Replacing Home: From Primordial Hut to Digital Network in Contemporary Art

Five: Networked Dependencies: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Relational Architecture

| 131 NETWORKED DEPENDENCIES RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER’S RELATIONAL ARCHITECTURE On a clear night between December 26, 1999, and January 7, 2000, those walking through Mexico City’s central square, formally titled La Plaza de la Constitución but commonly called el Zócalo, could look up and see a tangled net of piercing bluish-white searchlights stretching overhead as far as ten to twenty kilometers. Some passersby could even say that they had in fact designed a particular lightbeam configuration, a new one transforming the night sky every six to eight seconds, illuminating the surrounding National Palace, municipal buildings, the Metropolitan Cathedral, the Supreme Court of Justice, and the Templo Mayor Aztec ruins. Each of these designs formed a part of Vectorial Elevation, an interactive Web- and site-based installation devised by new media artist Rafael LozanoHemmer and commissioned by the Mexican Culture Council for the city’s millennium celebration (Figure 5.1). Working with designers and technicians from four countries, Five FIGURE 5.1. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Vectorial Elevation, Mexico City, 1999–2000. Photograph by Martin Vargas. Networked Dependencies | 133 Lozano-Hemmer developed a three-dimensional interactive simulation of the Zócalo located on the project’s Web site, www.alzado.net. In order to afford wider access to the site, Internet stations were made publically available on the Zócalo and around the country, mainly in museums and libraries. The interface offered online participants the ability to remotely control eighteen robotic searchlights placed on the rooftops of the buildings around the square. Participants could select each searchlight by clicking its simulated position, all the while navigating a three-dimensional visualization of their design in process. Target points where the selected light beams intersected allowed participants to move a number of beams at once, as well as to randomize, raise, lower, rotate, and/or invert their patterns incrementally. Once satisfied, the participant would submit the finished design online to be physically rendered in Mexico. Connected by data cables and located by GPS trackers, the searchlights in the square were then positioned by a DMX lighting controller, usually used to manage stage lights, that continually produced each new design before fluidly moving on to the next one (Figure 5.2). The site, which also included a live video of the changing designs from an aerial perspective and detailed information on each of the buildings, received eight hundred thousand visits from a total of eighty-nine countries, although 70 percent of the participants were from Mexico. Thanks to heavy local media coverage, almost everyone was aware that the searchlights were controlled by computers, and most knew about the Internet participation. Speaking on video to Lozano-Hemmer as he documented the project, those in the Zócalo commented on the work’s technological and architectural aspects, as well as on its spectacular nature. Some crossing the square at night thought the lights looked like “a constellation,” while others thought the beams formed a “roof” or a “dome” above them. For one woman, the designs turned the Zócalo into a “Mexican Hollywood” (Figure 5.3).1 In fleeting instances, the public square thus became many things to many people who moved through different real and virtual spaces, interacting either proximately or remotely in both planned and accidental encounters. Lozano-Hemmer does not predict who will connect and how, and he certainly 134 | Networked Dependencies does not force these connections—that may happen by chance. But his work does provide the initial conditions that open and close a variety of access points, moments of pause, and sites of connection, allowing each of us to find ourselves in place with the help of others. Both individual and collective moments and sites of connection are in turn often coincidental and, more often than not, happen unexpectedly. In projects such as Vectorial Elevation, participation in the emergence of a continuously rematerialized, newly accessible FIGURE 5.2. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Vectorial Elevation, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Basque Country, Spain, 2002. Photograph by David Quintas. FIGURE 5.3. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Vectorial Elevation, Mexico City, 1999–2000. Photograph by Martin Vargas. 136 | Networked Dependencies environment yields these embodied meeting points that are dispersed over time, and over real and virtual spaces. These interactions based on varied levels of participation instigate modes of engaging collectively, though not equally, in the framing of both public and private spaces, and the determination of who gets to use...