Art & Technology #27: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer imprinted his name in the art scene in 1999 with <Vertical Elevation> in the Zócalo Square, Mexico City, in which he turned the architecture into a massive interactive art piece. The searchlights from every angle and direction continuously crossed the sky intersecting with each other. The lights emitted in various manners created a fantastic experience; those who are familiar with art pieces combined with technology might think the sky decorated with lights is not special anymore in media art. These lights, however, are not created by Lozano-Hemmer, but generated from the website (www.alzado.net) launched by the artist. Anyone who visited the website could input the angle and duration of a light, which was reflected on the light sculpture piece. The artwork drew tremendous attention, with 800,000 people from 89 countries joining the project during the two weeks it was first presented in Mexico City. Afterwards, this project traveled to many cities in the world including Vitoria, Spain in 2002, Lyon, France in 2003, and Dublin, Ireland in 2004. People who visited the square could meet the public artwork made of the lights designed by someone else on the other side of the world, in which the artist played a role of connecting the website visitors and people in the square, using the sky as his canvas. The artwork that demonstrated the modern cityscape with various lights gave him and his colleagues an honor of winning a Golden Nica in Interactive Art of the Prix Ars Electronica in interactive art.

<Homographies>(2006), a large-scaled interactive installation, also required viewer’s participation. Lozano-Hemmer filled the ceiling of the exhibition space with florescent lights and placed sensors to recognize the position of the viewers. As the sensors detected the viewers’ movements, the florescent lights moved along the trace of their movements. Consisting of 144 white florescent lights fixed at same intervals to 72 robotic fixtures, this artwork was presented at the ‘2006 Biennale of Sydney’, inducing participation from many people.
One of his latest works, <Call on Water>(2016), was a fountain in which vapor rising up from a water container wrote words in the air. Dozens of poems by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz became the words made of air and returned to be air. The lines of the poems had momentary permeability and soon disappeared from the turbulence. With hundreds of computer-controlled ultrasonic nozzles placed under the reflective container, the fountain created cold steam as the viewers had an exotic experience in the vapor gleaming in the dark.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a new media and electronic artist, who was born in Mexico City in 1967 and majored in physical chemistry in Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He became famous for the architecture, technological performing arts, installation, performances, and public art pieces in which various media are used including lights and sound. As an artist, he has led a distinctive career of being the Guest Editor of 『Leonardo』 and Co-Editor of 『Mediamatic Interactive Publishing in Amsterdam』, along with writing multiple books about art and media. His artworks are housed by top art museums in the world including Musee d'art contemporain de Montréal and Museo de Monterrey in Mexico. The artist received Honorable Mention at Prix Ars Electronica in 1995 and 1998. He was also granted “Best Installation” at the Interactive Digital Media Awards in Toronto and a Cyberstar award in Germany.