In this new series, we’re inviting outstanding creative people working at the edge of their sector to answer five questions – about influence, struggle, ambition, chance and the strange intimacies of technology. Each person is someone whose practice we admire, whose problems feel adjacent to our own, and whose answers might tell us something about where things are heading.

If you’re new to the series, go check out our first interview with Adrian Hon, co-creator of Zombies, Run! – one of the world’s bestselling smartphone fitness games.

Up next is Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Matt says, “Ever since I came across Rafael’s project where he set up searchlights in Mexico City and gave the public control of them, I’ve voraciously followed his work. He’s such a good artist and so successful that I’m jealous of him. His work activates people.”

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a Mexican-Canadian artist based in Montréal, working at the intersection of architecture, performance and technology. His large-scale interactive installations use robotics, computerised surveillance, biometric sensors and telematic networks to create what he calls “anti-monuments for people to self-represent”. Works including Pulse Room, Border Tuner (which connected live voices across the US-Mexico border in 2019), and Atmospheric Memory (which premiered at Manchester International Festival in 2019) have been shown at the Guggenheim, MoMA, the Barbican, SFMOMA, Tate and beyond.

He was the first artist to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale in 2007, and is the recipient of two BAFTA Awards for Interactive Art, a Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica, and Canada’s Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

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1. Who changed the way you see the world?

I’ve settled on three. I mean, it was my Mum and Dad really, for the worse. But who is influential and changed my creative life? It would probably be Chuck D from Public Enemy. I grew up listening to a lot of hip hop, thinking about music that could be poetic and critical at the same time. 

Then Donna Haraway. I studied theory when I was young, and I really liked the idea that we need to develop a post-humanist way to see things. She clearly examined the non-humanist position—that anthropocentrism was not leading us in any positive way to sustainability, and the understanding of both digital and natural creatures as an extension of ourselves and vice versa. This porosity was critical—the non-enlightenment, non-humanist way to understand the world as phenomena that are constantly changing and overlapping, like fields. We still think of nature as something to be extracted and dominated, as opposed to something inseparable from us to be in dialogue with. And the same goes for the digital world. The Cyborg Manifesto was such an important piece of writing for me.

And then my third one was Charles Babbage. Reading the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, where he proposes that everything is recorded, that nothing is ever lost, that the atmosphere is a vast library that we could extract memory from, really influenced my work. The idea that there is no purity, that there is all of this existing metaculture at all times that you can tune and vibe out in an artwork.

2. What’s the creative problem you’re struggling with right now?

I would love to make it super virtue-signalling and talk about a mathematical problem, or an aesthetic or critical problem. But the problem I’m tackling, and I think we all are, is sustainability. I’m a democratic socialist. I believe in taxation, free healthcare, anti-trust legislation and stuff like that. And I find it so hard to practice what I preach. I have a studio with 22 full-time people, and my question is the same question as when I was young and working alone: how do I pay rent? How do I provide for a stable platform to continue creating?

The project that I’m really obsessed with is: how do we create best practices for people to survive in a creative field? This is a little bit of a taboo amongst artists, I find, to talk about management systems or about compensation or about contracts. Being able to maintain operations is the condition of possibility of autonomy. It’s the condition of possibility of being a critical voice. So I think of it as a creative problem as well. People are aware that the current system can’t continue, that this is not sustainable, that capitalism is just a cancer. This is nothing new. The problem is: how do you then create an independent practice that is not dependent on dwindling public funding, nor is based on catering to oligarchs? What is it based on then? What is the exchange that can happen where we can contribute something and be able to survive with our work? I know it’s a centuries-old problem. But I’m on it.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Pulse Topology”, 2021. Biometric installation visualizing recorded heartbeats, part of the Pulse Series of works started in 2005. Shown here: Art Basel, Switzerland, 2022. Photo by: Antimodular Studio.

3. If you could launch a project into the world tomorrow, what would it be?

It would be some kind of viral artwork or campaign where we lock into a formula to make anti-capitalism really sexy. How do we propose something creatively, practically, that gives us an alternative to this kind of never-ending expansion, never-ending economic violence, and concentration of wealth and power? The goals are too lofty. They’re impossible. But if I was illuminated somehow, I would try and go in that direction. This is everybody’s problem.

There is a quote that I love from Jodorowsky, the filmmaker. He said, “We can’t change the world, but we can start.” I love that quote because, yeah, we’re helpless, but here we are. And let’s just try and do something.

I’m also very interested in data dramaturgy. This is a concept I didn’t coin, but I’m following quite closely—the idea that artists have the responsibility to create ways to engage with the data that we have. We live in a society of metrics, but those metrics are outrageously abstract. So one of the tools that we have as critical artists is: how do you land that in an anthropomorphic, memorable way, to cite those statistics, that data, in something that can create a reaction, a plan, sorrow, mourning, whatever it is? Data dramaturgy would be the tool that one would use to get there.

4. Matt picks a card from Oblique Strategies: “Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities.” For you, is that helpful or unhelpful?

I love that I got that one. Because as a person with ADHD, specifics are not my forte. I love that one. It introduces flexibility, versatility. Some constants are points of reference, they’re landmarks. But what if we don’t have a reference point, but a reference flow? What if the weakness is actually flexibility? What if ambiguity is something that allows you to explode into many directions, like different universes that come out? Thank you for pulling that card out!

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Body Movies, Relational Architecture 6”, 2001. Interactive shadowplay. Shown here: Hauptplatz, Linz, Austria, 2002. Photo by: Antimodular Studio.

5. Would you let a robot wash you?

It’s really funny, because I routinely do let a robot wash me. I go to a gym that has a button that gives you a very specific water massage. The robot has no mechanical contact; it’s all water-based, but yeah, I absolutely would.

Find more from Rafael at lozano-hemmer.com.

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Featured image: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, 2024. Credit: Antimodular Studio.