machine, and will invigorate it intellectually and physically.
Artists were also engaged in the mechanisms of the state of progress. In his works from that period, and especially in an attempt to exit the gallery space to experience reality in other ways, Wodiczko indicated the direction which, in his opinion, the artists should take. It consisted in breaking with the limited understanding autonomy of art and its isolation. As he said in an interview:
The artists of the Polish People's Republic supported the system not when they worked on their commissions in the morning, but when they sat at a café table in the evening and proclaimed fundamental statements about the essence of art, escaping the ugly situation around them. […] It was a legitimisation of the system, an acceptance of the gift of limited freedom.
