TRACKERS, from participation to presence

«In my opinion, art should slow down communication, add noise, intercept and divert messages, create complex silences...» R.L.H

TRACKERS by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is the second solo exhibition presented by La Gaîté Lyrique since its opening. Theme-based, it brings together 12 works by the Mexican artist which make us ponder on our technological society, our relations with machines and the new arrangements that these relations induce and produce.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer bases himself on the assumption that this omnipresent technology affects all our lives – even those of us who do not use it, by rebound, ricochet and echo effect in a networked world where everything has an effect on everything else.

«I work with technology not because it is something new, but because it is inevitable, «a second skin» as McLuhan put it. […] What remains for us to do now is to divert this technology, use it to create connecting, critical or poetic experiences.» R.L.H

It is by subverting it that Rafael Lozano-Hemmer directs our attention to the core problems raised by the interactions between humans and technological objects. The detours, the connective and critical experiences mentioned by the artist are all keywords which evoke the hacker philosophy and ethic: a viewpoint which can be read between the lines in all the interactive works exhibited in TRACKERS.

The artist also shares with the hackers this desire to lay everything bare, in full view, to show the insides of the devices. Even when technological constraints prevent him from showing all the tricks – including the cables in Frequency and Volume (2003) and the diodes in Flat Sun (2011) –  it is by the variety of forms shaping the same idea that Rafael Lozano-Hemmer succeeds in revealing the mechanism without divesting them of their wondrous aspect.

The look – in all its directions, its points of fixation and its convergence lines – is one of the basic themes in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's work. Through all the installations, he never stops asking and questioning: How do we look upon technology? How does it perceive us? How do we control it? How does it monitor us?

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer put forth his thoughts on technology in daily life by filling the public space with his visual works. At first monumental in scale and format, the works that have made him famous served as urban structures supporting his raw material: light. Utilization of light has remained the artist's hallmark, but its use and significance has evolved steadily over the years.

Several works brought together retrospectively in the ensemble titled Relational Architecture make these changes clear. In Vectorial Elevation (1999) – designed specially for Mexico's entry into the year 2000 – Internet users were invited to send messages which were transformed into luminous movements in the sky with the help of powerful projectors. With Amodal Suspension (2003), they could send SMS's which were translated into light messages before being delivered to their recipients.

While these two works developed an aesthetic of relation and meeting, Apostasis (2008) – a work presented at La Gaîté Lyrique – develops an other logic. Beams are still very much present, but the management of light has changed. Here the device is not friendly: the light is no longer controlled by a message that is sent voluntarily, but shies away as soon as it detects the presence of a person. The message is blurred as there are two possible interpretations.

In fact, the room plunged in darkness and swept by searchlights reminds us as much of helicopters hunting for fugitives as the catwalk lights after which we all run in order to be famous and visible for the 15 minutes promised by Warhol.

In Apostasis, the light never stays on the body, shying away as soon as anyone steps into the beam. And yet, the detection involves as much interaction and interactivity as in the other devices. It is the relation to the otherness which seems to have changed and which makes us question ourselves about the manner in which we consider technology: how do we act with and through it? How do we, as human beings, define ourselves in this exchange of (good?) practices ?

Though no longer primary in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's digital installations, light retains a symbolic importance as a metaphor of the chiaroscuro characterizing the media society. It also affirms a certain similarity with information technology in its immateriality: both light and information are streams of particles (photons or bits) which illuminate or leave surfaces in shadow when blocked.

Just as light is perceived by its impact on a surface, the interactive works in the TRACKERS exhibition have several levels of materiality and visibility. Being interactive devices, these installations are based on the possibility of a relation between the informatic-electronic system and its external environment. As Jean-Louis Boissier says in his article «Interactivity as perspective» : the interactivity which constitutes the work is sometimes its very substance. 

The interactive work has many layers to recall Annick Bureaud's explanation : first the work conceived – that is to say, the concept as devised by the artist, next, the perceptible work – the interface that materializes this device, and finally, the work as perceived, that is, the manner in which the device will react to the actions of the public confronting it.

Having three levels of perceptibility, interactive works intrinsically need a third party to be activated. This third party finds himself part of the installation Third Person (2006) which transforms a shadow into a stream of words conjugated in the third person singular.

The interactive works are a testament to Marcel Duchamp's famous words: «it is the viewers who make the picture» to which Rafael Lozano-Hemmer adds: «the artwork is created by the individual's participation, it is not sealed-off and it needs to show itself in order to be.»

It is thus not just a coincidence that the TRACKERS exhibition begins with Surface Tension (1992) : in a large screen, a close-up of an eye follows the visitor. The eye questions the exhibition space – by asking what makes the artwork, when and by what means – but also more generally the space in which we exhibit ourselves.

«All of today's works of art, not only the digital ones, are endowed with consciousness. It is not new, but now we are conscious of their consciousness. They listen to us, they see us, they perceive us, they wait for us to stimulate them..» R.L.H

In the RECORDERS eheld at the Manchester Art Gallery at the start of the last term, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer had selected several devices such as Microphones (2008), Pulse Index (2010) ou Pulse Room (2006) record the heart beats, fingerprints, voices and pictures of spectators who had accepted to be part of the game. The exhibition functioned only by the goodwill of the viewers, whose recorded and stored actions became the very stuff of the exhibition.

«In RECORDERS, the artworks listen to, live and feel the public, they show their awareness, record and play back the traces left behind by the public, traces which are collected over the entire duration of the exhibition.» R.L.H

The exhibition put the emphasis on our awareness regarding machines, of their awareness regarding us and their monitoring of us by relentlessly remembering all our facts and actions.

«In opposition to the idea of creation by the public's act of seeing, one must also admit the other side of the coin: the panopticon eye as been computerized. Artists have long denounced the surveillance camera's predatory eye (…) but what is new is the growing computerization of the surveillance devices invading our public and private spaces. (…) Also, what is new is the amount of memory available to these devices (…).» R.L.H

Other artists like Hasan Elahi and Wafaa Bilal explore the theme of surveillance by incarcerating themselves within a digital or physical device, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer leaves visitors some freedom: the viewer is caught but not captured.

«To hide from my work, it is obviously enough to simply not participate - as all the elements in TRACKERS are rather vampirical: without the public they have neither life nor meaning.» R.L.H

TRACKERS extends Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's thought by orienting it differently. The selection of the 12 installations and their specific arrangement gives them a new turn and the viewers other contours.

The public's participation is always required, the devices come to life at his approach while stirring up their set of questions. As, to see clearly, the works look more for our presence than requiring our participation. The installations no longer ask for our hand, our voice or our heart, contenting themselves with our silhouette and our shadow.

While the artworks in RECORDERS needed the public's participation in order to record and transform it, those in TRACKERS question our presence with respect to a technology which sometimes tends to free itself of it. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer actually admits being strongly influenced by the American military drones which no longer need humans to drop bombs on other humans.

«These works highlight the fact that absence and presence are not opposites, and that several realities co-exist at any given moment.» R.L.H

In TRACKERS, it is the diversity of realities and interpretations that is put forward, leaving the viewer in a constant ambiguity. Every device is a fissure which swallows and melds meanings. The interfaces transport us into a world with multiple facets: in The compagny of colors (2009) the figures are broken up into innumerable colors and in Blow Up (2007), faces are fragmented in a visual representation of the multitude of ways we have of showing ourselves to the world and of perceiving it thanks to technology.

By becoming activated by our presence, the works collected in the TRACKERS exhibition remind us that we also activate our universe by moving around among the shadows and nuances, and that it fashions us as much as we fashion it.