The interactive art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: psychic resonance, surveillance and a murmuration of lights
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Tuesday, August 22, 2023
Powerhouse, Technology, Theft, Exhibition, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Parent, Light, Carbon, Element, Movement, Plant, Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, Manic, Collection, Museum, Powerhouse Museum, First Nations, Rafael, Environment, Bird, Glass, Social media, Interior design, Entertainment, Television, Toy, Standard atmosphere (unit)
We are in the Rafael Lozano-Hemmer exhibition Atmospheric Memory at the Powerhouse in Sydney.
Key Points:
- 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.