[Lozano-Hemmer Lights It Up]

Artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has done some particularly interesting work over the last decade using light and projection to transform large-scale urban spaces. Steve Dietz was looking to have him do a big commission for the opening of the new Walker Art Center building, and we had discussed having him teach at Carleton during the time he was in Minnesota executing the piece. But alas, the Walker pulled the plug on the generator, so Lozano-Hemmer's lights are out. Nonetheless, it gave me an opportunity to look through his past work, and today's post is occasioned by a new piece just about to open in Japan.

Lozano-Hemmer is a Mexican-Canadian artist who uses the term "relational architecture" to refer to his "large-scale interactive events that transform emblematic buildings through new technological interfaces. His previous pieces, done in collaboration with Canadian engineer-composer Will Bauer, have involved the deployment of data-networks, monumental projection, robotic lights, custom-made sensors, samplers and other devices to create collective participatory experiences in public space."

We're lucky that as a tech-savvy, new media artist Lozano-Hemmer--whose installation works are necessarily transitory--has been good about making short online films documenting key works. [Quicktime required.] "Two Origins" projected the 13th century heretical text, the "Book of Two Origins," onto the Place du Capitole in Toulouse. "The texts overlap as they are projected from two separate projectors; only when passers-by block one of the texts with their body is the other text readable within his or her shadow. "Two Origins" attempts to connect disparate planes of experience, inviting people to scan texts that had been folded by history and intolerance."

In "Body Movies" "thousands of photo portraits taken on the streets of the cities where the project is exhibited are shown using robotically controlled projectors. However, the portraits only appear inside the projected shadows of local passers-by, whose silhouettes measure between 2 to 25 metres high, depending on how far people were from the powerful light sources placed on the floor of the square. A custom-made computer vision tracking system triggers new portraits as old ones are revealed." This work was installed in several European cities.

You'll find other interesting things in the nice documentation of his work--including writing and curating--at the Fundacion Telefonica. He had an interesting interview with Geert Lovink in 2002 found on Nettime. Plus, find more info on him at V2.

In Lozano-Hemmer's new project at the Yamaguchi Center "short text messages sent by people over the Internet or by cell phone will be converted into patterns of flashing lights in the sky, turning the Japanese city of Yamaguchi into a giant communication switchboard. [Image above, and more visualizations here.]

"Amodal Suspension" will be a large-scale interactive installation where people may send short text messages to each other using a cell phone or web browser connected to address www.amodal.net . However, rather than being sent directly, the messages will be encoded as unique sequences of flashes and sent to the sky with a network of 20 robotically-controlled searchlights.

The signaling will be similar to Morse code or the flashing of fireflies, the lights will modulate their intensity to represent different text characters. Each message, once encoded, will be suspended in the sky of the city, bouncing around the YCAM center, relayed from one searchlight to another. An email will be sent to the intended recipient to notify him or her that a message is waiting for them in the sky of Yamaguchi. Each light sequence will continue to circulate until the recipient or somebody else catches the message and reads it.

The Project will create an interactive mesh of light over the city, a floating cloud of data that can be written on and read. The piece will provide a connective platform in which local residents and remote participants from different regions and countries can establish ad hoc relationships. While visualizing the traffic of information on an urban scale, the piece is also intended as a deviation from the assumed transparency of electronic communication."

[Quotes from Fundacion Telefonica]

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