Standard atmosphere (unit)

• 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 time

  This 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.