Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Recorders

A conveyor belt that records the items you put on it. A room walled with the fingerprints and heartbeats of its 10,000 most recent visitors. Two walls of tape measures that record the amount of time you’ve been exploring Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s strange and wonderful devices. These are just three of the 12 installations that make up Recorders, a collection of the Mexican-Canadian electronic artist’s recent work.

Recorders is an exploration of art, technology, surveillance, play, ego and communion. The full potential of Lozano-Hemmer’s work is entirely dependent on your participation, which forces you up close and personal in a way few other experiences might. You don’t have to, of course – you can just watch his clever machines operate with the data acquired from previous visitors. But if no one participated, nothing would change, which one suspects is rather the point.

The changes on display in Recorders aren’t particularly radical: a new heartbeat is added to the lights in 'Pulse Room'; new shadows play back at you in 'People on People'. Lozano-Hemmer sends us teetering on the fine line between knowing we’re being watched and being kind of pleased about it. The suggestion that technologies with the potential to coerce, survey and repress individuals are here at the service of playfulness and participation hints at broader political implications. Technologies have no inherent value in Lozano-Hemmer’s work – they are merely tools capable of manipulation for better or worse.

Those implications are best explored in a series of videos documenting Lozano-Hemmer’s large public scale works, such as 'Pulse Park' (2008) and 'Voz Alta' (2008). Both these works realise examine questions of human communion and democratic participation in more public and volatile environments than the MCA is capable of creating. The inclusion of these videos prevents Recorders from slipping into an exclusively sensory or entertainment-driven experience.

Showing for free at the MCA, Recorders admirably puts its money where its participation-friendly mouth is. Small children (and those in touch with their inner child) will delight at the bevy of buttons to press and levers to activate; the politically minded will follow Lozano-Hemmer’s thread on questions of surveillance technologies. And most anyone will enjoy the feeling that comes with seeing your own heartbeat, just for a moment, light up an entire room.

Photo: Pulse Room 2006 installation view, Recorders, Manchester Art Gallery, United Kingdom, 2010-11 incandescent light bulbs, voltage controllers, heart rate sensors, computer and metal sculpture Dimensions variable Image courtesy the artist and Manchester Art Gallery Photo: Peter Mallet