Recorded Assembly

Artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a creator of technologically inspired, entertaining, interactive creations that people line up to try, while also layering in intricate social criticism and analysis of complex systems.

The artist’s public installation, Recorded Assembly presents an expansive view of each participant's face that it encounters, blending up to 600,000 faces over time into what could be considered a mass portrait of humanity. Viewing this work serves as a reminder that we are all one in seeing many features and gestures melt into each other with each participant wondering where they start and others begin. It is vaguely familiar and completely foreign at the same time.

The artist was inspired by face recognition technology being used to search, track and target people. This work subverts that technology to emphasize the arbitrary nature of using this method for tracking and identification. Recorded Assembly will be a live and ever-changing, durational portrait that will run each evening and activate the site during SNF Nostos Ηealth.

Artist’s Bio
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967. In 1989 he received a B.Sc. in Physical Chemistry from Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. He is a media artist working at the intersection of architecture and performance art. He creates platforms for public participation using technologies such as robotic lights, digital fountains, computerized surveillance, media walls, and telematic networks. Inspired by phantasmagoria, carnival, and animatronics, his light and shadow works are "antimonuments for alien agency". He was the first artist to officially represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale in 2007. He has shown at Art Biennials and Triennials internationally. In the past two years, Lozano-Hemmer was the subject of 9 solo exhibitions worldwide, including a show at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, the AmorePacific Museum in Seoul, and a mid-career retrospective SFMOMA. His large-scale interactive installations have been commissioned for events such as the Millennium Celebrations in Mexico City (1999), the Cultural Capital of Europe in Rotterdam (2001), the UN World Summit of Cities in Lyon (2003), the opening of the YCAM Center in Japan (2003), the Expansion of the European Union in Dublin (2004), the memorial for the Tlatelolco Student Massacre in Mexico City (2008), the Winter Olympics in Vancouver (2010), the pre-opening exhibition of the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi (2015), the activation of the Augusta Raurica Roman Theatre in Basel (2018), and the light-bridge intervention across the US-Mexico border in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso (2019).

17/06 - 3/07, All day, Agora
 

The event takes place in the context of SNF Nostos Health by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).