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An Urban-Scale Light Show Splices The Sky Over Tasmania

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's "Articulated Intersect" is an audio-reactive light spectacular.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s light shows are more than just reflections of his artistic vision. While the Mexico City-born artist does articulate all the programming, 3D graphing, and staging himself, he’s often less concerned with his role in the actual performance than he is with that of the audience. Considering that his performances literally couldn’t happen without audience presence and participation, it makes sense.

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Like many of his other installation and conceptual pieces, Lozano-Hemmer’s light shows thrive off of crowdsourcing. Take, for example, 2007’s Pulse Front. Staged in Toronto, Canada’s Harbourfront, the interactive performance piece consisted of 20 robotic searchlights and 10 metal sculptures. When a participant grabbed onto one of the sculptures, a few of the search lights would pulsed at the same speed as the participant’s heart rate. The result was beyond flashy— it was a sky-wide broadcast of real-time biometric data.

In continuation of that tradition, Lozano-Hemmer is in the midst of installing another urban-scale light performance along the waterfront of Hobart, Australia. It’s called Articulated Intersect, and it’s part of the Dark Mofo festival, a 10-day long celebration, run by the the Museum of New and Old Art, of Tasmania’s winter season. We Skyped with Lozano-Hemmer while Intersections was being installed, to see what we could expect when the project debuts this Friday, and how he plans on incorporating his audience this time around.

The Creators Project: Could you give us some background on the Articulated Intersect project?

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Originally this project was conceived for the US-Mexico border. When I first thought of it I wanted, like so many other artists, to work along the Tijuana-San Diego border. I’m very inspired by the work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Emily Hicks, like the original broken line people who facilitated performances across the border, which dealt with this binational divide. I wanted to make a project where searchlights would be used not in this celebratory, victory-parade, carnival-esque mall-opening way, but rather to try and connect the two countries at the same time, and have a reference to the predatorial lighting that is quite often used in the tracking of Mexican migrants by la migra [immigration police], helicopters, and the Minutemen.

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The original concept is that you’d have three controllers in Mexico and three in the US, and as you’re pointing each, you’re literally penetrating the air space of the other country with a powerful search light, which can be seen from a ten mile radius. In so doing you would be setting up these light sabers or bridges of light between the two countries, to be interpreted as a violent transgression of air space but also a connective gesture across the borders. That’s its origin. And I’m still hoping to be able to do that at some point. It’s a logistical - no, more a financial problem than a logistical problem at this point.

Logistically, do you think it would be possible? Or something both governments would allow?

I genuinely don’t believe the authorities would have a problem with it. At least not between Tijuana and San Diego. It’d be most natural to do it there, because it’s where there’s the most fluid connection between both countries. It also hosts the biggest tradition of border art, so it’s not like I’m inventing anything. It’d be on the backs of hundreds of other incredible arts.

Except you’d be bringing a new media angle that would build upon that history in a 21st century way.

Right. In a way that’s consistent with what is happening. I often say I work with new media not because it’s new or original, but because it’s inevitable - the language of our time. I always try to present new media as something that is normal, as opposed to something that is new.

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It first showed in Montreal, correct?

Yes. It first showed at the Triennale Québecois, which was a triennial for Quebec artists in Montreal, Canada.

What’s different about the Hobart edition?

There are several differences, but the most important one is the way the lights are being used. They’re more like aggregates of light. Basically, we have 6 controllers and each of the controllers controls one light. In Montreal, we were creating a dome-like structure, based on Buckminster Fuller’s Tetrahedron. So as you moved your lever, what you were controlling was the apex of intersection of three lights, which were creating this enormous tetrahedron in the sky. For Hobart, we’re basically putting three search lights extremely close to the controller, and putting the person right in the middle of a big compound beam made itself out of three beams. So it’s a much easier beam to follow because you’re setting up this one-to-one relationship. Your haptic lever, the physical interface, is moving this enormous compound beam.

We’re doing this because of visibility. It’s a lot easier to see the beam when it’s compounded. Tasmania does not have any pollution. When we work in Mexico City, for example, the pollution provides a “natural fog machine,” which is great because you see the beams well, but Tasmania is so clean! You really need the extra punch of agglomerating the lights into a single beam.

The other new thing is that it’s on the waterfront, in an area called Sullivan’s Cove. The reflections on the water double up the effects very nicely.

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The final difference is that we’ve added sound. Now there’s feedback when there’s an intersection between two or more participants. The computer makes a ticking sound to let you know when that’s happened.

The context is not like in Montreal, where the associated event was focused around visual arts. Here, the Dark Mofo festival is based around performing arts.

When the lights intersect, is the sound that gets generated amplified, or local to the user?

It’s local. For light to have materiality, you need to employ all the tricks you can. The motion is certainly one. The haptic feedback is one, too. When you’re moving the lever and the lights intersect, you literally feel it because of a series of brakes and clutches which slow down the lever and give it autonomy. Then the sound comes in for extra effect.

I was curious to know about that responsiveness. How do the lights know when the beams interact? I read about the optical encoders, and I’m assuming that it’s based on the physical position of the lever, which is programmed into a system that relates light position with lever position.

That’s exactly right. The controller is stainless steel which has a pan-and-tilt head. The pan-and-tilt allows you to point the lever in any direction. The encoders tell the computers at what angle each lever is oriented. And from that we have the 3 dimensional position of the target in space - that is, where the light is pointed.

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In terms of the technical aspects of the project, the most complicated thing is the 3 dimensional calibration. It happens in 3 dimensions, but also 3 orientations. For each search light and each controller, we need to know not only its GPS position in the city - we also need to know the precise orientation. They call it tilt, yaw and roll. Because even a slight variation of that means a huge difference to where the search light is pointed.

That calibration is basically what we have been configuring over the past 4 nights. We’ve just been sort of taking note and measuring what different pan and tilt values are giving us for the search lights, and then correcting that in a 3D world view program. Then the controllers themselves have the computers to make this happen, and they have these 4 clutches which, for example, not only give you the haptic feedback when there’s contact but prevent the lever from pointing the lights to a nearby hospital, or hotel, or bird sanctuary.

One final, broader question. To me, this project follows the path set by your earlier projects like Open Air, Pulse Front and Vectorial Elevation, which are kind of based on an urban, massive, crowdsourced “telecommunity.” What do you hope to achieve with each new iteration of your urban light projects?

It depends, but often times what I’m trying to do is personalize public space. Searchlights, as you know, are used in a militaristic way. They were originally used for anti-aircraft surveillance. But after the Second World War, they were used for celebration and in victory parades, so we now associate them with that. Sadly, these days that celebration is now affiliated with some kind of corporate event, where you’re encouraged to buy something. For me, what’s radical is to misuse these technologies, which were military but now are corporate, to create spectacles that aren’t passive, that go away from the fireworks culture of catharsis, and instead create platforms that are seeking complicity.

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The thing about all of the projects you mentioned is that if no one participates, they become static and do nothing. An activation from the public is required to animate the entire piece. So one of the things I hope to do with projects like this is to have that sense of relationship, of agency, of - why not? - power. Of being able to take individual expressions and amplify them to an urban scale.

Lozano-Hemmer will be busy installing new projects up through the end of this year. Find out what, where and when on his website.

All photos courtesy Museum of Old and New Art and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.

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