Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, ‘Recorders’

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, presents Recorders, Lozano-Hemmer’s first solo exhibition in Australia. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, works in electronic media to produce interactive installations, combining technology with human performance.

Recorders explores the connection between corporeality, self-representation and technology by translating human activity into a digital language. Lozano-Hemmer explains: “recorders are artworks that hear, see or feel the public and record and replay memories entirely during the show. The pieces either depend on participation to exist or predatorily gather information on the public through surveillance and biometric technologies.”

Essentially, each work collects live data. Audiences are asked to interact with the art – speaking into microphones, grasping handles, walking through x-ray machines – thus leaving traces of themselves. The constant recordings can remind the viewer of George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Some of the works resemble airport security check-points. Please Empty Your Pockets uses an x-ray scanner to record every object placed on a conveyor-belt. The images reappear on the other side of the scanner against the backdrop of projected objects from previous participants. Pulse Index scans your fingerprint and records your heart rate to construct a myriad of prints from the participants stretching across the walls of the room. Curiosity and fascination overtake intimidation and suspicion. Viewers willingly want to participate, even personalising their recorded images.

Recorders offers participants an expressive opportunity to either voice or perform their socio-political thoughts. In Autopoiesis, the viewer’s image is reflected in a small mirror with the word ‘Autopoiesis’ (literally meaning selfproduction or creation) projected on their forehead. Lozano-Hemmer suggests ‘the concept of self-creation is an inspiration for all art that depends on participation to exist.”

People on People involves surveillance cameras filming the audience and then projecting back their video portraits into the shadows of the surrounding and subsequent audience. This creates a sense of intimacy and engagement between the audience through puppetry and shadow, allowing their individual actions to become almost entangled with each other.

This exhibition encourages self-awareness, selfrepresentation and self-expression. It responds to the concerns of surveillance as a ‘second skin’ and seduces the viewer with its gadgetry and offerings of improvisation, artistic involvement and social engagement. It is not until you have left the exhibition space that you develop a sense of paranoia, a sense of a heightened selfconsciousness and suspicion. You realise you have allowed your image and your possessions to be recorded, your socio-political thoughts and questions to be monitored, and your fingerprint to be scanned. Normally, this is infomation you’d be cautious of giving your own government. Then again, what of it – this is art!

By Melissa Pesa

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