Art, for example, becomes Reflections: Art in 1988, with windscreen-like reflections rendering parts of the original painting invisible.
The revolutionary new device, which attaches to vehicle windscreens like a Sat Nav, can detect traffic lights from 100 metres away and allow drivers to adjust their speed so they can pass through a series of green lights and avoid the red ones.
Sophie Ristelhueber's banal prints communicate nothing compared with Kenneth Jarecke's devastating image of a burned Iraqi soldier in his tank on the road to Basra, "his windscreen wiper like a pen, ready to write down thoughts for men" in Tony Harrison's grimly magnificent poem A Cold Coming.
A typical skimmer uses rotating drums or discs of plastic onto which the oil clings and is then scraped off by something like a windscreen wiper.
I would compare it to being like a windscreen wiper - you look left, then right, and try to get across to wherever Liverpool have played the ball, which is usually the opposite side to where you are heading.
The windscreen, though it looks like an aftermarket afterthought, does a fine job of quieting the rider compartment.
Never mind players guilty of career-threatening tackles or swinging their elbows like windscreen wipers.
And, yes, it's impossible to miss the iconic arm movements of Lock's bird-women, as they exercise them in different ways (a bit like windscreen wipers as they switch between insistent, fast and frantic).
On the Ukrainian-Slovakian border, a region across which the borders of empires have swept back and forth like windscreen wipers, I met office assistants who were fluent in Ukrainian, Slovakian, Hungarian and Russian as well as German or English; nobody found this remarkable.
Giles Walker uses ordinary objects like windscreen wipers to recreate humans robotically.
"It's a bit like trying to change the windscreen while you're driving down the M6," he says.
