rafael lozano-hemmer.

I love these amazing light installations by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Combining sculpture, design, and installation art into a type of “relational architecture”, he creates experiential art that takes one of the most fundamental entities in the universe – light – and connects it with something even more fundamental: our own bodies. Altered by our movement, our presence, and even our very own heartbeats, Lozano-Hemmer creates visually arresting installations.

With “Homographies”, “144 robotic fluorescent light fixtures controlled by 7 computerized surveillance systems” move in response to the presence of human bodies. As people travel throughout the space, the lights re-orient to graphically connect people to others in the room.

Lozano-Hemmer also explores creating a visual connection to the biology of our bodies in three different works: “Pulse Room”, “Pulse Spiral”, and “Pulse Front” (which was part of Toronto’s 2007 Luminato Festival). In all three, hand-held sensors take the actual rhythm of particpants’ pulses and convert them into patterns of light. It’s like the travelling of the light is a parallel for the movement of blood through our bodies, creating life and heat as it moves the same way that light itself creates heat. Just like light travels in wavelengths, those frequencies can be re-interpreted by the rhythm of a human heart beat.

I particularly love how all three works take something so subconscious and inherently familiar to each of us, the feeling of the beating of our own heart, and transform it from a physical, tactile sensation into a visual, illuminated one. A transferal of our own bodies’ functions from one sense to another.

“Pulse Room”