Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Trackers

The exhibition is conceived as an environment mixing detection technologies and audiovisual explorations in real time. By using "live cameras" and tracking systems, we attempt to materialize computerized surveillance, transforming the technological observation into a tangible form. Far from being a moralizing commentary on the Orwellian character of surveillance devices, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's work presents technology as an inevitable and omnipresent language of globalization. TRACKERS aims to create critical and complicit experiences using ambiguity, alterity, repetition and performance. The visitor, through his presence and behaviour, automatically controls light environments, video recordings, kinetic sculptures and algorithmic animations, that constitute the materials of the exhibition. By perverting surveillance systems through his artistic process, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer makes the visitor an integral part of the work of art, between the seduction of personalization and the violence of predatory control.

"Living matter correlated to symbolic matter, a figure raised to the status of creator, modifying by its very presence the artistic project as well as the work's process. - Paul Ardenne

"It is the viewer that makes the painting" - Marcel Duchamp