Rafeal Lozano Hemmer: Levels of Nothingness, Microphones, Reporters With Borders, Suface Tension

Levels of Nothingness

“Levels of Nothingness” is an interactive installation-performance where colours are derived from the human voice. A computerized microphone analyzes a live voice and controls a full rig of robotic lights to create a colour show using the language and clichés of spectacular Rock-and-Roll concert lighting. For the New York performances, Isabella Rossellini first activated the installation as she read seminal philosophical texts on skepticism, perception and color, including Francisco Sanches' treatise That Nothing Is Known (1581) and writings by Kandinsky, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Alexander Luria, among others. Following this performance, the general public was invited to test the colour-generating microphone. This project is inspired by but tangential to Kandinsky’s proposals for a performative synaesthesia that links the senses, most notably his opera “The Yellow Sound” (1912). In “Levels of Nothingness”, skeptical philosophy and colour theory, read out loud, generates a quiet choreography of abstract light designs. How it works: A computerized microphone analyzes a live voice in real time and extracts physical information (pitch, wavelength, period, amplitude, intensity and speed) and linguistic information (accent, intonation, speech recognition and pattern matches). This information then automatically triggers and modulates robotic lights to create effects like fly-aways, bump cues, colour chases, ballyhoos, builds and flash-throughs. The lights completely surround the public and their default state, if no one is participating, is still and off.

Microphones

"Microphones" is an interactive installation featuring one or several 1939-vintage Shure microphones, placed on mic stands around the exhibition room at different heights. Each microphone has been modified so that inside its head is a tiny loudspeaker and a circuit board connected to a network of hidden control computers. When a public member speaks into a microphone, it records his or her voice and immediately plays back the voice of a previous participant, as an echo from the past.

The result is surprising because the sound comes directly from the microphone, which "speaks back", and because it is a memory of what already has been said. People initially only say something short like "hello" or "I am the decider" but as they realize that the resulting echo is actually recordings from previous participants they start giving longer speeches, they sing, or the play "exquisite corpse". Half the time the microphones play back the voice that was just recorded, while the other half they reproduce a recording at random from up to 600,000 that each microphone can store. This distribution allows the participant to understand the interaction but it also creates an experience that is out of his or her control. Ultimately, the piece's content is entirely generated by the participation of the public.

Reporters With Borders

A high resolution interactive display that simultaneously shows 864 video clips of news anchors taken from TV broadcasts in the United States and Mexico. As the viewer stands in front of the piece his or her silhouette is shown on the display and within it reporters begin to talk. Every 5 minutes the piece switches the video clips - from a database of 1600 - and classifies them along gender, race and country, so that for instance on the left there are only American reporters and on the right only Mexicans. The piece exists as a small "shadow box" version and as a large-scale projection room. A C-print lightjet edition also exists.

Suface Tension

"Surface Tension" is an interactive installation where an image of a giant human eye follows the observer with orwellian precision.This work was inspired by a reading of Georges Bataille's text The Solar Anus during the first Gulf War: first wide-spread deployment of camera-guided "intelligent bombs". Present-day computerised surveillance techniques employed by the Department of Homeland Security in the United States through the Patriot Act, provide a new and distressing backdrop for this piece. The installation was originally developed in 1992 at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid as a stage module for a theatre work by the Transition State Theory troupe. Since then, Surface Tension has been presented as an art installation, typically on a plasma screen.

source: Rafael Lozano Hemmer