Abstract
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a Mexican digital artist recognized for creating large-scale theatrical interactive installations for museum and public spaces, as well as small-scale works with custom-made interfaces and digital technologies. Since 2006 this artist has created eight works that require the physiological input (pulse and heartbeats) of the audience in order to be completed. Light in the pulse-based works of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is the main vehicle that serves to visualize heartbeats outside the realm of the body, facilitating its reterritorialization and conceptualization as a malleable material that can cross the boundaries of the skin, expanding it to other three-dimensional extents in which new spatiotemporal relationships and interactions between participants and the surroundings are produced. This paper explores how these rhizomatic digital installations create a community conscience and engagement between different people in various spaces dedicated to art, while challenging our conception of reality.
Highlights
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a Mexican digital artist recognized for creating large-scale theatrical interactive installations for museum and public spaces, as well as small-scale works with custommade interfaces and digital technologies
There is an interactive collaboration between the installations and the participants that can create fractures in the sphere of reality by changing and challenging everyday perceptions of space and time, and by generating a space of community communication it makes spaces seem more alive. They give the particular sense to individuals of being in a specific space and of being in a common world, bringing into consciousness that even though individuals have diverse parallel realities they live in a community, sharing the same space with millions of people that are represented in the hundreds of heartbeats recorded with a system
Light is a medium that serves as interface to project heartbeats in both indoor and outdoor public and private spaces, molding them, altering their meaning and perception as immersive or kinetic sites
Summary
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a Mexican digital artist recognized for creating large-scale theatrical interactive installations for museum and public spaces, as well as small-scale works with custommade interfaces and digital technologies. The rhythmic and luminous nature of these interactive pieces generate spatiotemporal sensorial interactive experiences through relational ephemeral databases that can transfer our perception of the realm of the real, questioning our existence and the passing of time through illusionistic connective participations facilitated via complex systems based in digital technologies In his biometric body of work Lozano-Hemmer uses heartbeats and a same interface to create different scenes, transforming places by means of light. Henri Bergson’s statement “what I call ‘my present’ has one foot in my past and another in my future” (Bergson, 1911, p.55) can be connected to Lozano-Hemmer’s works because they imply a mix of past, present and future, creating an illusion of presence and a timeless space This generates a sense of copresence between different realities, people and times through the record of hundreds of Figure 7 | Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Pulse Tank, 2008. They give the particular sense to individuals of being in a specific space and of being in a common world, bringing into consciousness that even though individuals have diverse parallel realities they live in a community, sharing the same space with millions of people that are represented in the hundreds of heartbeats recorded with a system
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