Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Speaking Willow, is an interactive, motion-detecting tree that will whisper to visitors in hundreds of different languages at Washington, D.C.’s Planet Word Museum. Anticipated installation date 2020.

Voice Array is a participatory installation featuring up to 288 anonymous vocal samples—played in uneven unison, and accompanied by pulses of vibrant white light in discrete beams, emanating from above and below a raised black strip along a back wall. When activated, the piece connotes the pulsing volume bars on an old stereo, turning sound into light to measure intensity. Any visitor can speak into the silver-buttoned intercom to the left of the strip—upon withdrawal, the recording immediately transforms into a flashing sequence, stored as a loop in the first light of the array.

Pan Anthem (2014) is an interactive installation of hundreds of movable speakers that play national anthems when the viewer approaches. These speakers are arranged throughout the gallery’s walls based on national statistics. For example, the arrangement may depend on population, year of independence and etc.

In 2013 Lozano-Hemmer created a piece called Friendfracker. This was an online service that Lozano-Hemmer created along with Harper-Reed in one day. A participant would enter their Facebook account information into the online program, then once the information was verified the service would delete up to 10 of the participant’s friends on their Facebook account. The service wouldn’t tell which friends were deleted. Facebook disabled the program on April 25, 2013.

Less than three is an installation consisting of a series of light beams that form a kind of network between two analogue intercoms. When a viewer speaks into one of the intercoms, he can see how the voice signal is converted into flashes of light that are visibly transmitted along one of the several possible routes through the network. When the flash of light reaches the other end, the spoken phrase is released and transformed again, from light to sound. The installation interacts by transforming sound stimuli into light, which is then turned back into sound again. It was shown at Disseny Hub Barcelona between 2011 and 2012 at the exhibit I/O/I. The senses of machines (Interaction Laboratory)

In 1999, he created Alzado Vectorial (or Vectorial Elevation), where internet participants directed searchlights over the central square in Mexico City. The work was repeated in Vitoria-Gasteiz in 2002, in Lyon in 2003, in Dublin in 2004 and in Vancouver in 2010. In 2007, he became the first artist to officially represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale, with a solo show at the Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel. In 2006, his work 33 Questions Per Minute was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Subtitled Public (2005) is held in the Tate Collection in the United Kingdom.

In 1994, Lozano-Hemmer coined the term “relational architecture” as the technological actualization of buildings and the urban environment with alien memory. He aimed to transform the dominant narratives of a specific building or urban setting by superimposing audiovisual elements to affect it, effect it and re-contextualize it. From 1997 to 2006, he built ten works of relational architecture beginning with Displaced Emperors and ending with Under Scan. Lozano-Hemmer says, “I want buildings to pretend to be something other than themselves, to engage in a kind of dissimulation”

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (born 1967 in Mexico City) is a Mexican-Canadian electronic artist who works with ideas from architecture, technological theater and performance. He holds a Bachelor of Science in physical chemistry from Concordia University in Montreal. Currently, Lozano-Hemmer lives and works in Montreal and Madrid.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967. He emigrated to Canada in 1985 to study at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and then at Concordia University in Montreal. The son of Mexico City nightclub owners, Lozano-Hemmer was drawn to science but could not resist joining the creative activities that his friends did. Initially he worked in a molecular recognition lab in Montreal and published his research in Chemistry journals. Though he did not pursue the sciences as a direct career, it has influenced his work in many ways, providing conceptual inspiration and practical approaches to create his work. Lozano-Hemmer’s work can be considered a blend of interactive art and performance art, using both large and small scales, indoor and outdoor settings, and a wide variety of audiovisual technologies.

Microphones is an interactive installation featuring one or several 1939-vintage Shure microphones, placed on mike stands around the exhibition room at different heights. Each microphone has been modified so that inside its head is a tiny loudspeaker and a circuit board connected to a network of hidden control computers. When a public member speaks into a microphone, it records his or her voice, then immediately plays back the voice of a previous participant, as an echo from the past.

you may like: Sonya Curry