Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Personally, I found "Recorders" to be a truly beautiful and thought provoking exhibition highlighting the concept that in space, absence and presence are not opposites as one may presume. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer explains,  'A lot of my work is about interpenetration, embodiment and co-presence. I like stressing the way many realities co-exist in the same time and space.'

 Appropriately the artist refers to Duchamp's statement that “le regard fait le tableau” (the look makes the painting) since the work revolves around its relationship with the audience. 

As you enter your required data, which was in the form of fingerprints, voice and general presence, you change the work forever, it is now holding a piece of your information, a piece of you.

Highly inspired by the  book The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Cesares. The book published in 1940 is a science fiction novel which introduces a post-photographic device which records and projects in three dimensions. In the novel, the protagonist falls in love with a woman who turns out to be a three dimensional projection, a recorder loop. a poetic evocation of the experience of love, an inquiry into how we know one another, and a still-relevant examination of how technology has changed our relationship with reality.

(...)No one could distinguish them from living persons(they appear to be circulating in another world with which our own has made a chance encounter). If we grant consciousness, and all that distinguishes us from objects, to the persons who surround us, we shall have no valid reason to deny it to the persons created by machinery. When all the senses are synchronized, the soul emerges'

Dr Morel in The Invention of Morel, Adolpho Bioy Cesares, 1940

As the seduction of participation made me commit to saying a few (honestly!) words on 'voices' and give my fingerprint in 'pulse index', concern over identity did cross my mind. This is something we do possibly without hesitation everyday. Store cards, Facebook, CCTV even this blog; all data collected with information of ourselves. And as warned, the ominous and predatory nature did emerge as I engaged with the works.

The most beautiful and poetic of all works for me was Pulse room. As I engaged in the work, My heartbeat, something which is the symbol of my life, left my body to join all the other heartbeats in a collective. Each incandescent bulb is a representation of the people. Some shone brighter than others. This work was inspired by Macario, directed by Roberto Gavaldón in 1960, a film where the protagonist suffers a hunger-induced hallucination in which every person is represented by a lit candle in a cave.

 

I came away from the exhibition, positive about art and technology working together to convey ideas and thoughts as we accept our co-presence with it.We are coming to an understanding that our reality has changed because of it. As in the exhibition, technology needs our input but as we accept this as an extensions of ourselves, to possibly see it as a way of bearing our souls, the question is will our souls emerge or disappear?