The interactive art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: psychic resonance, surveillance and a murmuration of lights
We are in the Rafael Lozano-Hemmer exhibition Atmospheric Memory at the Powerhouse in Sydney.
- We are in the Rafael Lozano-Hemmer exhibition Atmospheric Memory at the Powerhouse in Sydney.
- The boy’s photograph was taken as soon as he entered the exhibition and then publicly projected onto his shadow.
- Like the social media it replicates, the exhibition content is a product of its users – which can feel like theft.
Themes of surveillance
- This work is a collaboration between Lozano-Hemmer and the pioneering Polish projection artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, and presents Wodiczko’s well-known theme of surveillance.
- Read more:
Not Big Brother, but close: a surveillance expert explains some of the ways we’re all being watched, all the timeThis type of art is what Lozano-Hemmer calls “relational architecture”, invoking the ideas of engagement and social experimentation (the “relational”) and the built environment.
- Several toddlers, enchanted by the sounds and lights, run frantically away from their parents and back again.
Lost connections
- This Sydney version of the show incorporates an eccentric variety of objects from the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences’ collection.
- The connections between these collection items and Lozano-Hemmer’s work are hard to understand, except that they all connect to the atmosphere in various ways … at a stretch.
Recreated, reformed and re-presented
- The overarching idea for Atmospheric Memory is that voice activation and image recording can be stored then endlessly recreated, reformed and re-presented to the audience.
- Lozano-Hemmer has repositioned Babbage’s interest in psychic resonance and spirit reflection alongside his technological forecasting.
- But Babbage also fell for the late-19th-century mystic allure of life-death illusionism, replayed here as the virtual/real dichotomy.