Kristallstimmen
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.
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.
