Recorders: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Hayley Andrew

Recorders at Manchester art gallery is a new exhibition by Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. The exhibition is entirely interactive, encouraging the viewer to actively participate and engage with the pieces shown. On initial entry to the exhibition space, your role as the viewer is clearly defined and the large lightbox showing ‘Pulse Index’ is both intriguing and exciting, showing various sizes of highly defined fingerprints. The smaller box to the left which is used to scan your fingerprint and monitor your heartbeat is subtly placed in the wall, again inviting the viewer to place themselves into the unknown. Moving around the space, it becomes clear that Lozano-Hemmer is focusing on themes of self-representation, control, surveillance and repetition. In particular, two of the pieces exhibited explored these themes successfully and particularly interested me as the
viewer.

Pulse Room
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‘Pulse Room’ uses 300 incandescent light bulbs, uniformed in a large open corridor. A sensor placed at one end of the room uses the participants touch to monitor heartbeat and this is then transferred into the bulbs and they effectively flash at the rhythm of the participant’s heart rate. Previous participants heartbeats are also stored in the system, each moving down a bulb when a new entry is stored. The reaction amongst fellow students was mainly a positive one, however I felt a more negative connotation to the piece. Some would argue Lozano-Hemmer is representing a sense a co-operation and community; all heartbeats living alongside each other as singular parts that join to make the whole. However the fragility of the slight glass bulbs spoke to me of the preciousness of life and how easily your bulb could ‘switch off’. There is also a sense of control and a strong link to how we are monitoring our lives using technology. We are tracking and evaluating something as natural as our heartbeat, using a machine to follow one of our most primal and natural processes. The piece also suggested to me a strange sense of almost repetition - although the bulbs were flashing almost intermittently, there always seemed to be a sense of rhythm to the piece. Are our own personal heartbeats really as individual as we perceive them to be? Or are we simply elements in a system, beating together in a collective rhythm?

Close-Up
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‘Close-up’ was another piece that I found particularly interesting, however for entirely different reasons. The piece uses a small monitor on a wall, displaying a seemingly abstract image that constantly shifts. As the imagine is ambiguous, again we are invited as the viewer to fully engage with the piece – in order to see the image, you must get up close to the screen and peer into the image. As you look into the piece, a small closed circuit hidden camera records your image then projects this into the piece. Not only are you looking at your own image, you are also witnessing the face of other viewers and their reactions to the piece. As the image constantly shifts, you are never fully aware of exactly what it is you are looking at. There is a strong sense of surveillance that surrounds this piece as you are essentially ‘looking at the looked at’. The smaller frames also represent the many monitors used for viewing CCTV – a technology we are all completely familiar with. There is also a high sense of control involved in this piece. As you are invited to look into the monitor you are instantly recorded without your knowledge or consent. Again this represents Lozano-Hemmers feelings towards our technological age of surveillance. Themes surrounding self-representation are also evident in this piece; do we really appear how we perceive ourselves to be?

I very much enjoyed the exhibition, in particular the interactive nature of the pieces on show. One aspect that particularly intrigued me was how Lozano-Hemmer presented some very negative ideas surrounding conformity, control and surveillance in a very playful environment. The viewer was the definitive tool throughout the exhibition – in each of the seven pieces, the presence of the viewer is imperative to the piece. Without the viewer, the pieces could not function. More importantly however, in the majority of the pieces the participation of others in also critical in the piece functioning correctly. Lozano-Hemmer presents some interesting themes and I am interested in further exploring some of his other works.