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Email PageRafael Lozano Hemmer 2006
September 15, 2006- October 21, 2006
Reception: September 15, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
bitforms
529 W 20th St Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Under Scan Portraits (2005) |  Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Standards and Double Standards (2004) |
“[Lozano-Hemmer’s] work may in fact be a perfect opportunity for us to visualize technology…but also actively join in creating an artistic expression of science’s modern advances. We can even control it for once.”—International Herald Tribune
bitforms gallery is pleased to announce the second U.S. solo exhibition of RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER—the Mexican-Canadian new media artist who has achieved international prominence for his monumental, interactive public art “interventions.” At the crossroads of architecture and theater, Lozano-Hemmer’s work has redefined the meaning of “interactivity,” using perverse technologies of surveillance to engage participants in an active, critical way. The upcoming bitforms gallery exhibition will feature the more intimate installations recently developed by the artist and reflecting his preoccupations with computer vision, portraiture and phantasmagoria. On view will be Eye Contact (2006), his latest creation just shown at Art Basel, and the critically acclaimed Standards and Double Standards (2004), among others.
The recipient of three awards from Ars Electronica, including a Golden Nica, Lozano-Hemmer is the mastermind behind Vectorial Elevation (1999), commissioned for Mexico City’s celebration of the Millennium and considered the world’s largest interactive installation; Body Movies (2001), presented in five European cities and to be staged again in Hong Kong next November; and the most recent, Under Scan (2006), which transformed pedestrian areas in the East Midlands region of the U. K. into huge shadow playgrounds. In addition, Lozano-Hemmer’s artworks were recently acquired by prestigious contemporary art collections—Surface Tension by the Daros Foundation in Zürich, and 33 Questions per Minute by The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Lozano-Hemmer’s work taps into the technology of data-networks, robotics, sensors, cell phones, projections and other custom-made devices to create “connective, participatory experiences,” in which several realities co-exist. Playful, yet always provocative, his installations have been praised for creating platforms for group experience rather than individual interfaces for solitary participation.
Eye Contact, which is to receive its U.S. premiere at bitforms gallery, builds on Lozano-Hemmer’s concepts developed in Under Scan, his large-scale “Relational Architecture” project in which passers-by activate portraits in their own shadows. Eye Contact is a 41” x 31.5” high-resolution display depicting 800 simultaneous videos portraits of people lying down. As soon as a computerized surveillance camera detects the presence of a visitor, it triggers the portraits to “wake up”: Hundreds of people simultaneously turn around to make eye contact with the viewer, creating an uncanny experience that questions who is the observer and who the observed, and blurring the boundaries between public and private space.
Also receiving its U.S. premiere at bitforms, Standards and Double Standards—originally shown at the 2004 Art Basel art fair and hailed by Beaux Arts Magazine in Paris as “Best of Basel”—turns the body into a target of predatory, electronic surveillance. A dozen buckled belts—fetishes of paternal authority—hang at waist height from stepper motors on the ceiling. Controlled by a computerized tracking system, the belts automatically rotate to follow visitors, slowly turning their buckles to face them. When several people enter the room, their presence affects the entire group of belts, creating chaotic patterns of interference. Development of Standards and Double Standards was funded by a Rockefeller Fellowship and a grant from the Daniel Langlois Foundation.
“Lozano-Hemmer’s work requires us to reassess our notions of the analog and the digital, of language and code, meaning and force, human and nonhuman communication,” writes Brian Massumi in Artforum Magazine. “But it does so not by commenting, critiquing, or sending a message itself. It does it aesthetically, by which I do not mean “beautifully” (although his installations always are that, too). Rather, I mean “aesthetic” in something closer to the etymological meaning: as in aesthesis, “making sensible.”
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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bitforms was last updated: 2008-11-23
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