Rafael Lozano Hemmer: The Voice Tunnel, Zoom Pavilion, Pan-Anthem.

Voice Tunnel

“Voice Tunnel” is a large-scale interactive installation designed to transform the Park Avenue Tunnel during the “Summer Streets” Annual Celebration in New York City. The tunnel goes from 33rd to 40th streets and is open for pedestrians for the first time in its almost 200 year history. The piece consists of 300 powerful theatrical spotlights that produce columns of light along the walls and cladding of the tunnel. All fixtures are floormounted right beside the walls, seven feet from each other, shining past the spring line, fading along the internal curved surface of the tunnel, just reaching its crown.

The intensity of each light is automatically controlled by the voice recording of a participant who speaks into a special intercom that is in the middle of the tunnel. Silence is interpreted as zero intensity and speech modulates the brightness proportionally, creating a morse-like code of flashes. Once a recording is finished, the computer plays it back as a loop, both in the light fixtures that are closest to the intercom as well as on an inline loudspeaker.

As new people participate, old recordings get pushed away by one position down the array of lights. So that the “memory” of the installation is always getting recycled, with the oldest recordings on the edge of the tunnel and the newest ones in the middle. At any given time the tunnel is illuminated by the voices of 75 visitors. Once 75 people participate after you, your own recording disappears from the tunnel, like a memento mori.

The voices can be heard through an array of 150 loud-speakers placed along the tunnel, in perfect synchronicity to the blinking lights that are near-by. The effect of the project is not cacaphonous because each speaker does not play all 75 recordings, it only plays the voices from lights that are immediately beside it.

Zoom Pavilion

Zoom Pavilion is an interactive installation that consists of immersive projection on three walls, fed by 12 computerized surveillance systems trained on the public. The piece uses face recognition algorithms to detect the presence of participants and record their spatial relationship within the exhibition space. Zoom Pavilion is at once an experimental platform for self-representation and a giant microscope to connect the public to each other and track their assembly. Independent robotic cameras zoom in to amplify the images of the public with up to 35x magnification: the zooming sequences are disorienting as they change the entire image “landscape” from easily recognizable wide shots of the crowd to abstract close-ups. The whole installation is in a fluid state of camera movement, highlighting different participants and creating a constantly changing animation based on optical amplification and tracking.

Zoom Pavilion marks the first collaboration between artists Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Krzysztof Wodiczko. It was originally conceived for the Architecture Biennale in Beijing but only realized for Lozano-Hemmer’s current solo exhibition in Mexico City’s MUAC Museum. These artists' practice often involves transformation of an existing built environment using projection technologies to “augment” the site with alternative histories, connections or public relationships. The term “projection mapping” is now used often to describe techniques that Wodiczko was already deploying over 30 years ago. Meanwhile Lozano-Hemmer’s contribution to the field in the past 20 years has been to develop ways to make mapped projections interactive with the general public. This piece emphasizes the temporary construction of connective space in relation to predatory technologies of detection and control.

Pan-Anthem

Pan-Anthem (2014) is an interactive sound installation where hundreds of national anthems are poised to play, upon the approach of the viewer. Individual movable speakers are magnetically fixed across the wall at the front of the gallery, precisely arranged to visualize a set of national statistics: whether population, GDP, number of women in parliament, land mass, or year of independence, to name a few possible arrangements. For example, when the work is configured to show the spread of national military spending per capita, on the far left of the wall the public can hear the anthems of countries without military forces like Costa Rica, Iceland and Andorra. As they walk to the right, they are able to hear Mexico 50 cm away, then Turkey 1.5 m away, the Russian anthem plays at 2.3 m, UK at 4.7 m, Saudi Arabia at 7.3 m, Israel at 8.7 m and finally the United States' Star Spangled Banner plays by itself at the far right of the room, 9m away. As a visitor approaches a particular set of speakers these start playing automatically, creating a positional panoramic playback of anthems associated to specific metrics.

On a side wall, a separate set of silent speakers are hung. They represent countries that have ceased to exist, e.g. Yugoslavia, USSR, Czechoslovakia, or countries that may exist in the future, e.g. Québec, Catalunya, Scotland. The curator or collector is free to rearrange the speakers to represent any set of national statistics and keep it updated adding or removing countries.

source:Rafael Lozano Hemmer