Listen to a stranger

Recorders. One of the biggest fears this age has is privacy, a camera at every corner and a chip in our passport. The first piece of work in the Recorders exhibition at the Manchester Art Museum was Pulse Index. This work was made up of visitor’s finger prints and pulses that have been recorded. A finger print is unique for every person and is our identity. Like many others, my reaction to this idea was cautious. What happens when I let it record my finger print, is that safe, where does it get recorded? Wanting to try everything in life I went ahead with the idea any way. Which I realized to see and make all these pieces in the room art for the rest of the day I had to interact and be part of it or else I wont understand it.

Every piece being exhibited was personal to everyone that walks in and chose to interact. Pulse Room, over a hundred light bulbs hung in a black room flashing to heartbeats. Somewhat peaceful and beautiful to stand under, seeing art off a wall is a great way to soak it in. Heartbeats are something so personal that without this room we would never think of being able to see. Standing under these beating bulbs felt intimate. Hundreds of heartbeats collected and shared for all to see. After spending time in this room I wanted to know more about the way this worked and what happens to all the beats. While speaking to an assistant he said many people had been put off by the idea of the public being able to see this information and not knowing where this was all being recorded to. This makes me wonder whether this was something the artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer began to notice about his audience or whether he had already anticipated this and wanted the audience to realize it themselves.

For me all this work wasn’t about being afraid of forms of surveillance, it was about hearing the people around you and not being afraid to be apart of it. A piece 33 Questions Per Minute allowed you to type in a question and see it on a wall of small LCD screens. It was like looking at Gods beeper. I was once told ‘if you have a question then someone somewhere will have the same to’ and this came to life in this piece. Seeing what people were thinking and choose to share with the public. Hearing peoples voices on the piece Microphones and seeing their belonging on the conveyor belt (named Please Empty Your Pockets), you cant get much closer to a stranger than that. Whether I’m on the same page as the artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer on this work or not I believe it’s more about how you experience it. I became less suspicious about what could be done with the information taken in this exhibition and more drawn in by what I was experiencing and sharing.