Interview with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

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Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Recorders exhibition is currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary, where I work. A couple of his earlier public, performative works are referenced in my Ph.D. so it was with great pleasure I was able to convince him to put aside some time during install to be interviewed.

We used some excerpts from the interview to create a gorgeous little promotional video for the Recorders mini-site that I also worked on - mcarecorders.com.au. Big thanks to Tanya, Brad and Jason from Versus Media for their clean visual style and high production values.

The initial of questions I asked focused on helping people understand Lozano-Hemmer’s work in general, the experience visitors could expect when then attending Recorders and some explanation of the works being premièred at the MCA. After those boxes were ticked I was able to ask some more investigative questions, the best of which appear a the longer (and much less stylised) interview video.

KW: You often use the familiar computer technologies mixed with lights, projectors, amplifiers and the like. What obscure piece of technology would you really like to get your hands on that’s not available to you?

RLH: In most of my work we’re using either existing technologies, typically coming from surveillance – from corporate, government or military surveillance – and other times we’re developing our own technologies. One technology I would really love to get my hands on is drones. I would appreciate the ability to have a mobile platform for surveillance over head, that allows the public to have access to information that is strategically important – for example with protests. Routinely governments and police departments give a head count of the people who took part in a protest. I would adore to have that technology in the hands of the organisers, to be able to have real metric and real counts.

The way this would work is the drones would do live heads counts during the protest and then send that data directly to the internet without the mediation of power…This would allow you to use the very technologies of control for legitimating certain social movements such as indignation and occupy wall street, which I think are the real stories of our time.

Making a time lapse of the new MCA buiding

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It’s not always easy to know which piece of content will resonate with your audience. However, in my experience it’s content that is a mixture of novel and authentic, captured in a way that reveals something usually unseen. The time lapse I created of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s George street facade – as builders remove the scaffolding that has obscured it for many months – an example of this.

Although I only twitted the link once, it was retweeted a number of time and lead to 8 new followers, a good metric of success for a single tweet.

Sam Marshall, the architect behind the new wing that the MCA is currently building in Sydney’s Circular Quay, let me know when the builders were about to remove the scaffolding that covers the new facade. I rigged up a GoPro Hero camera to shoot every minute for a week. The camera is sticking out a second story window across the street from the MCA and, yes, that’s a rope hoping it in place – it was very precarious.

Once the SD card was full, I took the camera down and created a series of time lapses as the building work was sporadic over a number of days. I edited the best bits together to create the following. It’s better with sound.

At the Frontier

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At the Frontier 2011 marks the first time the industry bodies Museums Australia and Interpretation Australia have combined forces to host a conference. Perth was a fitting venue for a conference about frontiers and there was a healthy representation of locals, mixed in with the usual suspects from the east coast.

The conference had a broad remit and ran a full 5 days. I could only make the final two days and was pleasantly surprised by energy and attendance on the final few sessions of the last day.

This is my first museums conference in many years and it was good to be back amongst friends.

Following are my (totally biased) highlights of the conference.

1. The lively discussion after Thursday’s Online session

Geoff Barker lead an engaging session with a tour of online tools that museums can use to collate and disseminate their content, including the ones he uses such as wikispaces where you’ll find a lot of resources listed and paper.li his daily museum community paper.

Michael Harvey from the Australian Museum spoke about their approach to social media (6 staff now spend an hour a week on Facebook and Twitter as part of their roles), using Mr Blobby as a squishy case study. Mr Blobby was picked up by the Gruen Transfer and used in their pitch segment. This came out of the blue for the museum, but they grasped the opportunity and quickly created a Facebook page for Mr Blobby which, at one point, had more fans than the official Australia Museum Facebook page.
(Mr Blobby photographer Kerryn Parkinson, © NORFANZ founding parties)

After the session there were a lot of interesting questions to ponder:

  • How can a museum provide a coherent voice when there are 6 people writing? Does it need one?
  • What constitutes success in social media?
  • Why spend spend money on creating content or building systems that already exists online?
  • How much of a collection belongs online and should you put up content that’s messy or incomplete?
  • How do you resource social engagement when we’re all already so busy?
  • How can staff engage with social media if their IT departments block Facebook?

I couldn’t comment on these questions at the time…

…however I will address some of these points in future posts.

2. The celebration of story and content

Thursday morning’s keynote by Susan Cross was a great example of the power of storytelling (or in her works interpretelling) over death by powerpoint (my words) as a way of communicating and making meaning.

Michael Parry’s talk on museums using mobile technology to do work outside the physical institution focused on ACMI’s location-based storytelling project 15 Second Place. I like that this a museum project, but the stories are not be told by the museum (or it’s staff) and it’s not even set in the museum. Interestingly, ACMI chose to pre-seed the site with commissioned stories, something I would’ve liked to hear more about.

Although my session was all about apps for museums, the other speakers and I were at pains to stress that we should not to make apps for apps sake. I believe it’s most important that you understand your content, your audience and the stories you want to tell them… and then decide what technology is most suitable to support that – including no technology at all.

3. The digital and real world conversations alongside the sessions

Twitter was buzzing, especially during the keynotes, with active commentary from @laura_miles @geoffmuse @thornypebble @angecasey @laura_miles @grandeflatwhite @drkeir @museummike @SusanMcD59 @vaguelym @interactivate @clairesavage01 and many more, you can catch up online if you’re so inclinded.

As always with such conferences there were energetic conversations in the halls, pubs, galleries, museums and foyers during the week. Considering all the networking, dealmaking and discussion, I wonder if it would be more productive to have a conference without formal sessions. Hmmm, nope, it would never get funding.

LED Hallway

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Hallway

There is a hallway in our house that runs from the stairway to the study, out the front of bathroom. It’s not a good place to hang paintings, so I decided upon a different approach to make that part of our house a little more interesting. A little more colourful.

Inspired by an Olafur Eliasson show I saw at the Museum of Contemporary Art I thought I could turn the hallway into a sort of light installation. So, when I was in Hong Kong I bought a strip of programmable LED lights from a hawker market and decided to put them to good use.

Read on below for a pictorial story of the project.

 

Oh, and please try this at home.

 

The LEDs come in a strip and they are controlled via a IR remote control. That’s important, as I’m going to put them very high up in the hallway. Which will involve a certain about of drilling holes in things.

 

 

I’ve run a power cable from the study into the hallway, up the wall and then onto a small platform I’d built. The platform supports of the power converter, the controller and the IR receiver. It also hides everything from view.

 

 

Above, on the left is the before, on the right is the the after.
Below are a few more images of the hallway under the influence of different colours, and some close ups of the LEDs at work.

 

 

The program that I use the most, slowly changes from one colour to the next.

 

Biloela Girls

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A Very Short History

I was invited by MixedIndustry to produce a site-specific installation for the inaugural Cockatoo Island Festival, Easter 2005. After visiting the Island and being enchanted by its varied history and beautiful empty industrial buildings, I decided to create something with echoes of the Island’s past. Cockatoo Island, which is situated in Sydney Harbour, was mostly used for shipbuilding and repair, but it has also been used as a convict prison, home for wayward teenage boys, goal, customs quarantine and as the Biloela Public Industrial School and Reformatory for Girls. It was the later that interested me.

A Biloela Girl

Having read the stories of girls who have come out of care, even some from alumni of Parramatta Girls (where Biloela School for Girls moved after it left the island), I wanted to do something that paid its respects to the time, the trouble nature of these girls lives and what was, in essence, their incarceration. From these needs came Biloela Girls, a video installation that consists of a ghostly character in period costume, running scared, intermittent and forever, across the windows of a building on the Island.

Below is an image made up from stills taken from the video used in the installation. You watch as the girl momentarily glances back over her shoulder before continuing on in fear.

The Installation

Using a light material that looked like a curtain, but acted as a back-projection screen, I displayed the character running backwards and forwards on a variable loop. I chose a building that was on one side of a lane that acted as a thoroughfare between two live music stages. There are ten different ways the character can cross the screen, and over the 3 days of the festival I tried different frequencies, from the vastly intermittent, where the is an average of 3 minutes between crossings, to the most consistent, where the character appeared every 15 seconds exactly.

Below is a picture of the lane that Biloela Girls appeared in, taken during the day (it was displayed on the left-most windows). It is coupled with a picture, taken at about the same spot, of the installation running at night. The ghost appears green because I used a cheap digital camera to take these pictures. To the naked eye it appeared in white and cream as it does in the above production still.

The Reaction

So much of art making is the manufacturing of experience, in the case of Biloela Girls I witnessed surprise, confusion, excitement, curiosity, wonder and even a few arguments. On different times and on different nights I tried out different frequencies, this meant that some people who had hoped to see it missed out, because if you didn’t know exactly where it was you can easily walk past it in those moments it doesn’t reveal itself. It also meant that others, who would never seek out art in their everyday, were surprised and perhaps intrigued by what looked like a ghost running scared across their peripheral vision.