Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City, Mexico in 1967 and lives and works in Montreal, Canada. The Mexican-Canadian media artist creates platforms where the audience can interact with technologies such as robot-controlled lights, digital fountains, computer-aided surveillance, video walls, and telematic networks. His interactive works are inspired by phantasmagoria, carnival, and animatronics. They are “anti-monuments that allow people to portray themselves.” He was the first artist to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Lozano-Hemmer has also exhibited at other art biennials in Havana, Istanbul, Kochi, Liverpool, Melbourne, Mercosul, New Orleans, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney, and Wuzhen.
His 2019 installation Border Turner was designed to connect El Paso in Texas, USA and Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua, Mexico. The project brought tens of thousands of people together and united families on both sides of the US-Mexico border. He has had other works commissioned for events such as the millennium celebrations in Mexico City (1999), the European Capital of Culture in Rotterdam (2001), the UN World Summit in Lyon (2003), the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver (2010), and the pre-opening event for the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi (2015).
His works feature in collections around the world.
How would you describe the sound of crystal?
We imagine it as a crystalline clang – the sound of fine crystals meeting, a resonance born from solid beauty that has an unmistakable fragility. You can experience what crystal sounds like in the “Kristallstimmen” Chamber of Wonder. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer pays tribute to the previously unheard stories of those who work at the company. This interactive soundscape features 3,000 loudspeakers, each of which plays a recording of a Swarovski employee from summer 2024.
Inside this Chamber of Wonder, you’ll hear more than 50 languages and 3,000 personal stories as Swarovski employees share their joy, enthusiasm, pride, and unique savoir-faire. “Kristallstimmen” is an immersive sound experience that draws from cutting-edge research in spatial audio, deep listening, acoustic arrays, ambisonics, and related fields. The installation is part of a series exploring how we perceive thousands of simultaneous sounds, with each sound emerging from its own individual loudspeaker. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer calls this phenomenon the “speaker as pixel.” A pixel is a point of light that changes in terms of intensity and spectral frequency. We only perceive the complete image when we look at a pixel interacting with others around it.
Do you know what makes your heart beat faster?
It all starts with a flawless cube of crystal, measuring one cubic meter exactly. You may not notice it at first as it’s transparent and has minimal facets reflecting the light. Now imagine that it explodes, a big bang shattering the crystal into 7,000 fragments, flinging them in every direction. This is what awaits you in “Pulse Voronoi,” the largest Chamber of Wonder at Swarovski Kristallwelten, created by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in 2024.
Become part of this Chamber of Wonder:
Experience the moment after this big bang, a moment frozen in time, as you move through “Pulse Voronoi.” The crystals inside the Chamber of Wonder glimmer rhythmically, beating in time with the heartbeat of the guest in front of you. Hold your hand underneath one of the five pulse sensors around the room. You’ll hear and see your heartbeat pulsing in the crystals closest to you. When you remove your hand, your heartbeat replaces the oldest in the room, shining slightly brighter than the others. You’re surrounded by 7,000 hearts beating at the same time. This project is part of a series of biometric artworks that Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has created over the past 30 years. These works of art incorporate guests’ data as a means of creating the piece. If no one interacts with it, the artwork does not exist.
