Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a Canadian based artist that does crazy installations with lights and tech. A ton of his work creates unreal spaces that relies on audience interaction. Usually this type of thing annoys the crap out of me aka 'Vivid Sydney', however I think the scale at which these singular installations are developed, their adaption to locations and their active relationship with the public is intriguing. 

Pulse Room, 2009, Denmark: basically it records your pulse and reflects it through a ceiling of hanging lights. I've never seen it other than online, but I imagine it would be an unusual/awe-inspiring atmospheric experience. I would probably be the kid jumping up and down. 

Pulse Room by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer from MUTEK on Vimeo.




At 3:25 Anne Sophie Warberg Lossing, Curator, Enter Action - Digital Art Now, has a quick chat.

"It captures, very nicely, the way technology invades our lives and I think it does it in a very poetic way umm...so it's not like those cold, in-humane technologies, but it's really touching, and it steals something from us that is really personal, so it's also a participatory work I guess...so it touches something very specific about the age we live in."

I jumped on Lozano-Hemmer's site and here is what I found out:

- It was inspired by a 1960 film Macario, where the protagonist suffers a hunger-induced hallucination in which every person is represented by a lit candle in a cave.

- Other references include minimalist, mechanic and serialist patterns in music and the theory of Cybernetics to explain the process of self-regulation of the heart.

Pulse Park, Madison Square Park: a combination of lights that are modulated by sensors that records heart rates of participants. The rhythms are lit up like that in the Pulse Room and move down a light when more are added. 

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