Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

(Mexico City, Mexico, 1967)

Electronic artist, he seeks poetic situations in the use of technology to practice an art of resistance showing the effects and defects that technology causes on our lives. In his installations he captures data from the human body and transforms them into artistic representations using technological devices; he is a conjurer who makes invisible processes tangible. Warehouse of hunches, it is a meeting of a hundred light bulbs that flash at the heart rate of the attendees. In Voice Matrix, 800 sound channels, associated with LED lights, ring and flash at the same time, viewers can record their message that merges with the tidal wave of words, forming an unintelligible sound mass. Circular and vicious breathing is, perhaps, the most striking proposal. In it, the visitor can enter a sealed transparent cabin and mix his breath with the concentrated breath of everyone who was there before. Call on Water is a kind of aquatic mirror in which when a person approaches it, a mechanism is activated that releases words in the form of steam. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice, Cuenca, Havana, Istanbul, Kochi, Liverpool, Melbourne NGV, Moscow, New Orleans, New York ICP, Seoul, Seville, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney and Wuzhen. He has created public art pieces for the Millennium Celebrations in Mexico City (1999), the Expansion of the European Union in Dublin (2004), the Student Massacre Memorial in Tlatelolco (2008), the Vancouver Olympic Games (2010) , the pre-opening exhibition of the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi (2015), and the activation of the Raurica Roman Theater in Basel (2018). Collections housing his work include MoMA and Guggenheim in New York, TATE in London, MAC and MBAM in Montreal, Jumex and MUAC in Mexico City, DAROS in Zurich, MONA in Hobart, 21C Museum in Kanazawa. He has received two BAFTA awards from the British Academy of Interactive Art in London, a Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica in Austria, a Rave "Artist of the Year" award from Wired Magazine, a Rockefeller Fellowship, the Trophée des Lumières in Lyon, an international Bauhaus Prize in Dessau, the title of Compagnon des Arts et des Lettres du Québec in Quebec and the Governor General's Award in Canada. He has lectured at Goldsmiths College, Bartlett School, Princeton, Harvard, UC Berkeley, Cooper Union, USC, MIT MediaLab, Guggenheim Museum, LA MOCA, Netherlands Architecture Institute, Cornell, UPenn, SCAD, Danish Architecture Center, CCA in Montreal, ICA in London and the Art Institute of Chicago.

He participated in Medialab Madrid within the framework of the Dataspace exhibitions: Mexican Electronic Art with the work Public Subtitled. The installation consists of a series of infrared sensors that detect the presence of visitors inside a darkened room. Once human presence is detected, three projectors randomly send a series of words over their bodies; The piece is an inquiry into surveillance and classification systems. The purpose of the words that are projected onto the body is to disarm and unmask the uses of technology that is used today to control and characterize individuals.