Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (born 1967 in Mexico City) is a Mexican-Canadian electronic artist who works with ideas from architecture, technological theater and performance.

Lozano-Hemmer lives and works in Montreal and Madrid.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967.

He emigrated to Canada in 1985 to study at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and then received his Bachelor of Science in physical chemistry from Concordia University in Montreal.

The son of Mexico City nightclub owners, Lozano-Hemmer was drawn to science but could not resist joining the creative activities of his friends.

Initially he worked in a molecular recognition lab in Montreal and published his research in Chemistry journals.

Though he did not pursue the sciences as a direct career, it has influenced his work in many ways, providing conceptual inspiration and practical approaches to create his work.

Lozano-Hemmer's work can be considered a blend of interactive art and performance art, using both large and small scales, indoor and outdoor settings, and a wide variety of audiovisual technologies.

Lozano-Hemmer is best known for creating and presenting theatrical interactive installations in public spaces across Europe, Asia and America.

Using robotics, real-time computer graphics, film projections, positional sound, internet links, cell phone interfaces, video and ultrasonic sensors, LED screens and other devices, his installations seek to interrupt the increasingly homogenized urban condition by providing critical platforms for participation.

Lozano-Hemmer's smaller-scaled sculptural and video installations explore themes of perception, deception and surveillance.

As an outgrowth of these various large scale and performance-based projects Lozano-Hemmer documents the works in photography editions that are also exhibited.

In 1994, Lozano-Hemmer coined the term "relational architecture" as the technological actualization of buildings and the urban environment with alien memory.

He aimed to transform the dominant narratives of a specific building or urban setting by superimposing audiovisual elements to affect it, effect it and re-contextualize it.

From 1997 to 2006, he built ten works of relational architecture beginning with Displaced Emperors and ending with Under Scan.

Lozano-Hemmer says, "I want buildings to pretend to be something other than themselves, to engage in a kind of dissimulation"

In 1999, he created Alzado Vectorial (or Vectorial Elevation), where internet participants directed searchlights over the central square in Mexico City.

The work was repeated in Vitoria-Gasteiz in 2002, in Lyon in 2003, in Dublin in 2004 and in Vancouver in 2010.

Subtitled Public (2005) is held in the Tate Collection in the United Kingdom.

In 2006, his work 33 Questions Per Minute was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 2007, he became the first artist to officially represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale, with a solo show at the Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel.

In 2014/2015 his work was presented in the Solo Exhibition A Draft of Shadows at Bildmuseet, Umeå University, Sweden.

Several of Lozano-Hemmer's installations include the use of words and sentences to add additional meaning.

These texts are used to elaborate upon a deeper meaning that involves a viewer's actions, to change or create an effect upon the atmosphere and perception.

Some of the text based installations, such as Third Person and Subtitled Public, place words upon the viewer himself.

Because of the random nature of these texts, the viewer has no control over what they are labeled as, incurring a sense of helplessness, and experience the pleasant and unpleasant connotations that are associated with the words placed upon themselves.

The text based installations such as 33 Questions Per Minute and There is No Business Like No Business are reliant upon the willing participation of the viewer.

These two forms of text installations are externally reflective, while the first two are internally reflective.

33 Questions Per Minute is an installation consisting of several screens programmed to generate possible questions and display them at a rate of 33 per minute.

The computer generating the questions can generate 55 billion unique questions, taking over 3,000 years to display them all.

In addition to viewing the automatically displaying the questions, members of the public can submit their own questions into the system.

Their participation shows up on the screens immediately, and is registered by the program.

Third Person is the second piece of the ShadowBox series of interactive displays with a built-in computerized tracking system.

This piece shows the viewer's shadow, composed hundreds of tiny words that are in fact all the verbs of the dictionary conjugated in the third person.

The portrait of the viewer is drawn in real time by active words, which appear automatically to fill his or her silhouette.

There Is No Business Like No Business is a blinking neon sign, whose speed is directly proportional to the number of times that the word "economy" has appeared in online news items within the past 24 hours.

Subtitled Public consists of an empty exhibition space where visitors are detected by a computerized surveillance system.

When people enter the space, the system generates a subtitle for each person and projects it onto him or her: the subtitle is chosen at random from a list of all verbs conjugated in the third person.

The only way of getting rid of a subtitle is to touch another person, which leads to the two subtitles being exchanged.

His work gave to the public a free entertainment, and he also help them to have a marvelous experience.[15]non-primary source needed